“For many of us who have suffered the indignities of rent, nothing we write here will be a surprise. Every first of the month, we know something is rotten. Every first of the month, we wonder what it would take to never pay rent again. Often, our fantasies are individual: we’ll get a windfall, make it big, or play our cards right, earn our way up. Sure, some of us will make it into the home-owning ranks. But most of us won’t. We’ll pay up, or leave town, downsize, and retreat. If we want to end the misery of rent for everyone, we’ll need to trade our individualistic fantasies for universal abundance. And we’ll need to work together.”

— Abolish Rent (2024) Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis

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Why ‘Abolish Rent’ is the Essential First Step

Housing is the first step to real revolution.

When it comes to basic needs, housing is the most essential aspect of our survival. Housing also happens to be the one revolutionary tool that supports and permits all other revolutionary tactics.

We seek revolution: complete and total annihilation of all conditions that permit any degree of participation with the capitalist methodology.

This essay is difficult for me to write, because the implications of its arguments are so clear, so obvious, and so intuitive, that it’s hard for me to find the stance and perspective of a beginner, a stance for un-initiated people to understand me. It’s hard for me to relate to people who aren’t already seeing this reality, but I’m trying desperately.

Housing: we all pay for it one way our another, so it would seem to logic that if we are all paying for it, and we’re all paying someone otherthan ourselves, then the loop of housing transactions is just a great, big circle, right? Well, if that were indeed the case, this argument would be much easier to land. In many ways, that oversimplification is the reality, but we all know that the discrepancies of wealth- and income-inequality confuse and confound our functional and practical understanding of the housing and property market-system.

Housing: there’s more of it than there are people to inhabit it. Yet, many of us remain unsheltered, insecure, and worse: criminalized. For those of us who still remain housed, the act is increasingly precarious. As the cost of literally everything continues rising unabated, more and more housed people are being pressured into un-dignified survival- and coping-mechanisms. We skip meals, we skip healthcare, we skip the joys of hobby enrichments, and our health inevitably deteriorates in response to what amounts as self-neglect. Life only gets more and more expensive and painful as we activate these ‘skills’ to deter the hazards of surviving in financial and material scarcity. We retract from our own strength and resilience at the threats of disease and disparity. The things that don’t kill us aren’t making us stronger, but they are making us more susceptibleto our inevitable future challenges, whether physiological, financial, or both.

I don’t want to die from homelessness, but right now, it’s killing me. And homelessness is coming for you, too, and it’s arriving faster, and sooner than you think. And if you refuse, or if you fail to learn right now to fight and to keep what you’ve got, then homelessness will kill you, too. If we don’t destroy the system that makes housing a subject of financial investment, then we will all be its fatal victims. If we continue failing at a strategy to attain tangible material goals, if we continue falling short of the necessary collaborative and coordinated actions towards those goals, then no amount of education and inter-personal good-will can save us from deliverance of poverty, disenfranchisement, and death guaranteed by the capitalist economy.

Are you going to wait around for the impetus to fight back, to retaliate? By then it’s too late. By the time you are in my position — homeless, barely surviving — you will have no bodily energy, no psychological stamina, and no material resources to commit to that fight. Everything about being homeless is just a daily survival routine. In homelessness, I have no true, immediate neighbors who would claim me as theirs. In the transient, ever-moving position of homelessness, there are no anchors of support. We can’t even rest for an afternoon without pre-considerations for inclement weather, police presence, unpredictable targeted harassment, hygienic resources, and our next meal. Simply tracking a few personal possessions is a constant, anxious burden. Every errand is meticulously planned around minimizing cost and resource expenditure, and after all that decision-making and anxiety-managing, there’s not much left for anything else.

DON’T WAIT until you have nothing left. Don’t wait until the effort of just getting yourself a daily shelter and a daily calorie becomes the primary and only worthy focus of your time. Make use of what you still have, right now, to shore up your defenses and to guarantee your access to housing — the most foundational and necessary resource — if for nothing more than the the sake of surviving in the uncertain future that is coming for us all.

WHY HOUSING? Housing is the first ‘third place.’ Home is the first place we gather friends and neighbors, for book clubs, for anti-I.C.E. prevention and response, for meals, holidays, free exchange, barter, clothing drives, skill shares… and for almost any activity that doesn’t exclusively rely on outdoor- or warehouse-scale infrastructure. Our homes are where we don’t have to spend (additional) money to practice commmunity. Home is where we celebrate, where we grow, and where we rest.

Housing is where we maintain our bodily physical hygiene, an essential aspect of our foundations for individual healthcare. A safe, clean, and familiar toilet is often taken for granted until we are faced with shitting in the woods, or in a public stall. Our home bathrooms are where we examine our naked bodies, catching infection and disease early, before they can make root. Our showers and sinks wash away the dirt and bacteria collected by our public excursions. Our laundry machines clean our clothing and bedsheets, preventing buildup of disease-carrying grime.

Housing is where we rest and recover. Home is where we safe-harbor the many tools of our rejuvenation, from entertainment, to raw physical comfort, to intimacy with partners, to private self-reflection. Housing is a refuge against the hell of society, economics, and the public eye. Housing is where we keep our notebooks full of new ideas next to our beds, where the seeds of the most effective anti-capitalist strategies and storylines are first formed and recorded.

Why are you letting them — aiding them! — in the capture of our last refuge? Why are you paying a landlord, who doesn’t care whether you live or die, and who in fact would rather that we all die, as long as it meant they could keep collecting a cash tribute for the boxes that contain our decomposing bodies? Why are you so dedicated to paying for an asset that will never be your own?

Whether you are not yet convinced — to form a resident union with your neighbors, to keep and to properly re-invest your monthly rent money — or if you are already convinced, and are now ready to dive into learning and practicing the strategies for reclaiming our housing as homes, I direct you to the book Abolish Rent (2024) by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis, who more eloquently and in greater detail re-visit all of the arguments above, and describe the process of organizing resident unions, the tool to actualize this reality, everywhere humans make shelter.

We have the technology, the material resources, the intentional collective will, and the labor capacity to guarantee a minimum degree of dignified housing, for every living human who desires it. Greater than this, we maintain all these same capacities not only for housing, but for the full set of the material basics that comprise human physiological needs. Housing, healthcare, hygiene, food, water, utilities, appliances, clothing, transportation, education, and recreation are among the list of basic, material essentials that any civil society would guarantee forall. Humans have yet to enjoy any sense of civility at a global scale, and we certainly have never enjoyed this civility within “the greatest nation on Earth, the USA.”

HOUSING IS THE FIRST step to achieving this civility, a status which, in actualized reality, would pulverize the capitalist power structures to dust. All coercive violence relies on the imposition of artificial scarcity through expropriation, especially and foundationally the scarcity of housing. Without a coercive structure to command workers who would commit acts of violence for a paycheck, the power of authoritarian economies dwindles. Every US-american soldier enlists first for the sake of their own personal self-preservation, paradoxically submitting to an institution that might literally claim their life, in order to only potentially gain access to the financial means for making themselves a life worth living. If they succeed in their militaristic careers, they will have participated directly in the development and refinement of the objectively evil manifestations of capitalism, only to ‘come home’ to a rigged economy, where they must still continuously and violently compete to protect their new-found financial ‘status.’ Despite the clear and obvious primary purpose of acquiring and protecting the freedoms associated with agency over their own homes, many veterans end up homeless and under-served by the very country for whom they sacrificed everything.

Even the most friendly and well-intentioned manual laborers — who perform the work of building and maintaining the architectures of roads, cities, ports, and the many utilities and raw materials connecting them — are performing the essential work of capitalism, having been coerced and mis-led into doing the hazardous labor of these industries. We cannot blame an oil-rig worker individually for the ecosystemic harms of deep-sea-drilling. But, it is easy to say that, whenever a worker encounters two otherwise equal financial opportunities, they will opt for the onethat is less hazardous to their personal health and to the health of the ecosystems they live within. Once we fundamentally re-design our infrastructure and daily lifestyles to demand less raw materials, fewer of us will opt for accepting the labor roles that produce those materials. We all want to contribute meaningfully to our community and to our world, but the industrial system of capitalism, with all its propaganda, its ubiquitous markets, and its dis-located and bypassed morality, distorts our humanity, our involuntary good intention, and re-purpose our goodwill towards capitalisms perverted ends, especially in the ends which effectively concentrate and institutionalize mechanisms of power.

We must stop concentrating the power. We must stop paying landlords, whether they live among us in our shared buildings, or if they live far away in mansions on the hill. We must re-claim stewardship over the places we inhabit. We must act as the rightful caretakers of our own homes, because we are their rightful caretakers.

My argument is that the more of us who form groups of people to adopt this strategy as our own — housing first, towards universal basic services — the better off we all are, whether we are members of those organized groups or not. Your access to housing is inherently tied to mine. Whether local or global, rebellion against property begins with a call to shelter in place, to halt all non-essential industry, and to meet and collectivize in hyper-local spaces among the company of our immediate neighbors. And then, from these organizing places, there would arisean impetus to re-organize all systems of material-industrial production, to re-orient our coordinated productive methodology around community purpose, human needs, and moral enrichments.

Capitalism offers us utterly zero moral pathways toward enrichment. Capitalism’s only virtue is synonymous to cancerous growth and parasitism. Captitalism must be destroyed, and this is the first step.

I hope I have convinced you that we are already fundamentally aligned in our greatest purpose: to make a life worth living. I hope I have convinced you that the first step toward truly and permanently dismantling the power of all empires is at our feet, at our home, within our grasp, and that this is a strategy that all of us can and must begin actualizing today, right now. We must only summon the courage enough to welcome a mild and temporary emotional vulnerability with our neighbors.

When we call for “Abolish Rent,” we really mean, Death to Imperialism and its agents, and All Power to the People!

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“LANDLORDS DON’T OWN our homes because they are better than us, smarter than us, or more hardworking than us. Our landlords own our homes because at some point in the past they — or their parents, or their parents’ parents — had more money than us. Rent is the price of being poorer than others, of our parents being poorer than the parents of others. It’s no wonder that the descendants of enslaved and Indigenous people, immigrants, and people of color are more likely to pay rent and to be unhoused. (Over half of Black households pay rent to secure housing; only a third of white households do.) As the feudal name “landlord” continues to suggest, rent is a monthly tribute to those with generational wealth, a hoard of resources built on stolen lives and stolen land.”

— Abolish Rent (2024) Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis

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EricLook@riseup.net (email)

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Hands up, church congregation unity, and protest/rally participation are all reinforcers of obedience training.

How many times have you heard a musician tell you, “Now everybody throw your hands in the air!” Do I think that the prevalence for popular music telling us to collectively “put our hands up” is a ‘deep-state’ psychological operation meant to invoke our obedience to armed police, who make of us the exact same demands? We might never answer this question for certain, because even if there is a future wherein the various capitalist and state agencies declassifies such a project, the potential is that such ‘declassification’ could itself be an artifice of social control. But does our questioning it — framing it as an unknown — help to inform our decision-making, and our participation, in all types of peer-pressured activities? Yes, acknowledging the potential of this absolutely does help us orient to the collective, social, moral posture.

The church congregation has the same structure and function as the musical ritual. We become activated to the whims of authorities and leadership, and the group-behavior is a peer-enforced ritual. Our participation in small, traditional acts is deemed a minimum requirement, as non-participants will effectively and automatically be ostracized from the group. Whether by singing hymns, or by ‘consuming the body and blood of christ,’ or by chanting appropriate responses at appropriate times, the tradition demands unthinking adoption of the group practice, if for no other reason than our own acceptance into the group. We participate and act cohesively to tradition not because we understand and agree with the practices themselves, but because we seek acceptance among and within a social group. Our acceptance into groups is conditioned on our adequate performance of the in-group traditions — not necessarily by an internalization of in-group ethical postures (if they exist), but by demonstrating a convincing facade of our assigned roles.

The ‘protest’ rally serves the same function of constraining acceptable patterns of behavior. Acceptance into the various ‘activist’ realms is conditioned on several factors: gathering where and when gathering is assigned, raising appropriately metered home-made (not store-bought) signage, chanting when called to chant, marching in non-disruptive lines, and most importantly: never questioning the efficacy of any of thesetraditions. The last rule is the most essential. According to activist tradition, anyone who dares to simply question the dictates of centralized, authorized leadership represents an existential and parasitic threat. Challengers are dangerous not only to the strength of the movement, but also to the health of individuals within the movement, and they thereby warrant our most violent and reactive rejection. This is the only ‘moral’ position of the activism industrial complex: do not challenge or deviate from leadership’s proclamations for acceptable tactics, strategies, and ways of thinking. This posture fundamentally protects and reinforces the entrenched power structures of capitalism, and ‘paradoxically’ opposes their rhetorical claims. This paradox, of course, is by design of the capitalistic defenses who feign anti-capitalist positions, and who funnel would-be insurgents into the counter-insurgent activist industrial complex.

Music performance and gatherings are ritualistic celebrations, and the sense of unity achieved among participants is meaningful. But our unity is fragile and largely subconscious, and it gives easily to the careful, precise mis-guidings by the puppets claiming positions of authority granted by popularity and fame. Our favorite musical performers and artists are often just as misled as we their audiences. Popular entertainers are not charged with fully understanding the downstream effects of their celebrityism, and as we have noted, within the virtues of capitalistic status, the function of ‘success’ is to imply a moral superiority. Lacking a conscious, intentional deconstruction of their roles, our celebrities easily fall into the habits and stances that our culture collectively feeds them from all sides. The truth about ‘propaganda’ is that all media is propagandistic, whether intentionally or accidentally. The truth of ‘counterinsurgency’ is that all of us reproduce and behave within the mechanisms of counterinsurgency, whether we do so intentionally or accidentally. Even the most well-meaning and good-hearted among us are readily pidgeon-holed into counter-insurgent methodologies.

The most sinister part of capitalism is in its capacity to hide itself within the genuine self-directed action of otherwise benevolent people and institutions. We all claim that we are wishing and acting to bring about the best possible material and social conditions for everyone. Yet few among us persistently challenge the preconceptions of our cultural indoctrination so that we may effectively refine our methods of resistance. Few among us are closely examining the results and consequences of our individual and collective actions in enough detail, and in a wide-enough perspective, to capture the consequential reality of our practical strategies, to comprehend the real functions of our social and economic roles.

These three topics — music, religion, and ‘protest’ — are near universal manifestations of the most basic authority structures of capitalism, which include especially the atomic family, and which are fundamentally built around the most dominant, formidable, and propertied individuals.

If we want to obliterate these structures of control, then we should analyze our strategies and tactics at every turn. We anarchists and socialists have refined the methods for centuries, and today we employ all the tools at our grasp. Our internet and our social media are battlegrounds of doctrine. Please, seek out the information that advances our positions. I dutifully and constantly urge you to adopt the goal of universal basic services, or UBS, and the first tactical step toward that end, the security and guarantee of housing for all. Toward that end, the most practical, educational, and inspirational content I have yet encountered is a book called, “Abolish Rent” (2024) by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis. Please contact me if you have any trouble acquiring a copy.

As always: Death to Imperialism and its agents, and All Power to the People!

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EricLook@riseup.net (email)

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linktr.ee/EricLook

‘Beauty and wellness’ is a phrase that implies a meaningful correlation to health, but the reality of the industry is irrefutably harmful, not only to the health of individual people who practice these ‘self-care’ tactics of ‘beautification,’ but also to the whole world ecosystem, by its consumerism and material toxicity. We are well-aware of the direct animal torture and chemical pollution that the beauty industry in particular has committed. We are less aware of the psychological aspects of cultural beauty standards, but these issues are being more widely investigated as time passes.

Health is an action, not a status. Much like love and friendship, to achieve health requires that we make consistent efforts, and accurate self-reflections. Health is also relational to our enviroments. For example, ‘healthy behavior’ in a cold-climate environment likely includes wearing warm clothing, and building well-insulated homes and structural facilities. Healthy behavior for an island-people likely requires a significant number of the community to practice boat-building and a proficiency at swimming and diving, skills that support or are necessary to fishing and basic sustenance. Appropriate, proportional action, in balance with the conditions presented by our environment, is what generates a mechanic of health.

‘Beauty’ and ‘wellness’ are internal value judgements. We can all develop our own preferences for aesthetics, and we can all recognize that our personal preferences are not universal. We can celebrate the fact that we are each excited by all sorts of different characteristics, both physical and behavioral. The ‘wellness’ part of the industry is mostly psychological, and it coincides with the pathology of politeness. ‘Politeness,’ as we have discussed before, is a concept that pretends to have moral grounding by correlating itself to kindness and compassion. Politeness is a performance of social norms and expectations. Politeness often dictates that we bypass any internal ethical conflicts by deferring to the basic patterns of behavior that society expects from us. We often self-regulate or suppress our internal urges, for the sake of maintaining the appearance of ‘normal’ society. Instead of challenging our expectations, we default to roles that society assigns us, and we end up imposing these expectations on ourselves without even contemplating a potential for alternatives.

Beauty and wellness industry wants us to buy their products, and to adopt their ways of thinking. It wants us to literally cover our skin in toxic chemicals. As an essential function of capitalism, the industry pronounces that if we can not follow their beautification pathology and learn their ‘skills,’ that by virtue of this failure, we are thereby less deserving of both material and emotional care from our community, and from our public and private institutions. The pervasive role of ‘beauty’ standards is reflected in the attendance rules made for even entering most establishments at all, and these rules are often poorly disguised as ‘functions of public health.’ For example, the seemingly universal demand that we must wear foot coverings in public is a function of both class- and inter-cultural-warfare that erroneously posits capitalistic societies above all others. Paradoxically, if we follow the ‘shoe rules’ along the spectrum of class status, we should notice that as status increases, wearing shoes flips to become an indicator of lower status. Luxury spaces, like private homes and vacation resorts, are ‘protected’ spaces, where ‘undesireable’ people from the ‘lowliest’ classes, the shoe-wearing people, are financially barred from access. The same ‘beauty’ standard that criminalizes the poor is wielded doubly, as a weapon to characterize and divide the people into artificially disparate classes. The beautification rituals, that by their artificial inaccessibility, condemn the poor, are the same rituals that elevate the rich. This is psychological warfare. The best way to fight this particular war is to refuse to show up to their battlefields in the first place.

Many beauty influencers are largely unaware of their roles in this war, but their handlers — the corporations who profit from our judgemental, aesthetic policing — have been, for hundreds of years, acutely studying, developing, and refining this phenomenon. Capitalists control and direct influencers like puppets. Most influencers are unfortunately reputably mindless, but they cannot be solely blamed for their ignorance, because ultimately all of our motivations lie in self-preservation within this capitalist hell. If we can make more effective arguments, including shaming the participants of this destructive industry, then we might begin to encourage each other to dismiss the ideology of capitalistic beauty and wellness. With our psychological defenses prepared, we can build a more functional sense of beauty and wellness, founded in ecosystemic health, ethics, and compassion.

Beauty and wellness are social constructs. We can destroy these constructs altogether, or we can build them in any manner that suits us. If we wish to associate these ideas with health, then we must dismantle the capitalistic perspectives from which we assess and distribute them.

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EricLook@riseup.net (email)

patreon.com/EricLook

linktr.ee/EricLook

We anarchists and anticapitalists write often about the importance of joy ­ — but that’s not saying much, because we anarchists write often about the importance of all things people have historically, rightly identified as essential to human experience. To reach a conclusive stance of absolute anarchism that includes these many topics, one must proceed through the benevolent, socialistic, and moral intent that we find among the automatic urges of human expression. “The involuntary aspiration born in man to make the most of one’s self, to be loved and appreciated by one’s fellow-beings, to ‘make the world better for having lived in it,’ will urge him on the nobler deeds than ever the sordid and selfish incentive of material gain has done.” [The Principles of Anarchism (1905) Lucy Parsons]

But this essay is not about joy. This essay an expression of pain; the pains of losing what we once had, and the pains of never knowing what we’ve been missing for so long: our sense of belonging.

More importantly, this essay is a call to action.

What I hate: I’m angry, all the time. I simply cannot experience peace in the face of overwhelming socioeconomic and cultural evidence that my mere existence is under threat from widespread beliefs in factual inaccuracies forcibly propagated among us, the common people. As we investigate capitalism, we encounter its natural and reactionary defenses, including its own ‘self-refinement’ and supposed ‘good character.’ Lesser minds succomb easily to this manipulative, ‘self-flagellating’ ‘restrospection.’ Our resulting systematic behaviors, beliefs, and institutions become part-and-parcel to the domination that we claim to resist. I don’t want this.I don’t want any of the inner turmoil, in myself or in anyone else. I don’t enjoy being angry all the time.

What I love: I want a life worth living. I want access to goodness, not barriers from it. I want to laugh so much that my sides hurt. I want to smile so constantly that my cheeks are sore by the time my face finds the pillow. I want the safety of my own bed. I want to hear the imaginary, lighthearted, nonsensical, and embellished creations of storytelling. I want to learn and play new variations of card games, word games, and activity games. I want to feed and be fed in rooms overflowing with extended friends and family, at tables overcome with the sustenance of the many dishes we all prepare together. I want things; I fucking swear to god, I want a life.

Capitalist tendencies

I can’t do any of those essential things that would generate a healthy, resilient sense of belonging, because we collectively refuse to turn ourselves over to any efforts that would materially bring about its conditions. We are distracted by theory, by identity, and by the purely hypothetical morality of courtrooms, legislation, and property. In truth, we all know that all of these institutions are morally inept, bankrupt, and callously evil. The capitalist defenses twist our sense of benevolence into the form of a cage that prevents the upheaval of capitalist architecture. The shallow capitalistic appeals to ‘humanity’ are projections of their inner sociopathy. There is neither an inherent morality nor any liminal place for ethics within capitalism, so the capitalist must rely on manipulating the morality of its servants and subjects. In this endeavor, the preconceived, outward perspective imposed by physical and psychological capitalist architecture constrains small minds, preventing individuals from achieving a functional escape or detachment from the capitalist dogmas that presede decision-making.

To achieve the figurative launch velocity needed to escape the capitalist gravity, we must start above ground. Right now, we are buried and bound by chains of capitalist architectures. Our living conditions are made intentially tragic and traumatizing, because recovery from these pains precedes thinking and acting about their causes, and if we can be kept in constant states of recovery, then we will never be able to dedicate the necessary energies to think ourselves out from under our self-constraining boot. While it’s true that the oppressor will never give us the education and the tools we require to overcome their oppression, also true is that we almost-exclusively-voluntarily bind ourselves in its chains.

Alignment

The idea that resistance structures are materially reliant upon ‘capitalist’ industries is not a paradox, but a misnomer thanks to our misunderstanding the purposes and functions of industry itself. Labor, invention, innovation, and creativity are functions of human spirit, tho regularly hijacked by the capitalist cultural architecture. Humans are inherently creative and artistic, but as a function of survival within the confines of capitalist conventions, we are coerced — for the fact of survival — to selling the skills and products of our inventions and labors. The worthy industries of production which sustain life itself will always exist despite the influence, exchange, or existence of money. The expulsion of finance from worthy industry can only improve the efficiency and cumulative positive effects of an industrial system aimed at sustaining life, which functions primarily to produce useful, necessary, and ecosystemically sound goods and services. If an industry is not useful or beneficial to living beings, then it should dissolve. Wherever industry is convoluted from its purpose and causing harm, then it should be banned, and its adherents should (at minimum) be publicly shamed and prohibited from positions of authority.

We should give up on our ‘democracy’, no matter what. Democracy is a tool of social control and moral bypassing. It is a mechanism that allocates our decision making authority to either an uninformed populace, or to a corrupt representative, or worse: to the compounded evil of both. Even at its most benevolent,

“the argument for democracy against anarchism undermines itself.

“If you consider these worthy electors as unable to look after their own interests themselves, how is it that they will know how to choose for themselves the shepherds who must guide them? And how will they be able to solve this problem of social alchemy, of producing the election of a genius from the votes of a mass of fools? And what will happen to the minorities which are still the most intelligent, most active and radical part of a society?” [Anarchy (1891) Errico Malatesta, via Anarchist FAQ, Various authors]

Now today empowered by the near-infinite-reproducibility of information itself, by the immediacy of its electronic transfer, and by the potency of the resulting global, communal refinements to anticapitalist revolutionary strategy, it is our duty to revolt and rise up against every interjection of capitalist influence, toward the complete and total annihilation of imperialistc relations, and so thoroughly as to innoculate every living being against the potentiality of ever-again producing the conditions for property relations itself. Our monument to anticapitalism must live psychologically within us. Our living and breathing comprehension automatically reflects outwards from the resulting material manifestations of mutual care, the real revolution.

Action

To escape, our strategy commences with articulating our goal, that sits upon the horizon; and in the foreground, articulations of the pathway for the first logical and sustainable action. Our goal is the socialized guarantee for the material cornerstones of participation within society itself, summarized in the phrase ‘universal basic services,’ and which include but are not limited to: housing, healthcare, hygiene, food, water, utilities, clothing, appliances, education, transportation, and recreaton. We should dream of a future so utopian that our most progressive, most radical beliefs of today are represented in the bare minimums, at the mere threshholds of civil, compassionate societies of the future.

There are many reasons I always name ‘housing’ first in the list of universal basic services. Housing is the foundation for any and all meaningful action, both individual and collective. We should waste no time defending our rights to housing. Everyone deserves the safety and security that only real, physical housing provides. To actualize this first step of promised housing, not many strategies have yet been tried. But there is one strategy I believe most promising, most realistic, most accessible, and most powerful for commencing both material and psychological anticapitalist revolution. This strategy happens to be better explained in the easy-to-read book, called, “Abolish Rent” (2024) by authors Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis. I urge you, I implore you, I beg you to read this book, to adopt its strategy for yourself, and to spread the message of its importance. Seed as many resident unions around the world as possible, to make guaranteed housing a material reality within our lifetimes.

‘Mutual care’ means mutual material support. Among the most effective and foundational material supports we can provide for each other is the total abolition of financial barriers to the means of survival. The abolition of rent in your local community has downstream and immediate effects on the capitalistic power dynamics of cost and property relations. Every person who refuses any degree of cooperation with the coercive powers of property makes themselves an accomplice to the destruction of capitalism. To make any fundamental social change, we must adopt this militaristic approach to anti-capitalism, which is necessarily founded in anti-commerce and anti-property.

Removal of the financial barriers to our basic needs is the premise for undoing the coercive power imbalance of capitalism and property relations which progressively, cancerously grows in violence. Think of how many people are working directly at the core of the imperialist machine — soldiers, war machine industrialists, surveillance agents, etc — simply because they need a paycheck that can purchase the means of their survival. In fact, how do our daily habits, and our individual indentured consumption, contribute to this machine? There is so much of our lives to examine and deconstruct. All of this has been explained at length, in all sorts of anticapitalist, anarchist, socialist, and communist media. I invite you to seek out those resources and references, using keywords, and asking friends and people like me for suggestions and guidance along the way. We are each one among many in the field of anticapitalism, which spans beyond where we’re going and beyond where we came from. We must pass on as much past learning as possible to the aid of others, while always acquiring as much new learning for ourselves to advance our own positions.

‘Final warning’

The capitalists are now desperate to complete their technofuedal machines of control, in centralized command centers, by which their extreme-few can effectively delegate the output of every military and propaganda apparatus around the world. They have had quite-enough of the ‘wisdom of class consciousness,’ of functional intelligence, creeping into the minds of their once-blind mass of subordinate jackboots. Therefore they have been building a weapon that dismisses the very need for any of the self-constraining violence that we, the masses, impose upon ourselves by way of militaries, police, neoliberal architecture, and psychology. That weapon is of course masked under the claim of ‘artificial intelligence,’ a name that anyone paying attention sees accurately as yet another cruel, open-air joke at the expense of we, the free-range prisoners of this rotten mining colony that we call a ‘global economic society’ — as if that makes it any better.

In any case, our collective existential future is threatened by global climate collapse as delivered by unrepentant industrialism, imperialism, and colonialism. This bullshit society certainly isn’t worth living for, nor any of its parts worth defending. I will defend the future worth living, one that fundamentally excludes the conditions of violence, oppression, coercion, and competition for access to the means of survival within society itself.

Now I ask you, fellow human, to understand this simple idea:

Adopt the strategy. Long-term Goal? Universal Basic Services. First step? Housing, through local support structures made up of people and ‘property.’ How? Collective action and mutual care. What tactics in particular? Resident unions, elaborated in the book, “Abolish Rent” (2024) by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis. Spread the word.

As always, Death to Imperialism and its agents, and All Power to the People!

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EricLook@riseup.net (email) — patreon.com/EricLook — linktr.ee/EricLook

The concepts of patriarchy and matriarchy have always served to perpetuate capitalistic power dynamics. By attributing and quantizing characteristics of ethics and behavior into statistical probabilities that ‘correlate’ to arbitrary demographic categories, we pidgeon-hole ourselves and each other into specific ways of being. We are told that, to be a good and responsible man, we must speculate on our inherent ‘masculinity;’ to be a good woman, we should speculate our inherent ‘femininity.’ This process of speculation itself is a tool for ingratiating each of us to our own personal identity politic.

The capitalistic convention of thinking presupposes several things for us, thereby eliminating our need to think for ourselves. Among these preconceptions are: that capitalism is patriarchal, and that all formations of power dominance are inherently patriarchal. We accept theseconclusions unconditionally and unquestioningly. We internalize a falsehood that our urge for creating and maintaining hierarchy itself is based in qualities that are inherent to categorical sex and genetic expression. This is simply untrue. Hierarchies [of care, control, and information]naturally arise out of all social interaction, no matter how many from any of the genders or sexes are present in the system, and even among people like me who claim the stance of gender abolition. The problem with hierarchy is not fundamental to any one categorical demographic, whether we call ourselves men, women, intesex, a-gender, non-binary, or anything else. The problem with hierarchy is not fundamentally arising from hierarchy itself, but from the unexamined conventions that allow for hierarchichal positions to assert power in relationships.‘Authority’ does not correlate to expertise, experience, compassion, or capacity — it correlates to levers of power.

The capitalist convention, having already conviced us that all modern social methodologies are inherently and historically patriarchal, thereby easily sells the myth that all non-capitalistic methodologies are by the same virtue inherently and historically matriarchal. We, the capitalism-indoctrined commoners, are meant to behave as though the act of placing women into postions of hierarchical power itself would necessarily result in the destruction of the reality and potential for gendered evils as enacted by ‘patriarchal’ hierarchioes. Through the cult of scientific academy, field studies and psychological research are produced en masse to impart the wrongful claim that all societies who do not practicecapitalistic commerce are fundamentally matriarchal, by default of their non-commerce. And through such manipulations of ‘science,’ they would convince us, especially those of us who sometimes fall smoothly into their gender categories, that we should promote a matriarchal authorianism, because doing so is ‘logically’ essential to the very good of our society.

Those societies being labelled from the capitalistic lens as ‘matriachal’ are more accurately described as egalitarian and ‘agenderous,’ if you will forgive me of possibly making up a word (all language is invented somewhere). When challenged at their seats of power, the capitalistic responds by re-allocating power into identities which are just as much infiltrated and controlled by the capitalist dogma. ‘Women’ in any system are equally as susceptible to power-corruption as ‘men.’ We’re all just people. What do our sexual preferences and genitals have to do with our ability to care for the welfare of others? All the ‘science of gender’ is based in unexamined preconceptions and circular ‘logic,’ and our discussions of matriarchy vs patriarchy are an essential part of this logic. The essence of genderism is to obscure functional understandings and perpetuate gender absolutism. This obstacle is one of many weapons that capitalism manufactures and forcibly places into our hands, so that we may police each other along the guidelines — this is what we mean by controlled opposition.

The ethereal, psychological, capitalist authorities have convinced us to don collars of ‘politeness’ and ‘political correctness,’ for these collars are firmly attached to their leashes of control, the institutions of power. I argue that we are not born with an urge for outwardly performing our individual moral stance, and that we are incentivized by ubiquitous media propaganda and other social programming to identify ourselveswithin the constraints of the supposed morality of matriarchy. This self-identification is a performance of our top-down assigned ethics, not a real application of ethical self-actualization. Matriarchy is the negation of patriarchy, not a negation of the conditions for which we observe the application of ‘patriarchy’ as immoral. A more egalitarian approach dismisses the gendered debate altogether, to develop understandings grounded in ecosystemic ethics, not in only identitarian ones. Ecosystemic morality necessarily accounts the behavior of all individuals and groups of that system.

This essay is a call-out against every one of us who have been so quick to employ the words ‘patriarchy’ and ‘matriarchy’ in our rallying calls against capitalism. Our proclamations are typically not more than declarations of self-identity — un-examined identity, identity which is made available to us only by the elaborate misgivings of commerce and its rotten academies. This essay is an invitation to challenge ourselves, and to un-seat ourselves from constraints imposed upon us from ‘unquestionable authorities:’ the bankers, the capitalists, the sciences, the academics, and the moral vangaurd.

This of course is not to dismiss the violence of the material and psychological institutions, but to undermine the potential of their violence by widening our potential for mutalistic care, facilitated in the abolition of gender politics. Our anti-capitalist project is harmed by debates of patriarchym but benefits whenever we honestly and openly adopt the stance of gender-abolitionism.

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EricLook@riseup.net (email) — patreon.com/EricLook — linktr.ee/EricLook

The people are digging through the files, and it makes me hopeful to see so many of us accurately documenting the evil of our times. I’m glad that so many are doing the necessary investigative thinking and seeking that generates the information needed to adequately inform our collective decision-making. That being said, for us ultimately knowing the finer details and functional inner-workings of the depraved evils in this world doesn’t do much (not nothing, but not much) for the process of building hyper-local relationships of mutual care in our daily, material lives, the process which itself would supersede the potential for evil to take root by its focus on eradicating the material conditions that permit our coerced participation in capitalistic commerce.

Mutual care is the real revolution. Meet your neighbors. Let yourself be known in vulnerability. Read the book “Abolish Rent” (2024) by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis, which lays the pathway towards its title, describing a strategy toward establish housing as a first ‘insitutional’ entity among the in-comprehensive list summarized by our slogan ‘Universal Basic Services,’ which are already materially possible thanks to compounded technological innovations made by global human species. Read the book, for fuck sake! What’s the worst that could happen; that you will have read a book?!

Privatized commons

The enclosure of the material commons occurs through property claims. This process of material enclosure is guaranteed by the simultaneous enclosure of the psychological commons. The psychological commons have been captured by the radical monopoly of the institutional approach to mutual care. Mutual care IS the revolution. We need each other. Now is a good time to be vulnerable about who we are, and to intentionally welcome people who are within our immediate geographic vicinity get to know us. I desperately encourage everyone to read the book “Abolish Rent” (2024) by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis, which lays out for us all an immediately approachable pathway towards agency over housing. Secure, safe, guaranteed housing is both the literal and figurative foundation for all other meaningful social collaborations.

Spiritual bypass

Whenever we make the claim that billionaires are worse than useless parasites, the sycophants to capitalism appear as if by mating call, and are the first reactively defending their predator-idols. In a telling reveal, a clearly socioeconomically advantaged person, presenting their personal appearance according to the styles of the ruling aristocracy, responds to our claim ‘billionaires are useless’ in saying, “I can’t believe you’re talking about another human being like this,” as if patently oblivious to billionaires’ well-documented, scornful, and repeated judgements of the working class as “masses of useless eaters.” These mis-informed and dis-compassionate propagandists defend themselves and their rotten idols with many such fragile appeals to ‘humanity,’ as if they do not daily reproduce and invest directly into efforts at increasing the brutal conditions of dehumanization within capitalism, all for the sake of their personal, materially oriented ‘enrichments.’

As a person who struggles to accomplish the necessary tasks of surviving my personal material conditions, I often employ absurd motivators of my own invention. For example, I’m regularly at the gym telling myself, “10 more reps and I get [thing],” but my ‘thing’ is the thorough abolition of capitalism and the state so that its violence no longer touches any of my friends. It sounds a little morbid, but the state and capitalism are literally killing and torturing us. So I am literally saying to myself, “[many] more reps, and we get to live.”

Politeness

I mostly don’t have the patience to perform the liberal concept of politeness anymore. Within some digital spaces, I allow myself to spit at people quite a bit. I find that it’s good to know how to effectively get under people’s skin, and I find that this strategy can be a way of shooting straight to character limits. Because I don’t want to work within unexamined constraints, I don’t want to reproduce limitations, I want to escape the constrains of our preconceptions, to get the whole root and surrounding soil of the issue. We should be able to weigh contrasting and uncomfortable ideas, even when presented from sources (people) who have been ‘nasty’ to us, or from those who we have, for whatever reason, decided to dislike or discredit. In terms of educational aims and our capacity for imparting behavioral changes through social enforcements, pain is a significantly stronger marker of memory than pleasure. Recognizing the efficacy of pain despite its discomfort, I like to believe that the challenge of encountering and ‘dealing with’ people who we perceive as abbrasive will stick with us until we overcome it, usually doing so subconsciously. Politeness is an essential behavior constraint of the liberal mindset, and it has nothing to do with genuine kindness or compassion.

If we want to be treated well by others and by our societal conventions, then we should persistently examine the degrees to which our daily behaviors are contributing to the ubiquitous harms of capitalism. I personally have no discomforts or hesitations at calling out every observable instance of capitalist thinking, including those I perform myself, once I have recognized them. Of course, it goes without saying that self-recognition is typically gradual and private, so those callouts are not as momentarily significant or public as the applications of shame that I suggest we should adopt toward public displays of ignorance.

Shameless plug

I’m truly proud of the writing and progress I have made in the field of anticapitalism. And I’m hoping to create a consistent income for perhaps the first time in my life, at least an ‘income’ of mutual care, that is, the goods and services that make life possible and serve as the foundation for making of ourselves and within our extended communities a life worth living. I’m currently homeless, and I have a lot of fear and anxierty towards surviving another cold season excluded from shelter, and constantly exposed the harassment of the jackboot thugs who comedically, tragically consider themselves ‘peace’ officers. Don’t be ridiculous.

I don’t know if I can survive another winter this way, I am on the verge of inviting a psychotic break already. My goal right now is to accumulate a group of around 200 compassionate readers and fellow anti-capitalists, or anyone who can spare on-average $10 per month, which would collectively represent a pathway for me to start having consistent housing for the first time in my life. I’m writing every day, publishing almost as often, and urging us toward broad-view and long-term strategy that will create meaningful change in our lifetimes if we simply understand it.

The real revolution is mutual care. the real revolution will not be “funded” by any conventional understanding of commerce. We aim to perform only that which has ethical value in living purpose; we do not obey the demands that money, finance, and property aim to coerce from us. ■

EricLook@riseup.net (email) — patreon.com/EricLook — linktr.ee/EricLook

These are all flashy, modern-day sales tactics that obscure rather than clarify our understanding, and which therefore destabilize our position when facing new information. I’m not saying this creator is teaching immoral things, but I do find these tactics to be red flags warranting our scrutiny. For me personally, noting these flags itself literally becomes an obstacle standing in the way of my hearing the arguments people might be otherwise appropriately elaborating.

Finally, I would like to invite us to practice our basic media literacy skills. One behavior of media literacy is to regularly investigate the sources for biases, including the speakers and the publishers. Who is speaking, and what is the goal of their messaging? What response does this piece of media expect or desire of me? Where does this media fit within a larger market of propagandistic media? There are many details about a source that we can infer from seemingly unrelated data points: Seeing that a creator has 194-thousand followers, we should recognize that within our contemporary climate, this number represents a monetizable audience. Then, after taking a reasonable browse through several pieces of content, we might find that there is a lack of obvious and consistent messaging of activism, and instead there is only the same vague, moralistic attitude of ‘benevolence’ that has always been present in liberalism. This video in particular grasps at our reactive emotionality, and I feel as tho we are aligned, but the truth of our alignment is obscured. This video seems to imply a stronger sense of urging — and at least a consideration for some wider strategy — than all other videos belonging to this publisher that I personally watched, but it still offers no specific or meaningful directions in its closing.

I believe the direction implied by so many similar ‘content creators’ is that, if we pay attention to this creator with our ‘likes’ and ‘follows,’ then eventually, maybe even very soon, something will happen. But I’ve followed thousands of similarly ‘aligned’ content creators for ages, and ‘something’ never happens. Could this time be different? I hold out hope every time I encounter such a style and topic of content. Unfortunately, there is not even an attempt at a discussion of guideposts, goals, or strategies for action. For once (I mean hopefully more than once but for fuck sake), I would like to see one of these micro-celebrities suggest a pathway for action that doesnt center themselves. I want them to tell me about a strategy that they encountered that they believe deserves all of our attention, and then to tenaciously promote that strategy without elevating any one person or group of persons as its one arbiter, its vanguardist savior. I want for informed people to point me in the direction of the people and sources that informed them. I’m not saying this absolutely doesn’t happen on social media, but it is exceptionally rare. And then, when people do actually suggest their personal influences, 99 out of 100 recommendations are either so anachronistic (and so annoyingly repeated) as to be historically incomprehensible to us today, or they are entirely focused in emotional storytelling that tends to only confirm feelings already internalized, within those who are already morally aligned to us.

Having said all that, I will offer a suggestion for our coordinated, cooperative, collaborative pathway, an idea that doesnt need me personally to continue its proliferation. In terms of guideposts, we aim to establish what many of us typically refer to as Universal Basic Services — among these: housing, healthcare, hygiene, utilities, education, food, clothing, transportation, appliances — the simple necessities of contemporary life, as made possible through compounding technological innovations and convention. In other words, we seek a purely socialistic approach to scaling material logistic cooperation, but it’s much easier to say ‘universal basic services,’ or UBS. That’s our current goalpost, guiding us toward a moving horizon. How can we get there?

From the framing of our ultimate goals, we incrementally step back in scope and scale until we can invent and imagine ourselves succeeding in a tactic that takes meaningful steps towards our goal on the horizon. We adopt a series of smaller goals, strategies, and tactics which are fundamentally aligned to the goal. The first of these smaller steps is Housing, which is the literal and figurative foundation for all other endeavors. What is the strategy for approaching housing? The book “Abolish Rent” (2024) by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis eloquently, gently, and thoroughly explains this pathway.

There has been a common call for something refered to as ‘networking’ within our intentions for performing mutual care. But this strategy has yielded for us little more than digital echo chambers, and regularly fails at (I would argue that it intentionally avoids) facilitating significant and sustained changes at even the smallest material levels. I find that this failure is most attributable to its misplaced focus, which is a function of the preconceptions of alienation, isolation, and exceptionalism that are imposed upon all of us by the cultural climate of capitalism. These unexamined ways of believing serve the foundations of our paradoxical capitalist anti-capitalism, which maintains a radical monopoly over all anti-capitalist methodology. The strategy and attitude needs to be fully overturned. If there were a slogan for this attitude, it might be along the lines of, “Fuck networking; start neighborhooding.”

It’s time now to gather up everything that we can carry from among what we’ve learned in our multi-faceted pursuits toward the complete abolition of capitalistic thinking. It is our duty to promote the detailed refinements we have achieved through all of this dialogue and void-screaming. It is our duty to recognize the field and spectrum of anti-capitalism, and to open ourselves to its abundance. It is our duty to recognize our complex positions within this field, our positions which exist in bits and pieces. It is our duty to continue pushing and pulling ourselves, and each other, along the spectrum of anti-capitalism.

Intelligence is the capacity to discern and defer to expertise. Intelligence can be fostered. Intelligence is not merely passing tests and reaching ‘common standards.’ Intelligence is a moving entity for which we are all responsible to capture and empower.

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EricLook@riseup.net (email) | patreon.com/EricLook | linktr.ee/EricLook

‘Do not turn away from one who appears to you as a stranger in need, but rejoice in the opportunity to serve your God.

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‘For when God invites you to sacrifice of yourself to serve the unmet needs of another, God is demonstrating His faith in your compassion. If you turn away from the needy who arrive begging at your doorstep, you turn away also from God.’

The essential foundation of our activism — our motive for taking action — is seated in our good intention, our generalized benevolence for all people and all life on our planet. We see ourselves as agents of peaceful revolution: we strive to perform the mutual care that brings about and represents this revolution. But our good intentions are not enough. We must also measure the efficacy of our tactics and strategies that we practice against the reality they are producing towards their professed ends.

Our good intentions are used against us, wielded as a weapon by a counterinsurgent attitude that pervades our culture. The insidiousness of this benevolence-as-counterinsurgency is that most of us are paradoxically unaware of how often our roles and behaviors are supporting and reproducing capitalistic perspectives. The ‘activism industrial complex’ is part of an automatic, cultural response which serves to ‘catch’ all potentialities of resistance, and to funnel would-be agents of anticapitalism into easily mis-led, de-fanged, and mis-managed organizations.

We care

In “Who Cares? Rediscovering Community” (1997) David Schwartz identifies two essential elements of modern capitalistic cultural architecture, which fundamentally constrains our creative thinking, with a detailed examination targetting the efficacy of large-scale institutions of care (such as health, medicine, psychology, disability, etc). Schwartz explains that formal medical science had by the 1970’s already long-recognized itself as part of the problem, as evidenced through Ivan Illich’s naming it ‘paradoxical counterproductivity’ in 1977. In Schwartz words, this is the function whereby “modern institutions tend to produce the opposite of their stated purpose.” But that’s not all institutions do, according to Schwartz and Illich. Institutions “also tend to eliminate possibilities for other kinds of action. Illich names the situation in which one type of institutional product displaces all other possibilities a radical monopoly.” [p.28] Schwartz provides us the example of the automobile, whose ‘radical monopoly’ consists of the pervasive physical architectures and psychological dominances of the personal, private car. Not only does the dominance of the car monopolize our conception for the appropriate modes of travel and transportation, but it also serves as one of the preconceptions for the design and arrangement of all physical spaces, that is the architecture of people and things.

Let me take a round-about and disjointed approach to explaining why this immediately reminds me of another common epithet in modern times; it goes something like, ‘There is no greater barrier to knowledge than the confidence of unexamined preconceptions.’

You might accurately guess, if you read more than a few of my personal essays, that when it comes to introductory questions of spirituality and religion, that I would lean towards atheism, or towards atheistic explanations and beliefs. As part of the actively-revealing clarity of the atheist investigative position, we must note that it would be deeply unfair to discount the hundreds of millions, or maybe billions, of personal accounts who celebrate the positive role of faith practice (ie. religion, spirituality), especially to the degree that personal and communal faith practice serves as a dutiful function of coping with and surviving difficult life conditions and traumas. We can all be thankful for the survival- and adjustment-mechanisms that promote the functional health of individuals and communities. Having recognized those positive aspects, it would be equally unfair to discount the brutality and the global devastation wrought in the name of disparate faiths and the imposition of particular interpretations.

If we are good people, and I believe we are, then we should become willing to dissolve and discharge the parts of our institutions that we rightfully identify as no longer serving us. If we wish to preserve traditions that may not be clear in their purpose, we should be honest in defending and investigating their continued practice, with a sincere and unbiased eye. We gain much from allowing ourselves to feel exactly as we may feel about the details of our practice, and by openly explaining and discussing with our companions the simple reasons for our wish to preserve them. It is helpful also to recognize that many feelings can be co-ocurring, and to make space for each and as many parts of our feeling as may be. We must be logical in this discussion of personal experiences, even if that means making an admission that we may not always be certain about exactly how we are feeling right now, or why we typically enjoy a particular tradition. It is an acceptable stance to admit we don’t know. We can use this uncertainty as the foundation of our internal investigation, not simply as a foundation for belief, for if we then adopt a position that is built on obscured foundations, it might as easily serve as a snag or obstacle preventing us from reaching both more fulfilling and more practical understandings. While easily elaborated in endless anecdotage, the psychological stance of faith has been made a regular subject of academic study, and there are several popular sayings that reflect this principle: There is no more effective obstacle to learning than the confidence by which we carry our preconceptions. Our unexamined beliefs are the most effective shield for deflecting the essential challenges and stressors that would indicate and direct meaningful growth of character, both individually and interpersonally and communally.

What I’m trying to say is that the way we approach mutual care is fundamentally constrained by our not-yet-fully-examined understandings for the ways that capitalism manipulates our deepest motivations against us. ‘Mutual care’ is the phrase that today represents what I argue is the most potent abstraction for what is the most basic and quintessential function of all human relationships, which has been hijacked by institutions whose only claims to functional authority are the confabulations of ‘polite’ society, set of course in no more than the blood-mortar of the implicit and universal violence of property relations.

Our strategy evolves

The best educators want to give us every critical thinking tool at hand, and the knowledge to use them, and the confidence to think critically by the power of our own volition, so that we can use our own intelligence to reason through difficult decisions without having to defer to anyone else. The best educators want us to know how to defer to skilled, practiced expertise and how to discern expertise from authority, and of course what the difference is between expertise and authority. The best educators want us to be not only fully empowered, but also fully inspired to meet and surpass their own accomplishments and wisdom. The pride of an educator is in seeing our pupils surpass us. The best educators want us to have the intellect to appropriately decode implicit meaning. The best educators want to make sure that we cannot be led astray, coerced, or tricked by anyone, especially not by the sufficiently identified immoral and illogical agents and institutions who want us to sacrifice our agency to their imposed authority. The best educators give all they have all of their knowledge. They give to as many as they can find who are ready to receive it. If knowledge is one of the facets of power, then understand what I mean when I say, All power to the people; All knowledge to the people. It is through the abundant distribution of our most potent thinking skills that we usher in the glory of our spiritual and religious Gods. It is through obfuscation, blurring, and unilateral control of the distribution of information that our enemies — demons — make puppets of us to perform their evil.

A part of the anti-capitalist strategy is sharing the best information and promoting the strategy of critically, intensively investigating the strategy itself. We gain much by imagining how the strategy might unfold in material reality, preparing for potentialities, attempting strategy, reflecting and refining, sharing our refinements, and constantly promoting the most potent tactics and skills. It is up to everyone along the spectrum of anti-capitalism to find our roles on that spectrum and to continue moving along it towards the ever-moving utopian horizon. It is by promoting the most effective means of continued radicalization to those who are ready to hear it that we most effectively release the chains of mass-hallucination and hypnotization.

When we begin to engage in our practices of mutual care, we encounter what might feel like a paradox: We seem to require access to the outputs of the capitalistic machine in order to survive and arm the fight against the capitalistic machine. Capitalism is so insidious that every time we consider resources and labor at all, such as when we entertain the idea of charitable giving, that we have a tendency to assess our capacity for giving from a dogmatic capitalistic perspective founded in opposites named ‘scarcity’ and ‘excess.’ We have a questionable faith in our perpetual access to resources, which is forcibly and strategically instilled in us through the artificial maintenance of scarcity. Our capacity for ‘charitable giving’ correlates to the capitalistic ideal of achieving control over excess. It is only safe for us, capitalism teaches, to share our stockpile of resources when such sharing comes only from such stores of excess. The real paradox is that charitable giving is made necessary by the same vsocial architecture that generates and promotes the accumulation of excess, which is the precondition for charitable giving. We are unwilling to share that which we perceive to be among the set of base requirements for our own minimum standards of lifestyle within capitalism, and this feedback encourages the accumulation of ever more excessive stores of resources, reducing from the overall supply available, which we understand already as artificially scarce. In simpler terms: this is the scarcity mindset. This is a preconception; it is fundamental to how we analyze every decision that we make. But it only seems as though we live in scarcity because of our conditioning. The ‘culture’ of capitalism socially imposes scarcity upon us. The capitalist application of economics pre-supposes a global system of property ownership. But property ownership is merely a concept, it does not exist materially apart from its social enforcements. Property ownership is enforced by social behavior and architecture, both material and conceptual. We have moral and ethical responsibility to inspect the traditions and belief structures that together compose the unseen psychological constraints of human organizing.

Our capacity grows

I don’t need you to follow my social media acounts; I don’t need you to click on my stuff. What I need is what we need. I firmly believe that the most effective revolutionary strategy necessitates our internalization and adoption of the the following:

1. The institutions are broken. The unexamined institutional pathology of formalization itself serves moreso as a barrier to meaningful collective action than a facilitator of it. We must therefore resist the urge for institutionally categorizing ourselves by the process that can be simplified in the phrase ‘identity politics.’

2. We must embrace the potency of dialogue and local power. We must thoroughly discuss the alienation and exceptionalism of property relations in plain and common terms with our geographically local neighbors so as to re-establish our imaginations outside the constraints of capitalistic thinking, especially when analyzing the material distinctions of our choices and conditions. ‘Embracing dialogue and local power’ means returning to the tradition of being emotionally vulnerable with the people who live around us. I’m talking about getting to know our immediate neighbors and letting them get to know us. This is a muscle in atrophy due to neglect; it is a human body-part of which capitalism threatens to make a vestige. We all have the capacity to become more vulnerable. Most importantly, through our vulnerability, we mustrecognize the fact that we are already fundamentally morally aligned in all of our pursuits of making life worth living, which necessarily includes self-preservation and the ecosystemic conditions of cyclic and seasonal earth life, and which also includes the socio-ecosystemic conditions required for the abundant reproduction of joy and belonging, within ourselves and within our communities.

If we are diligent anticapitalists, and I believe that we are, then our strategy must include preparing ourselves for every opportunity to resist capitalism. We arm ourselves with a readiness to produce and refine the most accessible arguments and reference materials for every person along every moment of the anticapitalist spectrum. We should aim to make ourselves ready to dialogue with everyone we might encounter in our own daily life. And reciprocally, we must open ourselves to being challenged by the perspectives and analyses of those whose studies and experiences vary from our own. To entertain a casual mnemonic device: we should be like a muscled body-builder, with a focus on our core abdominal muscles, too develop our ABS: Always Be Sharing / Suggesting / Strategizing.

We are always ready to share the most potent resources, appropriate to the perspectives and conditions of the person we are talking to. That means first having approached our fellows with the honest and open communication required to inform our understanding of each other’s positions along the anticapitalist plane. When we find ourselves directly quoting resources and words that we have historically found most informing of our own beliefs, then we should challenge ourselves to paraphrase those words, as frequently and as often, and to the best of our ability, embracing the practice and pacing for this marathon. We must develop this practice and do it repetitiously, just like we are training our muscles. And just like our muscles, it is good to intentionally enjoy appropriate rest — and joy — along the way.

What are the questions that lead us to ascertaining our common goals, and thereby meaningfully internalizing our fundamental mutual alignments?

How can we convince people that we have something worth sharing with them, something worthy of their own deep personal investigation, if not by first convincing them that we are fundamentally aligned? We must act upon the truth that our most meaningful dreams and ideals do not compete against each other. Our deepest lifestyle goals are not exclusive to each other. More importantly, our most meaningful lifestyle goals are fundamentally aligned, and therefore the lifestyles and institutions supporting us in our pursuits can easily be coordinated. The best way to accomplish any of our dreams is through voluntary coordination, collaboration, cooperation.

Our senses sharpen

We look deeply at this discussion of our fundamental moral alignments, because the realization of moral alignment is the foundation for coordination of any scale. The imminent failure to recognize our moral alignment on the global scale is our realest existential threat. We are already inherently aligned by virtue of our being alive, and by being one species who possesses one, shared home. We are already fundamentally allied to each other through mutual self preservation and mutual hopes for growth. We are always in a process of re-constructing arbitrary social architectures for the sake of the coordination of these alignments.

When I talk about our fundamental moral alignment, I find that one of the the most relatable examples is the fact of global construction, maintenance, and use of (public) roadways, and the many aspects of its institutional standardization that are implemented mostly benevolently to facilitate the safe and effective coordination of transporting people and resources. Our roadway system spans nearly every inhabitable land mass on our one planet, and while the conventions of their use are all similar, the conventions of their geographic place vary. Whichever roadway we find ourselves on, we obey the convention of the geographic place. This cooperation is a psychological convention facilitating convenience for everyone who benefits from the roadway system. Obeying convention is the best course of action for our welfare because of the potential for material and social consequences. When it comes to driving, it is self preservation, I believe, that makes up the primary factor motivating us to self-impose (obey) the convention. We all know that if you drive on the wrong side of the road you will likely incur injury to yourself or your property. Secondary to self-preservation is our consideration for social consequences, or the social reinforcements of what we might call ‘convention.’ Conventions — the ‘common’ modes of behavior to which we are all adjusted — often guide our unexamined expectations. For example, the complaint that other drivers are going ‘too fast’ or ‘too slow’ is an expression of the feeling that our expectations have been violated. In this case, the violation is of our expectation that other motorists will obey the conventions of average roadway speeds. In courtrooms, we pass judgement and attribute guilt based on failures to uphold the ‘reasonable’ expectations that we charge every member of society to upholding. But society itself is unreasonable.

The revelations of openly discussing morality will manifest themselves in tangible improvements to the systematic sociocultural mechanisms of health and public utility. It is necessary to apply moral thinking, moral questioning, and moral critique toward all industries to innoculate every facet of capitalism with its antidote.

The classic move of the activism industrial complex is to keep us active, endlessly active… But there is a way to supersede these bureaucratic thugs, and the premise for this is beautifully outlined in the 2024 book “Abolish Rent” by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis. Everyone should read this book, internalize its strategy and purpose, and get to work alongside their neighbors to abolish rent. This is the fastest and most meaningful way of revolution. Mutual care is the revolution.

Anarchy is inherently anti-violent and pro-social. Anarchy’s entire foundation is in the mechanism of purposeful, ethical, and reflective balance. While other anti-violent ways of thinking exist, anarchism is the one which most accurately discerns the neoliberal failures, including the obsessive pacifism which go as far as to reject our right to defend ourselves from the cultural super-structure hell-bent on our torturous demise. Their violence is predictable, structured, and systematic; our knowledge of this sets the conditions which clarify our strategy. The demons of our time have abundantly and thoroughly demonstrated their intentions to perpetuate this violence. Their violence necessitates self defense, but that only affords us the most mediocre, dehumanized suvival. To make for ourselves a life worth living, their violence warrants our coordinated, collaborative, pre-emptive action. Anarchy is inherently anti-violent, but not to the point of rejecting the violence of preemptive self-defense made necessary by the evils we face. Anarchy is also pro-social in its endless, confident retrospection. Through these mutual endeavors, we foster fulfillment of our deepest human need: our sense of belonging to each other.

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Massive thanks to 6 patreon subscribers dedicating a total of $99.44 monthly! Also huge thanks for 2 generous gifts totaling $50 cash and $25 in prepaid grocery cards! Please continue sharing to help me survive another month!

EricLook@riseup.net (email)

patreon.com/EricLook

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matching pace, social vectors

I experience deep anger and resentment for the dominant global socioeconomic arrangement, its benefactors, its willful sycophants, and its ignorant servants. My intensity is often directed towards those who make rhetorical claims of caring for the welfare of human beings and ecosystems, yet who still engage in deeply harmful capitalistic behaviors for which activists, researchers, educators, and even entertainers have identified clear, straightforward, and easy alternatives. The willingness of these ‘performers’ of care to softly ‘acknowledge’ the existence of pervasive intersectional diseases without ever meaningfully engaging with their essential topical context is perhaps not better demonstrated than by the hopefully dying fad of Indigenous land acknowledgement ‘ceremonies,’ which accomplish nothing for the sake of Indigenous people (or any people at all), but faithfully serve the rationalizations that subdue the dissonance in colonizing populations which is necessary to facilitate our participation in the perpetuation of capitalistic endeavors at every level of ‘culture.’

Here is the genesis of my frustration with well-intentioned people: their refusal to internalize (or engage at all with) an understanding for the surrounding superstructures within which their personal strategies exist. We have to continuously find ourselves out of the box we were programmed into, and then out of the box that first box was programmed into, and on and on. As other anticapitalists have said, the world is a series of tangible institutions built on psychological institutions, which are built on tangible institutions, which are built on psychological institutions. This comment is not repetitious for repetition sake; it is not merely rhetorical. The world we know is both ovewhelmingly complex and exasperatingly simple. We need to develop large scale meta-cognitive strategies of analysis to rebuild the psychological institutions that exist within us in order to conceptualize new tangible institutions.

It is possible to continue practicing the physical manifestatons of community care while studying and challenging their efficacy and while opening ourselves to creating new ones. It’s okay (and good) to continue peforming care actions when we believe in the goodness of our impacts, even if we’re not totally sure what the real details of these impacts are. The important part is paying attention to whether our impact is aligning with our intention, and refining and evolving our strategic actions accordingly.

“Impact is more important than intention,” seems to be the most commonly refused lesson among social activists. The idea that our good intentions can and will absolve us from any accidental harm we might indirectly cause is a memetic parasite that divorces us from achieving or even acknowledging the purpose of our self-proclaimed social roles. It is a paradoxical counterproductivity toward the growth of our souls; it shrinks rather than strengthens. Good intention is not enough. We must also measure the impacts of our actions.

Measuring real impact is where ‘getting out of our box’ intersects with our intentions. We must see the larger system around us in order to understand the variables that we’re manipulating.

This is the entire point of my work. I don’t do much that doesn’t either immediately support my physiological survival (eat, exercise, hygiene, etc) or isn’t immediately aimed at sharing and refining anticapitalist strategy. Strategy is founded in our goals, and we haven’t spent enough time as a collective talking about our goals. We’ve been isolated from each other and alienated from every aspect of biological living.

I know that you would do everything in your power to provide and guarantee every goodness in life to those you love. You would meet their every request for care and attention because that’s the whole point; loving and being loved with our chosen family and friends is what gives us purpose. If everyone had the resources at hand, they would give everything to the people they care for. If everyone had a network of locally distributed care that supported them, they wouldn’t have to turn to exterior systems of support, such as waged labor. If you had all your needs met, you’d develop your interests, whatever they are, whether in art or entertainment or recreation or travel or anything yet unmentioned. But what you wouldn’t do is try to diminish the resources available to others. You wouldn’t create stockpiles of more than you can consume, utilize, or steward, because you would have faith in the support networks that continuously provide the materials, services, and relationships of your livelihood. And better, within that livelihood lies the unconditional opportunity to self-direct your personal contributions of care towards those you love, and towards the community in which you live.

Most people are benevolent, but we live in a society that is fundamentally designed to reward malevolence and indifference. The people standing at the levers of control are using those levers to direct the creation of ever more powerful engines of control, and to build barriers between us and their mechanical tower. The role of aristocracy is to formalize the ‘legal apparatus’ in documentation, mortar, and blood, and especially to impose their violent process of coercion, dehumanization, torture, and murder upon any subjects who aim to destroy those levers, because we represent their most meaningful existential threat.

We call for nothing short of the abolition and wholesale annihilation of this putrid, parasitic, demonic ‘culture.’ We call for the death of imperialism and its willful agents. Every attempt at reform of this society is but a temporary patch that keeps its engine grinding towards the inevitable cliff of collapse. The social collapse is already happening under our feet, in both distant regions and at home. And there’s an ecosystem collapse happening too; its causes are the same. The documentation of the devastation of everything we have ever known is happening in real time, and the origins of these recordings will be increasingly near, geographically and socially, until you are filming them yourself. These facts are abundantly clear to anyone willing to challenge the preconceptions of the capitalistic lifestyle.

It’s time to move beyond good intentions and reforms. We need a strategy that doesn’t include moral servitude to immoral institutions. We need a reclamation of local and individual agency, and a re-positioning of our stance to face lifestyle and purpose. What I hope to transmit is simple and twofold: First, a long term goal to align our efforts, and second, the essential first step towards that goal which sets the foundation for effective action in all other facets.

1. Long term goal: ‘Universal Basic Services’ (UBS) is a phrase meant to encompass the idea that every one of us, having no realistic alternative option except living in the society to which we are born, should have guaranteed access to the necessities for making a dignified life. I propose that those necessities include: Housing, Healthcare, Hygiene, Food, Water, Electricity, Telephone, Internet, Clothing, Appliances, Education, Transportation, and Recreation. You would do everything in your power to provide all of these things for your immediate loved ones. Global human society long ago accomplished the technological, cooperative, intellectual, and material capacities to make such guarantees a living reality, but as we have discussed, the ethereal arrangements of capitalistic society, on the grounds of their self-perpetuation, must prohibit such meaningful advancements. Anyone who argues against the provision of everything for everyone because it ‘could promote laziness within the individual’ is likely admitting to their own internalized and unexamined capitalist alienation, which results in an indifferent abandonment which can only be seen as ‘lacking effort’ to the degree that a trapped animal stops attempting to escape when each attempt results only in injury. For the few humans who may be uninspired to contribute meaningfully toward their surrounding community’s health and goodness, thousands more will ‘make up’ for their ‘slack.’ This argument of course lacks the analysis which posits that we all deserve as much rest and recovery time as we need to facilitate our personal healings. We deserve to be ‘lazy,’ and such a response is a reasonable reaction to surviving such a toxic society.

2. Housing is the first listed ‘universal’ item because it is the essential foundation for all other services, and because it is tangible and achievable and is a fight that is accessible and quintessential to all of us. Your reading homework toward this end is the book, “Abolish Rent” by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis, and any other material you find which examines this issue. We all deserve housing. We all deserve the dignity to control the aspects of our personal home life. Proper stewardhsip of place can only be achieved by present actors, never by absent ones. The absent owners, ‘our landlords,’ have their individual experience of luxury invested in our collective experiences of poverty. It is time to collectively upend the abuses of property relations through the destruction of their institutions. It’s not only housing that suffers when predators own our lands, but also the culture and our lifestyles that rely on local small businesses for enrichment. The ownership class is attacking the foundations which allow us to foster meaningful interpersonal and intercommunal relationships, and we must fight back. We must obliterate this system of servitude and dispossession.

email: oldcrick@riseup.net

links: linktr.ee/oldcrick | patreon.com/oldcrick

Everything is a joke — in a bad way. We’ve misplaced our seriousness, letting its absense fuel our cruelty, and having removed it from examining the subjects of purpose and compassion. For instance, to call the United States president our global clown supreme might rightfully offend entertainers. Professional clowning — the art of ‘being a clown’ — requires a refinement of technical skills and an attunement to and a compassionate understanding for the perspectives of other people. Humor is built on relationships. But our political and institutional clowns are all tragedy, no comedy. They have refined the skills of expropriation, and attuned themselves to the interests of stockholders, in an enveloping cancer. Their offenses constitute part of an invisible fog, a generalized mass psychosis induced by, among other things, the force-fed and universalized preconceptions of capitalist dogma and its systematic suppressions of intelligence and agency.

It’s why I can’t even take this media platform seriously. I am among some who effortlessly see through the thin veil of what we call ‘society,’ but in our experience of sightedness we are a minority.

We need to fundamentally change our strategy. It seems there’s no shared, meaningful, tangible goals between us. We haven’t quantified or expressed our desires in a way that capitalist production hasn’t inverted, eviscerated, and then inhabited like a demon in a hollowed out shell. I don’t want to just barely fucking survive this bullshit world. I want to live a life worth living. And this ‘society’ produces very little culture worth defending.

I want a home. I want everyone who wants reliable, safe, stable housing to have it unconditionally. It’s childish and cowardly to entertain the idea that we can’t guarantee housing for everyone, without condition. All requirements for such a realization have long been met: our willfullness for benevolence, our labor power, our technological and material capacities. The prohibiting factor to this achievement has always been the agentic nature of institutional centralization by finance and violence, which permits that a few people control every miniscule aspect of the rest of our lives. The system isn’t broken; it’s working almost exactly as it was designed, needing but a few tweaks here and there.

Everything I do now is an effort to help people hear, accept, and internalize the following goal and strategy: for achieving the goal of Universal Basic Services, the strategy must necessarily begin with an assault on property.

Housing is central to our lives, and foundational for enrichement. We need safe sleep, and we need storage for our possessions. We need gathering places, and the means to keep and prepare food. We need private space to engage in intimacy with friends and lovers. We need facilities to maintain our hygiene. We need a geographic place from which to dispatch to our hobbies and responsibilities. We need homes. Everyone needs a home. But not everyone has even a basic home. All of us are being slowly priced out of access to the aspects of meaningful, purposeful life. All of us are being exploited by an absent, malevolent, predatory ownership class.

Rent is the private capture of public investment. It’s often said that only three things matter in real estate: location, location, location. […] It’s not just the building they own, but where the building is, that makes housing more or less valuable. The value of a location is often shaped by our bosses, that is, by where and how we are forced to work a wage. But rent doesn’t just steal from the wages we earn as individuals, it steals from the value the public creates. We know this intuitively: proximity to parks and recreation, to good schools, to transit stops make housing cost more; centrally located apartments can claim higher rents. But each of these reflects the quality of the neighborhood, not just the quality of the building: public, not private investment.

“All housing is public housing,” […] Public investment is a precondition for private profit. Even what we think of as privately owned housing relies on vast public infrastructure to exist. That physical infrastructure includes the pipes that deliver water, the sewers that carry out waste, the sidewalks, roads, and transportation systems that connect our housing to our neighborhoods and our neighborhoods to each other. Public infrastructure also means legal and financial systems, from the contracts that govern leases, to the regulations that dictate everything from what counts as a bedroom to the terms of financing loans. The private housing market could not exist without the support of the state. When a city invests in a new subway stop or expands zoning restrictions so landowners can build, the value of locations rise. Landlords claim this value that the public creates for themselves, extracting it from tenants in the form of higher rents. — [“Abolish Rent” p.27–28, Rosenthal & Vilchis]

We want to live with power, to decide what happens to our homes, our neighborhoods, and our cities. Unburdened by the fear of making rent, what could we do with life’s most precious resource, our time on this earth? What could our cities be like, not as monuments to capital and the lucky rich few, but as testaments to the many, and the many lives we could lead? [p.37]

We can’t organize for any other goals if we don’t have housing. We can’t create local communities if we’re transient. We can’t effectively strike for labor rights if we can’t prevent the inevitable evictions due to lost income and inability to pay rent. We can’t maintain local relationships without local stability. We can’t host gatherings with neighbors and friends to teach life skills and just to express joy and solidarity without a geogaphic place in which to gather. Housing is the most essential and the most simple resource that sits utterly within our grasp. We can’t create gardens in our yard spaces if we don’t re-claim the agency over our rights to act upon and steward our lands and homes. We can’t maintain networks of care when they are destabilized from the most basic function of physical place.

Everyone deserves a home. And it’s a cruel and barbaric joke that this overwhelmingly wealthy ‘society’ can not even pretend to care to accomplish such an overwhelmingly simple task.