Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care

the destruction of property is usually viewed as violent only if it disrupts profit or the maintenance of wealth. If food is destroyed because it cannot be sold while people go hungry, that is not considered violent under the norms of capitalism. If a person’s belongings are tossed on a sidewalk during an eviction and consequently destroyed, that is likewise not considered violent according to the norms of this society.

under capitalism, “peace” is the maintenance of violence on the state’s terms.

The creative power of the oppressed will always exceed that of the oppressor, because it is the oppressed who must exercise creativity to navigate and survive a world that is set against them.

Our goal should be interdependence: to be part of a community where rescue is viewed not as exceptional but as something that we owe each other.

The repression of Palestinian resistance offers a profound example of the elasticity of violence as a concept and shows how, while the powerful can wage war on particular communities with impunity and claim innocence, the oppressed can be deemed a violent threat simply for attempting to assert their rights or defend their humanity.

It is not saviorism, but collectivity and solidarity, that will fuel our best efforts.

Such is the perversion of “violence” under imperial and colonial rule: the maintenance of state-sanctioned violence is considered peaceful, while the disruption of those death-making processes is deemed violent.

When state actors refer to “peace,” they are really talking about order. And when they refer to “peaceful protest,” they are talking about cooperative protest that obediently stays within the lines drawn by the state.

We do not suffer oppressions identical to those of our ancestors, but the struggle against our oppressors has never ceased.

We urge organizers to spend more time with books and other modes of learning, not as an admonition (after all, you are reading right now) but to encourage you to claim an inheritance of knowledge your oppressors hope you never discover, embrace, or build from—the stories, wisdom, hope, and imaginings of organizers who came before us.

As fires rage and sea levels rise in the coming years, we will be called upon to rescue one another again and again.

If your tactics disrupt the order of things under capitalism, you may well be accused of violence, because “violence” is an elastic term often deployed to vilify people who threaten the status quo.

It’s true that the language of reform is more easily accepted by the public, because language that lacks substance is generally inoffensive.

Given how revocable and alterable these corporate-owned mediums are, we must consider, What would we do in the case of a major political event if social media were no longer at our disposal? And what about all the people we’re not connecting with in our own communities due to some people’s lack of social media use or the invisible constraints of corporate algorithms?

There are many layers of fear associated with this abandonment: fear of what would happen if the system no longer managed our lives, fear of being devoured by the system ourselves, fear that we cannot win, and perhaps most dauntingly, the fear that we cannot do any better than this, that our hopes to the contrary are the utopian dreams of childish idealists.

It's important to both ground ourselves in the here and now and also remember that the world is much bigger than this moment, bigger than us and our experience of it, and much bigger than we imagine when we are afraid

It means having the courage to imagine, make mistakes, trust, listen, learn, think, and rethink; to resist punditry, pedestals, and perfection; to reject cynicism and embrace critical analysis; to plot; to hold on; to care and commune; to show up; to love.

Reform” is not a battle cry. It is a political pacifier.

Many of the social patterns and behaviors that lead us to reject one another and revert to individualism are the products of trauma, so to do the work of being human together, we must make space to address these emotional and physiological realities.

Let this radicalize you rather than lead you to despair.

the work of changing, imagining, reimagining, building, and rebuilding the world—is on me, too, because it’s on all of us.

remember this much: learned prisoners are an affront to the [prison-industrial complex].

What are the ways that people make the places they inhabit, daily, through their participation, cooperation, and interdependence? What would those dynamics look like if those people were truly free? How can we manifest those ideas, values, and visions in the spaces we create together?

Hope and grief can coexist,” Kelly and Mariame remind us

Contributing to mass death while destroying the Earth for a profit are not considered violent actions, while damaging equipment in an effort to interrupt those harms is considered terrorism.

Cynicism is a dominant force in today’s political discourse

To think of our organizing efforts as the work of making place helps ground us in the larger reality of what we are fighting for: not mere words or ideas, but transformed lives in transformed places. In working toward liberation, we are making place in opposition to those who would rob us of time, space, togetherness, and possibility itself.

While some people engage in politics for the sake of debate or to defend their sense of moral identity, radical organizers are attempting to create something new.

free ourselves from the strictures of individualism and unite in acts of solidarity and collective care. It is in that spirit