One of the many issues that arises in my mind when I think about theory and activism is, rst of all, regarding the old fashioned binary that divides both to extreme poles. In relation to this initial issue, I can only reason that both concepts can no longer be separated; they are two sides of the same existence, and are merged as expression and content of the same assemblage. Following this idea of non-separation of theory and practice another important issue arises, this time related to the materiality that surrounds us and mediates our exchange of information and communication, both in our daily lives and in political activities. Once we realise that theory and activism are part of the same social process, based on interaction and communication, then the importance of the medium where this process takes place also becomes clear. The importance of the material circumstances and platforms for discursive practices is not new in politics. In 1917, Lenin stated that the close relationship between material circumstances and the condition of possibility of a certain statement to take place, and the potentiality of a given statement to exert effect in the material assemblage. Nowadays, maybe more than ever before, the medium and materiality of communication, information exchange and power relations are again in the spotlight of political debate and activism. From the late 1940s, with the emergence of the rst digital and micro-electronics technologies, until the rst two decades of this century, we have seen an explosion and expansion of digital technologies for communication and information. Of course we have to contextualise this technological expansion and understand it within the very apogee of capitalism. The world has been through constant changes not only with regard to the technique itself, but also in its forms of production and reproduction of capital, in the management and development of knowledge and discourses of truth, in the forms of relationship and sociability, in the political struggles, and in policy making. Another important transformation of our contemporary era is that immaterial capitalism and new digital technologies have become mutually interdependent. It means digital technology is not only a network structure that serves as a productive base to capitalism, but capitalists also invest in it with all their strength to extract as much value as possible. In this sense, there is a movement of expansion of digital technology propelled by capitalism in every area of society, which increases its reach. Such a materiality presents an ambiguous potentiality. On one hand, digital technology allows people to communicate, exchange information and knowledge, in order to create and share their own symbolic content, in a much faster, more accessible and dynamic way than previous communication technologies. This kind of technology enables people to engage in social interaction and in the production of their own opinions and narratives. In fact, digital technologies have been used not only as a platform for communication, entertainment or consumption, but also as a highly strategic tool for political struggles and the articulation and diffusion of alternative political opinions that are not necessarily presented in the traditional channels of political information. Good examples of such use can be seen in movements such as the Arab Spring, Occupy and Indignados (but we could also name many other initiatives like Wikileaks, Open Democracy etc.). With the expansion of digital technology, the sources of information and political narratives have increased, making political disputes more complex, implying changes of various orders, especially in the relationship between the political eld, the media sphere, the market in general, and civil society. This in turn introduces new processes, practices, forms of sociability, political actors, groups, etc. There is a pluralisation of voices, collective production and political action.On the other hand, there is a double movement made both by capitalism itself and by government towards complete control over digital technologies. It is well known that corporations such as Google and Amazon track peoples consumer behaviour online to extract prot from it. These companies identify social patterns, trends and forms of collective production and try to co-opt and capture them into capitalisms dynamic. They also try to limit collective creation of knowledge and sharing of information, controlling such production by restricting the ux of discourses and practices, and by lobbying for the privatisation and patenting of intellectual property. The second movement, the one made by governments, is as invasive and brutal as the one made by corporations. Nonetheless, as governments hold the monopoly of law creation and legal violence, their movement to control the ux of information and surveillance data is much more complex and deceiving than those put in practice by companies, which, in most cases have to respect some limitations imposed by sovereign states. Moreover, government practices can always be legitimized by discourses of fear and security. So it goes without saying all the perils and constraints to freedom of speech and political action are imposed by surveillance programs (such as the one run by the NSA) or censorship of the internet (as occurs in countries like China and Iran). The contemporary paradox presented by digital media shows all the potentialities and fragilities that this medium offers directly or indirectly to anyone. It is not hard to notice an intensication of political struggles that render both online and ofine worlds one and the same battle eld. It is also noticeable the importance to engage in this struggle, both producing content and expressions, making theory our political practice, and our political practice, the theory that will guide us. * Lenin, Vladmir. Collected Works, available on Lenin Internet Archive. http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jul/15.htmOne of the many issues that arises in my mind when I think about theory and activism is, rst of all, regarding the old fashioned binary that divides both to extreme poles. In relation to this initial issue, I can only reason that both concepts can no longer be separated; they are two sides of the same existence, and are merged as expression and content of the same assemblage. Following this idea of non-separation of theory and practice another important issue arises, this time related to the materiality that surrounds us and mediates our exchange of information and communication, both in our daily lives and in political activities. Once we realise that theory and activism are part of the same social process, based on interaction and communication, then the importance of the medium where this process takes place also becomes clear. The importance of the material circumstances and platforms for discursive practices is not new in politics. In 1917, Lenin stated that the close relationship between material circumstances and the condition of possibility of a certain statement to take place, and the potentiality of a given statement to exert effect in the material assemblage. Nowadays, maybe more than ever before, the medium and materiality of communication, information exchange and power relations are again in the spotlight of political debate and activism. From the late 1940s, with the emergence of the rst digital and micro-electronics technologies, until the rst two decades of this century, we have seen an explosion and expansion of digital technologies for communication and information. Of course we have to contextualise this technological expansion and understand it within the very apogee of capitalism. The world has been through constant changes not only with regard to the technique itself, but also in its forms of production and reproduction of capital, in the management and development of knowledge and discourses of truth, in the forms of relationship and sociability, in the political struggles, and in policy making. ContentPower and Resistance: conference introduction ... 03Reflections on agony of power - Alen Toplisek ... 06Reflections on theory and practice - Sofa Gradin ... 07Reflections on technopolitics - Matheus Lock ... 08Agments from Disobedient theory and Interventions into normality - Kelvin Mason ... 10Organization for a free society (OFS): An introduction ... 14 A drawing from the field: anthropological reflections on violence and conflict in Syria - Mia Sung Kjaergaard ...24Challenges to political expression in a changing academic landscape:a personal view - Anna Alekseyeva, Elodie Negar Behzadi, Anna Davidson, Kelsi Nagy, Victoria Wyllie de Echeverria ...28Contemporary and nineteen sixties activism compared: the limits of protest - Mike ODonnell ... 36Warning! Your brain is being hacked - Mark R. Leiser ... 42 Another important transformation of our contemporary era is that immaterial capitalism and new digital technologies have become mutually interdependent. It means digital technology is not only a network structure that serves as a productive base to capitalism, but capitalists also invest in it with all their strength to extract as much value as possible. In this sense, there is a movement of expansion of digital technology propelled by capitalism in every area of society, which increases its reach. Such a materiality presents an ambiguous potentiality. On one hand, digital technology allows people to communicate, exchange information and knowledge, in order to create and share their own symbolic content, in a much faster, more accessible and dynamic way than previous communication technologies. This kind of technology enables people to engage in social interaction and in the production of their own opinions and narratives. In fact, digital technologies have been used not only as a platform for communication, entertainment or consumption, but also as a highly strategic tool for political struggles and the articulation and diffusion of alternative political opinions that are not necessarily presented in the traditional channels of political information. Good examples of such use can be seen in movements such as the Arab Spring, Occupy and Indignados (but we could also name many other initiatives like Wikileaks, Open Democracy etc.). With the expansion of digital technology, the sources of information and political narratives have increased, making political disputes more complex, implying changes of various orders, especially in the relationship between the political eld, the media sphere, the market in general, and civil society. This in turn introduces new processes, practices, forms of sociability, political actors, groups, etc. There is a pluralisation of voices, collective production and political action.On the other hand, there is a double movement made both by capitalism itself and by government towards complete control over digital technologies. It is well known that corporations such as Google and Amazon track peoples consumer behaviour online to extract prot from it. These companies identify social patterns, trends and forms of collective production and try to co-opt and capture them into capitalisms dynamic. They also try to limit collective creation of knowledge and sharing of information, controlling such production by restricting the ux of discourses and practices, and by lobbying for the privatisation and patenting of intellectual property. The second movement, the one made by governments, is as invasive and brutal as the one made by corporations. Nonetheless, as governments hold the monopoly of law creation and legal violence, their movement to control the ux of information and surveillance data is much more complex and deceiving than those put in practice by companies, which, in most cases have to respect some limitations imposed by sovereign states. Moreover, government practices can always be legitimized by discourses of fear and security. So it goes without saying all the perils and constraints to freedom of speech and political action are imposed by surveillance programs (such as the one run by the NSA) or censorship of the internet (as occurs in countries like China and Iran). The contemporary paradox presented by digital media shows all the potentialities and fragilities that this medium offers directly or indirectly to anyone. It is not hard to notice an intensication of political struggles that render both online and ofine worlds one and the same battle eld. It is also noticeable the importance to engage in this struggle, both producing content and expressions, making theory our political practice, and our political practice, the theory that will guide us. * Lenin, Vladmir. Collected Works, available on Lenin Internet Archive. http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jul/15.htmPOWER AND RESISTANCEConferenceIntroductionOne of the many issues that arises in my mind when I think about theory and activism is, rst of all, regarding the old fashioned binary that divides both to extreme poles. In relation to this initial issue, I can only reason that both concepts can no longer be separated; they are two sides of the same existence, and are merged as expression and content of the same assemblage. Following this idea of non-separation of theory and practice another important issue arises, this time related to the materiality that surrounds us and mediates our exchange of information and communication, both in our daily lives and in political activities. Once we realise that theory and activism are part of the same social process, based on interaction and communication, then the importance of the medium where this process takes place also becomes clear. The importance of the material circumstances and platforms for discursive practices is not new in politics. In 1917, Lenin stated that the close relationship between material circumstances and the condition of possibility of a certain statement to take place, and the potentiality of a given statement to exert effect in the material assemblage. Nowadays, maybe more than ever before, the medium and materiality of communication, information exchange and power relations are again in the spotlight of political debate and activism. From the late 1940s, with the emergence of the rst digital and micro-electronics technologies, until the rst two decades of this century, we have seen an explosion and expansion of digital technologies for communication and information. Of course we have to contextualise this technological expansion and understand it within the very apogee of capitalism. The world has been through constant changes not only with regard to the technique itself, but also in its forms of production and reproduction of capital, in the management and development of knowledge and discourses of truth, in the forms of relationship and sociability, in the political struggles, and in policy making. 03Another important transformation of our contemporary era is that immaterial capitalism and new digital technologies have become mutually interdependent. It means digital technology is not only a network structure that serves as a productive base to capitalism, but capitalists also invest in it with all their strength to extract as much value as possible. In this sense, there is a movement of expansion of digital technology propelled by capitalism in every area of society, which increases its reach. Such a materiality presents an ambiguous potentiality. On one hand, digital technology allows people to communicate, exchange information and knowledge, in order to create and share their own symbolic content, in a much faster, more accessible and dynamic way than previous communication technologies. This kind of technology enables people to engage in social interaction and in the production of their own opinions and narratives. In fact, digital technologies have been used not only as a platform for communication, entertainment or consumption, but also as a highly strategic tool for political struggles and the articulation and diffusion of alternative political opinions that are not necessarily presented in the traditional channels of political information. Good examples of such use can be seen in movements such as the Arab Spring, Occupy and Indignados (but we could also name many other initiatives like Wikileaks, Open Democracy etc.). With the expansion of digital technology, the sources of information and political narratives have increased, making political disputes more complex, implying changes of various orders, especially in the relationship between the political eld, the media sphere, the market in general, and civil society. This in turn introduces new processes, practices, forms of sociability, political actors, groups, etc. There is a pluralisation of voices, collective production and political action.On the other hand, there is a double movement made both by capitalism itself and by government towards complete control over digital technologies. It is well known that corporations such as Google and Amazon track peoples consumer behaviour online to extract prot from it. These companies identify social patterns, trends and forms of collective production and try to co-opt and capture them into capitalisms dynamic. They also try to limit collective creation of knowledge and sharing of information, controlling such production by restricting the ux of discourses and practices, and by lobbying for the privatisation and patenting of intellectual property. The second movement, the one made by governments, is as invasive and brutal as the one made by corporations. Nonetheless, as governments hold the monopoly of law creation and legal violence, their movement to control the ux of information and surveillance data is much more complex and deceiving than those put in practice by companies, which, in most cases have to respect some limitations imposed by sovereign states. Moreover, government practices can always be legitimized by discourses of fear and security. So it goes without saying all the perils and constraints to freedom of speech and political action are imposed by surveillance programs (such as the one run by the NSA) or censorship of the internet (as occurs in countries like China and Iran). The contemporary paradox presented by digital media shows all the potentialities and fragilities that this medium offers directly or indirectly to anyone. It is not hard to notice an intensication of political struggles that render both online and ofine worlds one and the same battle eld. It is also noticeable the importance to engage in this struggle, both producing content and expressions, making theory our political practice, and our political practice, the theory that will guide us. * Lenin, Vladmir. Collected Works, available on Lenin Internet Archive. http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jul/15.htmThis open source magazine is the result of many different thoughts and efforts on how to intervene creatively into our daily basis political reality and also on how to break down and surpass old dichotomies and binaries. All the papers published here were presented in the conference Power and resistance: theory and imaginative activism. This event was a two-day conference in May 2014 at Queen Mary, University of London. The idea for this conference came out of thinking about alleged divisions between political thought and action. If academics and students sit in ivory towers while activists are caught in strategic battles with the police and other enemies, how can political thought and action best learn from each other? Power & Resistance has a strong inter-disciplinary and open character, inviting thinking and acting minds from both the academic sphere and its surroundings. One of our main aims is to think about the oppositional binary that we usually put conceptually between theory and practice, and how theorising can aid us in understanding the changing world, consequently even affecting the way we normally conduct ourselves. We have invited theorists and activists to think about questions that arise when we want our research or activism to have an important/signicant social impact. The conference asks what (theoretical) interventions are effective in todays society, if any, and whether they can contribute to the changing of the landscape of the status quo. In this way, we wanted to encourage the participants to think about their own projects or research and how it is situated within the complex network of social and power relations. The conference tapped into both theoretical/methodological questions as well as more practical/experiential insights of engaging in society.Thinking for a while about all of these issues, we came up with some different clusters of questions which later turned into conference panel topics: The rst one relates to the nature of the power or hegemony we would seek to intervene into. Is hegemonic power all-consuming, rendering all attempts at intervening/disobeying/counter-conducting ultimately hopeless? How are then power and resistance related as actualities or potentialisations of the two concepts: is resistance merely one form in which power relations are reproduced? Or can we on the contrary interpret certain resistant practices as beyond the reach of (hegemonic) power? Can we evade the traps of hegemony and imaginatively practice activisms that genuinely resist hegemony/domination? And what does make good interventions/disobedience/activism? What kinds of practices are powerful and compelling interventions today in this regard? The second one relates to the boundaries of fruitful intervention. If the aim is to pursue some form of political change, at what point do interventions become powerful? Do theoretical interventions need to relate to lived experiences to be fruitful? If the self is inherently tied to the production of theory, is intervention something we can implement in seminar rooms and ofces, then leave on our desk as we switch off the lights and go home? The third one is perhaps more self-reexive for us as academics: how do radical academics ensure their work is politically worth while? Is academia really a safe and tucked away ivory tower? There are many debates in academia on the position of the researcher in their own research, the role they play and whether or not they should abide by the strict and (today increasingly contentious) rules of neutrality and objectivity. What are some obstacles researchers encounter and how do we see our own research with relation to our dissenting spirit? The fourth one is about the infrastructure in which political knowledge and communications takes place. How is the digitization trend affecting the way politics are being made and how can it be used in favour of resistance? How do we subvert digital materiality for more diversity, freedom and escape from the incessant informational control imposed by the governments and companies? How do we make the digital realm a common space, radically democratic and inclusive? How do we render this collective production a common good without it being co-opted by the hegemonic logic?One of the many issues that arises in my mind when I think about theory and activism is, rst of all, regarding the old fashioned binary that divides both to extreme poles. In relation to this initial issue, I can only reason that both concepts can no longer be separated; they are two sides of the same existence, and are merged as expression and content of the same assemblage. Following this idea of non-separation of theory and practice another important issue arises, this time related to the materiality that surrounds us and mediates our exchange of information and communication, both in our daily lives and in political activities. Once we realise that theory and activism are part of the same social process, based on interaction and communication, then the importance of the medium where this process takes place also becomes clear. The importance of the material circumstances and platforms for discursive practices is not new in politics. In 1917, Lenin stated that the close relationship between material circumstances and the condition of possibility of a certain statement to take place, and the potentiality of a given statement to exert effect in the material assemblage. Nowadays, maybe more than ever before, the medium and materiality of communication, information exchange and power relations are again in the spotlight of political debate and activism. From the late 1940s, with the emergence of the rst digital and micro-electronics technologies, until the rst two decades of this century, we have seen an explosion and expansion of digital technologies for communication and information. Of course we have to contextualise this technological expansion and understand it within the very apogee of capitalism. The world has been through constant changes not only with regard to the technique itself, but also in its forms of production and reproduction of capital, in the management and development of knowledge and discourses of truth, in the forms of relationship and sociability, in the political struggles, and in policy making. Another important transformation of our contemporary era is that immaterial capitalism and new digital technologies have become mutually interdependent. It means digital technology is not only a network structure that serves as a productive base to capitalism, but capitalists also invest in it with all their strength to extract as much value as possible. In this sense, there is a movement of expansion of digital technology propelled by capitalism in every area of society, which increases its reach. Such a materiality presents an ambiguous potentiality. On one hand, digital technology allows people to communicate, exchange information and knowledge, in order to create and share their own symbolic content, in a much faster, more accessible and dynamic way than previous communication technologies. This kind of technology enables people to engage in social interaction and in the production of their own opinions and narratives. In fact, digital technologies have been used not only as a platform for communication, entertainment or consumption, but also as a highly strategic tool for political struggles and the articulation and diffusion of alternative political opinions that are not necessarily presented in the traditional channels of political information. Good examples of such use can be seen in movements such as the Arab Spring, Occupy and Indignados (but we could also name many other initiatives like Wikileaks, Open Democracy etc.). With the expansion of digital technology, the sources of information and political narratives have increased, making political disputes more complex, implying changes of various orders, especially in the relationship between the political eld, the media sphere, the market in general, and civil society. This in turn introduces new processes, practices, forms of sociability, political actors, groups, etc. There is a pluralisation of voices, collective production and political action.On the other hand, there is a double movement made both by capitalism itself and by government towards complete control over digital technologies. It is well known that corporations such as Google and Amazon track peoples consumer behaviour online to extract prot from it. These companies identify social patterns, trends and forms of collective production and try to co-opt and capture them into capitalisms dynamic. They also try to limit collective creation of knowledge and sharing of information, controlling such production by restricting the ux of discourses and practices, and by lobbying for the privatisation and patenting of intellectual property. The second movement, the one made by governments, is as invasive and brutal as the one made by corporations. Nonetheless, as governments hold the monopoly of law creation and legal violence, their movement to control the ux of information and surveillance data is much more complex and deceiving than those put in practice by companies, which, in most cases have to respect some limitations imposed by sovereign states. Moreover, government practices can always be legitimized by discourses of fear and security. So it goes without saying all the perils and constraints to freedom of speech and political action are imposed by surveillance programs (such as the one run by the NSA) or censorship of the internet (as occurs in countries like China and Iran). The contemporary paradox presented by digital media shows all the potentialities and fragilities that this medium offers directly or indirectly to anyone. It is not hard to notice an intensication of political struggles that render both online and ofine worlds one and the same battle eld. It is also noticeable the importance to engage in this struggle, both producing content and expressions, making theory our political practice, and our political practice, the theory that will guide us. * Lenin, Vladmir. Collected Works, available on Lenin Internet Archive. http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jul/15.htmThese issues led us to create the conference and this resulting magazine of contributions. The sections of this magazine relate directly to the panels topics:Disobedient Theory: Interventions into Normality: This section invited participants to reect on the border-territories of activism and theory. Instead of attempting to come up with bland or overgeneralising rules of thumb, we focused on speaking through specic examples, movements and organisations, drawing out what they can tell us about such admittedly generalising questions. Kelvin Mason's contribution discusses 'academics' who use 'activist' strategies to place academic practices and resources outside of academia. (But as we have seen, there is little substance to these labels anymore.) The Organization for a Free Society discusses 'activists' who use and make 'theory' and who let the process of understanding how the world works be a central part of changing it for the better. Mia Sung Kjaergaard's contribution reects on the tensions that arise when one tries to make theory out of activism, especially when that activism surrounds sensitive personal and political catastrophes.Activism in Academia: this part the contributors debated about activism within academia. Michael ODonnell approaches the topic attempting to close the gap between what is necessary at the macro level. And what is possible in radical activism at the micro-level. He suggests that the creation of a link between both levels made by an academic activist group. Anna Alekseyeva, Elodie Negar Behzadi, Anna Davidson, Kelsi Negar, Victoria Wyllie de Echeverria went to a more empirical contribution. Departing from a feminist theoretical perspective, they interviewed academics and PhD students to understand how the academics experience has been changing with the growing of neo-liberalism within academic institutions, and also how theses academics experience activism in such environment. Technopolitics: Activism and Subversion in the Digital Age: this section sought to address the issues in the fourth series. Mark Leiser, in his paper Political Deception in the Online Environment, debates forms of on-line persuasion and how individuals use digital platforms to express and spread political ideologies.We hope that, with this magazine, we all can start to critically think on how to creatively intervene in our world to make it a better and fair place to all, overcoming obstacles, uniting forces and ghting together; because we all know and desire it: another world is possible.One of the many issues that arises in my mind when I think about theory and activism is, rst of all, regarding the old fashioned binary that divides both to extreme poles. In relation to this initial issue, I can only reason that both concepts can no longer be separated; they are two sides of the same existence, and are merged as expression and content of the same assemblage. Following this idea of non-separation of theory and practice another important issue arises, this time related to the materiality that surrounds us and mediates our exchange of information and communication, both in our daily lives and in political activities. Once we realise that theory and activism are part of the same social process, based on interaction and communication, then the importance of the medium where this process takes place also becomes clear. The importance of the material circumstances and platforms for discursive practices is not new in politics. In 1917, Lenin stated that the close relationship between material circumstances and the condition of possibility of a certain statement to take place, and the potentiality of a given statement to exert effect in the material assemblage. Nowadays, maybe more than ever before, the medium and materiality of communication, information exchange and power relations are again in the spotlight of political debate and activism. From the late 1940s, with the emergence of the rst digital and micro-electronics technologies, until the rst two decades of this century, we have seen an explosion and expansion of digital technologies for communication and information. Of course we have to contextualise this technological expansion and understand it within the very apogee of capitalism. The world has been through constant changes not only with regard to the technique itself, but also in its forms of production and reproduction of capital, in the management and development of knowledge and discourses of truth, in the forms of relationship and sociability, in the political struggles, and in policy making. Another important transformation of our contemporary era is that immaterial capitalism and new digital technologies have become mutually interdependent. It means digital technology is not only a network structure that serves as a productive base to capitalism, but capitalists also invest in it with all their strength to extract as much value as possible. In this sense, there is a movement of expansion of digital technology propelled by capitalism in every area of society, which increases its reach. Such a materiality presents an ambiguous potentiality. On one hand, digital technology allows people to communicate, exchange information and knowledge, in order to create and share their own symbolic content, in a much faster, more accessible and dynamic way than previous communication technologies. This kind of technology enables people to engage in social interaction and in the production of their own opinions and narratives. In fact, digital technologies have been used not only as a platform for communication, entertainment or consumption, but also as a highly strategic tool for political struggles and the articulation and diffusion of alternative political opinions that are not necessarily presented in the traditional channels of political information. Good examples of such use can be seen in movements such as the Arab Spring, Occupy and Indignados (but we could also name many other initiatives like Wikileaks, Open Democracy etc.). With the expansion of digital technology, the sources of information and political narratives have increased, making political disputes more complex, implying changes of various orders, especially in the relationship between the political eld, the media sphere, the market in general, and civil society. This in turn introduces new processes, practices, forms of sociability, political actors, groups, etc. There is a pluralisation of voices, collective production and political action.On the other hand, there is a double movement made both by capitalism itself and by government towards complete control over digital technologies. It is well known that corporations such as Google and Amazon track peoples consumer behaviour online to extract prot from it. These companies identify social patterns, trends and forms of collective production and try to co-opt and capture them into capitalisms dynamic. They also try to limit collective creation of knowledge and sharing of information, controlling such production by restricting the ux of discourses and practices, and by lobbying for the privatisation and patenting of intellectual property. The second movement, the one made by governments, is as invasive and brutal as the one made by corporations. Nonetheless, as governments hold the monopoly of law creation and legal violence, their movement to control the ux of information and surveillance data is much more complex and deceiving than those put in practice by companies, which, in most cases have to respect some limitations imposed by sovereign states. Moreover, government practices can always be legitimized by discourses of fear and security. So it goes without saying all the perils and constraints to freedom of speech and political action are imposed by surveillance programs (such as the one run by the NSA) or censorship of the internet (as occurs in countries like China and Iran). The contemporary paradox presented by digital media shows all the potentialities and fragilities that this medium offers directly or indirectly to anyone. It is not hard to notice an intensication of political struggles that render both online and ofine worlds one and the same battle eld. It is also noticeable the importance to engage in this struggle, both producing content and expressions, making theory our political practice, and our political practice, the theory that will guide us. * Lenin, Vladmir. Collected Works, available on Lenin Internet Archive. http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jul/15.htmREFLECTIONS ON AGONY OF POWERALEN TOPLISEKWhen we listen to radical political theorists, the word power resonates with negative percussions, most often summoning images of violence, force and compulsion. A similar view is given by Jean Baudrillard in his book The Agony of Power where power is seen as an all-dominating hegemonic force, the meaning of which is evidently pejorative. The pervasiveness of this attitude pushed the alternative conceptions of power to the margin or into inhibition until at least Hannah Arendt wrote the Human Condition and later Michel Foucault started uncovering the before-unwritten-about dimensions of the notion of power. Power shouldnt be a dirty word in the vocabulary of a theorist or an activist. Power also underlines key components of emancipation when it comes to individual or collective empowerment, or resistance. The paradox arises when we throw into discussion another troublesome word, that is, politics. As Max Weber already noted, notions, such as power and resistance, need to transition into routinization due to their ephemerality. Without going into that next step of institutionalization and formalization, movements and resistance groups are threatened by the inevitability of diminishing power and effectiveness. It was Foucault who noted that /p/olitics is nothing more and nothing less than that which is born with resistance to governmentality, the rst revolt, the rst confrontation*. Politics and resistance therefore are not worlds apart in the conceptual and ontological sense, as it might seem at a rst glance. This conceptual debate becomes even more difcult when it is situated within the context of todays post-austerity neoliberal governmentality. It has become increasingly clear in the Western capitalist societies that resistance to the prevailing governing order is (or so it seems, at least) futile. Anti-establishment protest movements are nding it hard to spread their message across the barricades of the periphery and the parties of the left (centre). The latter, even when they resist the pro-business or other antipopular policies, they quickly fall into the hegemonic lure of compromise and reappropriability. If the moment for a revolution still hasnt arrived and the gradualist approach to change hasnt done much to avert the expanding social inequalities, what then there is left to do?* Foucault, Michel. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collge De France, 197879. Ed. Michel Senellart. Trans. Graham Burchell. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan. Page 217.One of the many issues that arises in my mind when I think about theory and activism is, rst of all, regarding the old fashioned binary that divides both to extreme poles. In relation to this initial issue, I can only reason that both concepts can no longer be separated; they are two sides of the same existence, and are merged as expression and content of the same assemblage. Following this idea of non-separation of theory and practice another important issue arises, this time related to the materiality that surrounds us and mediates our exchange of information and communication, both in our daily lives and in political activities. Once we realise that theory and activism are part of the same social process, based on interaction and communication, then the importance of the medium where this process takes place also becomes clear. The importance of the material circumstances and platforms for discursive practices is not new in politics. In 1917, Lenin stated that the close relationship between material circumstances and the condition of possibility of a certain statement to take place, and the potentiality of a given statement to exert effect in the material assemblage. Nowadays, maybe more than ever before, the medium and materiality of communication, information exchange and power relations are again in the spotlight of political debate and activism. From the late 1940s, with the emergence of the rst digital and micro-electronics technologies, until the rst two decades of this century, we have seen an explosion and expansion of digital technologies for communication and information. Of course we have to contextualise this technological expansion and understand it within the very apogee of capitalism. The world has been through constant changes not only with regard to the technique itself, but also in its forms of production and reproduction of capital, in the management and development of knowledge and discourses of truth, in the forms of relationship and sociability, in the political struggles, and in policy making. 06Another important transformation of our contemporary era is that immaterial capitalism and new digital technologies have become mutually interdependent. It means digital technology is not only a network structure that serves as a productive base to capitalism, but capitalists also invest in it with all their strength to extract as much value as possible. In this sense, there is a movement of expansion of digital technology propelled by capitalism in every area of society, which increases its reach. Such a materiality presents an ambiguous potentiality. On one hand, digital technology allows people to communicate, exchange information and knowledge, in order to create and share their own symbolic content, in a much faster, more accessible and dynamic way than previous communication technologies. This kind of technology enables people to engage in social interaction and in the production of their own opinions and narratives. In fact, digital technologies have been used not only as a platform for communication, entertainment or consumption, but also as a highly strategic tool for political struggles and the articulation and diffusion of alternative political opinions that are not necessarily presented in the traditional channels of political information. Good examples of such use can be seen in movements such as the Arab Spring, Occupy and Indignados (but we could also name many other initiatives like Wikileaks, Open Democracy etc.). With the expansion of digital technology, the sources of information and political narratives have increased, making political disputes more complex, implying changes of various orders, especially in the relationship between the political eld, the media sphere, the market in general, and civil society. This in turn introduces new processes, practices, forms of sociability, political actors, groups, etc. There is a pluralisation of voices, collective production and political action.On the other hand, there is a double movement made both by capitalism itself and by government towards complete control over digital technologies. It is well known that corporations such as Google and Amazon track peoples consumer behaviour online to extract prot from it. These companies identify social patterns, trends and forms of collective production and try to co-opt and capture them into capitalisms dynamic. They also try to limit collective creation of knowledge and sharing of information, controlling such production by restricting the ux of discourses and practices, and by lobbying for the privatisation and patenting of intellectual property. The second movement, the one made by governments, is as invasive and brutal as the one made by corporations. Nonetheless, as governments hold the monopoly of law creation and legal violence, their movement to control the ux of information and surveillance data is much more complex and deceiving than those put in practice by companies, which, in most cases have to respect some limitations imposed by sovereign states. Moreover, government practices can always be legitimized by discourses of fear and security. So it goes without saying all the perils and constraints to freedom of speech and political action are imposed by surveillance programs (such as the one run by the NSA) or censorship of the internet (as occurs in countries like China and Iran). The contemporary paradox presented by digital media shows all the potentialities and fragilities that this medium offers directly or indirectly to anyone. It is not hard to notice an intensication of political struggles that render both online and ofine worlds one and the same battle eld. It is also noticeable the importance to engage in this struggle, both producing content and expressions, making theory our political practice, and our political practice, the theory that will guide us. * Lenin, Vladmir. Collected Works, available on Lenin Internet Archive. http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jul/15.htmOne of the many issues that arises in my mind when I think about theory and activism is, rst of all, regarding the old fashioned binary that divides both to extreme poles. In relation to this initial issue, I can only reason that both concepts can no longer be separated; they are two sides of the same existence, and are merged as expression and content of the same assemblage. Following this idea of non-separation of theory and practice another important issue arises, this time related to the materiality that surrounds us and mediates our exchange of information and communication, both in our daily lives and in political activities. Once we realise that theory and activism are part of the same social process, based on interaction and communication, then the importance of the medium where this process takes place also becomes clear. The importance of the material circumstances and platforms for discursive practices is not new in politics. In 1917, Lenin stated that the close relationship between material circumstances and the condition of possibility of a certain statement to take place, and the potentiality of a given statement to exert effect in the material assemblage. Nowadays, maybe more than ever before, the medium and materiality of communication, information exchange and power relations are again in the spotlight of political debate and activism. From the late 1940s, with the emergence of the rst digital and micro-electronics technologies, until the rst two decades of this century, we have seen an explosion and expansion of digital technologies for communication and information. Of course we have to contextualise this technological expansion and understand it within the very apogee of capitalism. The world has been through constant changes not only with regard to the technique itself, but also in its forms of production and reproduction of capital, in the management and development of knowledge and discourses of truth, in the forms of relationship and sociability, in the political struggles, and in policy making. Whenever we take action to improve the world, we are already drawing on our knowledge of what the world is like. The protester on the street waving a banner telling the government to change a law has already made an analysis of the political situation, of whom to direct the message towards and why. The pregurativist stirring a pot of vegan stew in a social centre, creating an alternative space where activists can think and interact beyond capitalism, is already drawing on theory and ideas of how and why this can be done. We are all using political theory and ideas all the time sometimes we know and say so explicitly, and sometimes we don't.Similarly, to think, speak and discuss is already to do. Theory, analysis and ideology are so central to our existence in the world that rethinking cannot be separated from redoing. As J.K. Gibson-Graham put it, 'Successful theory "performs" a world; categories, concepts, theorems, and other technologies of theory are inscribed in worlds they presuppose and help to bring into being'*.It is curious, then, that political theory and activism have come to be seen by many as somehow separate from each other. The stereotype of theorists is that they lock themselves into exclusive ivory towers, rubbing tweed-patched elbows with other nerds and writing obscure books that bear no relation to the real world outside. When I run a skillshare or give a talk about political theory in activist groups I'm involved in, I sometimes get told that academia has nothing to offer activists, that political theory is middle class wankery, that academics are dinosaurs. With horror I remember a documentary I watched a few years ago about a nun in one of Sweden's few remainingfully functioning convents. This deeply devout young woman spoke of her passionate feelings about global poverty. She learned of the famine and poverty that so many experience, she had learned the atrocious statistics of global inequality; and decided to devote her life to eradicating them. Her course of action: to go into the convent for the rest of her life, spending her days inside the walls of this small building in rural Sweden, praying about it. As a PhD student, I fear I may end up in some respects like her, sitting in a room somewhere trying to think away the world's problems. I'm sure the neoliberals and neoconservatives would love it if all the lefties did that.On the other hand, the respective stereotype about activists is that they are running round on the streets caught up in petty quarrels with the police or government ofcials, without a comprehensive or critical understanding of what they are doing. How can you seriously attempt to change the world if you do not understand the intricacies of power?There is certainly a grain of truth at either extreme of the theorist/activist binary but the problem does not arise from any inherent separation between thinking and acting. The problem with the nerdy scholar whose writing never sees the sun rise outside the university library basement, is not the nerdiness, but the failure to reach beyond a small academic bubble. What makes theory potentially irrelevant for activists is not its focus on political thought or its pausing to follow through and critically analyse ideas rather, it is the limited access that is problematic. That academic education costs money. That literature is copyrighted and commodied. That all schools are not equally resourced and able to give students good foundations for further critical study. That university is something you are either fully in (as a fee-paying registered student) or outside of (as a member of public barred from campus buildings and academic libraries). As for activists who get caught in strategic battles with the police or politicians, perhaps we would be even more successful if we saw thinking and critical analysis as something integral to what we do.Thankfully, the extreme stereotypes of the theorist/activist binary do not bear much relation to real life. As we have seen, activists are already theorising, and theorists are already being active. The contributions in this magazine are only some empirical examples of that.* Gibson-Graham, J. K. (2006) The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It), New Edition Ten Years On. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Pages xx-xix.Reflections on theory and practiceSofa GRADIN07Another important transformation of our contemporary era is that immaterial capitalism and new digital technologies have become mutually interdependent. It means digital technology is not only a network structure that serves as a productive base to capitalism, but capitalists also invest in it with all their strength to extract as much value as possible. In this sense, there is a movement of expansion of digital technology propelled by capitalism in every area of society, which increases its reach. Such a materiality presents an ambiguous potentiality. On one hand, digital technology allows people to communicate, exchange information and knowledge, in order to create and share their own symbolic content, in a much faster, more accessible and dynamic way than previous communication technologies. This kind of technology enables people to engage in social interaction and in the production of their own opinions and narratives. In fact, digital technologies have been used not only as a platform for communication, entertainment or consumption, but also as a highly strategic tool for political struggles and the articulation and diffusion of alternative political opinions that are not necessarily presented in the traditional channels of political information. Good examples of such use can be seen in movements such as the Arab Spring, Occupy and Indignados (but we could also name many other initiatives like Wikileaks, Open Democracy etc.). With the expansion of digital technology, the sources of information and political narratives have increased, making political disputes more complex, implying changes of various orders, especially in the relationship between the political eld, the media sphere, the market in general, and civil society. This in turn introduces new processes, practices, forms of sociability, political actors, groups, etc. There is a pluralisation of voices, collective production and political action.On the other hand, there is a double movement made both by capitalism itself and by government towards complete control over digital technologies. It is well known that corporations such as Google and Amazon track peoples consumer behaviour online to extract prot from it. These companies identify social patterns, trends and forms of collective production and try to co-opt and capture them into capitalisms dynamic. They also try to limit collective creation of knowledge and sharing of information, controlling such production by restricting the ux of discourses and practices, and by lobbying for the privatisation and patenting of intellectual property. The second movement, the one made by governments, is as invasive and brutal as the one made by corporations. Nonetheless, as governments hold the monopoly of law creation and legal violence, their movement to control the ux of information and surveillance data is much more complex and deceiving than those put in practice by companies, which, in most cases have to respect some limitations imposed by sovereign states. Moreover, government practices can always be legitimized by discourses of fear and security. So it goes without saying all the perils and constraints to freedom of speech and political action are imposed by surveillance programs (such as the one run by the NSA) or censorship of the internet (as occurs in countries like China and Iran). The contemporary paradox presented by digital media shows all the potentialities and fragilities that this medium offers directly or indirectly to anyone. It is not hard to notice an intensication of political struggles that render both online and ofine worlds one and the same battle eld. It is also noticeable the importance to engage in this struggle, both producing content and expressions, making theory our political practice, and our political practice, the theory that will guide us. * Lenin, Vladmir. Collected Works, available on Lenin Internet Archive. http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jul/15.htmReflections on technopoliticsMatheus Lock*One of the many issues that arises in my mind when I think about theory and activism is, rst of all, regarding the old fashioned binary that divides both to extreme poles. In relation to this initial issue, I can only reason that both concepts can no longer be separated; they are two sides of the same existence, and are merged as expression and content of the same assemblage. Following this idea of non-separation of theory and practice another important issue arises, this time related to the materiality that surrounds us and mediates our exchange of information and communication, both in our daily lives and in political activities. Once we realise that theory and activism are part of the same social process, based on interaction and communication, then the importance of the medium where this process takes place also becomes clear. The importance of the material circumstances and platforms for discursive practices is not new in politics. In 1917, Lenin stated that the close relationship between material circumstances and the condition of possibility of a certain statement to take place, and the potentiality of a given statement to exert effect in the material assemblage. Nowadays, maybe more than ever before, the medium and materiality of communication, information exchange and power relations are again in the spotlight of political debate and activism. From the late 1940s, with the emergence of the rst digital and micro-electronics technologies, until the rst two decades of this century, we have seen an explosion and expansion of digital technologies for communication and information. Of course we have to contextualise this technological expansion and understand it within the very apogee of capitalism. The world has been through constant changes not only with regard to the technique itself, but also in its forms of production and reproduction of capital, in the management and development of knowledge and discourses of truth, in the forms of relationship and sociability, in the political struggles, and in policy making. 08*Scholarship from CAPES Foundation, Ministry of Education of Brazil, Braslia - DF 70040-020, BrazilAnother important transformation of our contemporary era is that immaterial capitalism and new digital technologies have become mutually interdependent. It means digital technology is not only a network structure that serves as a productive base to capitalism, but capitalists also invest in it with all their strength to extract as much value as possible. In this sense, there is a movement of expansion of digital technology propelled by capitalism in every area of society, which increases its reach. Such a materiality presents an ambiguous potentiality. On one hand, digital technology allows people to communicate, exchange information and knowledge, in order to create and share their own symbolic content, in a much faster, more accessible and dynamic way than previous communication technologies. This kind of technology enables people to engage in social interaction and in the production of their own opinions and narratives. In fact, digital technologies have been used not only as a platform for communication, entertainment or consumption, but also as a highly strategic tool for political struggles and the articulation and diffusion of alternative political opinions that are not necessarily presented in the traditional channels of political information. Good examples of such use can be seen in movements such as the Arab Spring, Occupy and Indignados (but we could also name many other initiatives like Wikileaks, Open Democracy etc.). With the expansion of digital technology, the sources of information and political narratives have increased, making political disputes more complex, implying changes of various orders, especially in the relationship between the political eld, the media sphere, the market in general, and civil society. This in turn introduces new processes, practices, forms of sociability, political actors, groups, etc. There is a pluralisation of voices, collective production and political action.On the other hand, there is a double movement made both by capitalism itself and by government towards complete control over digital technologies. It is well known that corporations such as Google and Amazon track peoples consumer behaviour online to extract prot from it. These companies identify social patterns, trends and forms of collective production and try to co-opt and capture them into capitalisms dynamic. They also try to limit collective creation of knowledge and sharing of information, controlling such production by restricting the ux of discourses and practices, and by lobbying for the privatisation and patenting of intellectual property. The second movement, the one made by governments, is as invasive and brutal as the one made by corporations. Nonetheless, as governments hold the monopoly of law creation and legal violence, their movement to control the ux of information and surveillance data is much more complex and deceiving than those put in practice by companies, which, in most cases have to respect some limitations imposed by sovereign states. Moreover, government practices can always be legitimized by discourses of fear and security. So it goes without saying all the perils and constraints to freedom of speech and political action are imposed by surveillance programs (such as the one run by the NSA) or censorship of the internet (as occurs in countries like China and Iran). The contemporary paradox presented by digital media shows all the potentialities and fragilities that this medium offers directly or indirectly to anyone. It is not hard to notice an intensication of political struggles that render both online and ofine worlds one and the same battle eld. It is also noticeable the importance to engage in this struggle, both producing content and expressions, making theory our political practice, and our political practice, the theory that will guide us. * Lenin, Vladmir. Collected Works, available on Lenin Internet Archive. http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jul/15.htmOne of the many issues that arises in my mind when I think about theory and activism is, rst of all, regarding the old fashioned binary that divides both to extreme poles. In relation to this initial issue, I can only reason that both concepts can no longer be separated; they are two sides of the same existence, and are merged as expression and content of the same assemblage. Following this idea of non-separation of theory and practice another important issue arises, this time related to the materiality that surrounds us and mediates our exchange of information and communication, both in our daily lives and in political activities. Once we realise that theory and activism are part of the same social process, based on interaction and communication, then the importance of the medium where this process takes place also becomes clear. The importance of the material circumstances and platforms for discursive practices is not new in politics. In 1917, Lenin stated that the close relationship between material circumstances and the condition of possibility of a certain statement to take place, and the potentiality of a given statement to exert effect in the material assemblage. Nowadays, maybe more than ever before, the medium and materiality of communication, information exchange and power relations are again in the spotlight of political debate and activism. From the late 1940s, with the emergence of the rst digital and micro-electronics technologies, until the rst two decades of this century, we have seen an explosion and expansion of digital technologies for communication and information. Of course we have to contextualise this technological expansion and understand it within the very apogee of capitalism. The world has been through constant changes not only with regard to the technique itself, but also in its forms of production and reproduction of capital, in the management and development of knowledge and discourses of truth, in the forms of relationship and sociability, in the political struggles, and in policy making. I. The BasicsOrganizing for a Free Society Our WorkII. Our PoliticsMethods for Understanding the World Around Us Totality of OppressionsThe Story We Are ToldVisions of the World We WantA Strategy From Here to ThereIII. Here and NowThe Political MomentToday and Tomorrow Moving Forward with OFSThis Introduction to Organization for a Free Society was collectively written by our members. Its purpose is to give a broad overview of what we stand for and how we carry that out.I. The BasicsOrganizing for a Free SocietyOrganization for a Free Society (OFS) is a participatory socialist organization(i) made up of activists and organizers immersed in different grassroots movements, struggling collectively toward a free society.OFS is a home for revolutionaries working both to develop holistic politics, vision, and strategy and to strengthen the broader movement.(ii) We study together to deepen our politics, but OFS is not a study group. We hit the streets and organize together, but OFS is not a direct action afnity group, either. We are a united group of committed revolutionaries growing and struggling together, connecting theory and practice, and attempting to embody the seeds of the future in the present. We have political connections to movements in different parts of the world, but our organization is primarily based in the United States, and our analysis and strategy reect our country and its role in the world.OFS is committed to a fundamental transformation of the social, political, economic, and environmental values and institutions of society and we draw from a rich history of social movements that came before us.II. Our PoliticsMethods for Understanding the World Around UsAs people we are shaped and limited by the institutions around us, and at the same time we are the ones who create and perpetuate these institutions. In order to create a free society, we must use theory to help us overcome both systemic oppression and our own internalized oppression.First, we must understand the various faces of the system that oppress us in different areas of our lives. In understanding capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy(iv), environmental destruction, and the violent state that enforces them, we see that each system has distinct characteristics but that they all share a common factor hierarchy and domination are the values at the root of each of these systems. Second, we see that those systems of oppression are interwoven, and are able to recreate, reinforce and defend one another.We have all arrived at this holistic analysis by growing and developing in different tendencies, like feminism, anarchism, national liberation, and Marxism, and we bring these paths with us into our work. We can focus on confronting one form of domination or exploitation in a particular moment for example, we focus on institutional racism when we take the streets to protest the NYPDs murder of yet another young Black man. Likewise, there can be broad political moments in which one form of oppression takes precedence and must be confronted rst, but we always remember that other forms of oppression are present as well.We do not subscribe to a perspective that holds one system as the root of all others. Though we can identify particular aspects of oppression in different areas of social life (our workplaces, relationships, etc.), we see one totality of oppressions. We call this method of analysis complementary holism.It is not enough to understand that one system of oppression is not historically more important than others. We must take all systems of oppression into account in our analysis of society, understanding that different types of oppression can accommodate, dene and reproduce one another. If we were to say that we use concepts of feminism to analyze patriarchy, anarchism to analyze state power, Marxism to analyze economics, and so on, we would still only get a two-dimensional picture of each of these systems. We cannot abstract the economy from the rest of the social fabric, analyze it in a vacuum and think that we can arrive at a sufcient strategy to dismantle capitalism. Ultimately, we must confront the totality of oppressions if we are to build a free society.This system is based on the premise of perpetual material growth, which is depleting the natural wealth of our Mother Earth, making her less and less inhabitable for people and for many other animals and plants. We are living in a time of unprecedented loss of species and habitat diversity, as well as deterioration of vital resources such as clean air, clean water, and healthy soil. As we experience these crises of environment and climate, the wisdom of indigenous peoples that helped to sustain humanity for so long continues to be silenced through the marginalization and destruction of indigenous communities and lands.Through the instruments of patriarchy, we are bound to a rigid gender, sex, and sexual binary(vi). Historically, patriarchy has centered around the policing and control of wombs and reproduction, which has resulted in the policing and controlling of femininity on all bodies, but its effects are felt everywhere. Cisgender(vii) masculinity is afrmed and privileged, while women, queer people, transgender people, and gender non-conforming people are punished by the threat of rape, violence, shame, and social and economic subordination.The state broadly understood as the institutions of organized coercive power of ruling social groups enforces authoritarianism in many aspects of our lives, from the family and the school to the government and the courts. Power is concentrated in the hands of a small group of elites (mostly rich, white, straight, Christian men), and most people have little say in the institutions that govern our lives.We experience these systems as part of a whole, a totality of oppressions, woven together both through societys institutions and in personal interactions. These systems divide us from each other by giving some relative privileges over others, buying us off in order to obscure the systemic implications of the totality of oppressions.The Story We Are ToldIn understanding the U.S. experience today, it is important to study the story we are taught about our society. We are socialized not to name oppression as systemic or interconnected. In what boils down to a gendered and racialized class caste system, we are taught in school that we live in a merit-based society. This means that punishment and rewards are presented as direct results of individuals behavior. In this framework, oppressed people are blamed for their oppression. We are told that labels like lazy, stupid, dangerous and crazy are inherent in certain groups of people and are the cause of their poverty, rape, incarceration, pillaging or marginalization. A persons position in a system of oppression and privilege is erased behind the faade of a meritocracy, in which anyone can achieve anything if they only try hard enough. We are shown individual examples to prove that oppressions are a thing of the past. While President Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey are examples of Black individuals who have power and wealth, their existence is used to demonstrate that racism is over.Likewise, liberation movements do not go unrecognized by the system. Rather, the system co- opts the language and symbols of revolutionaries and incorporates them. This phenomenon colonizes dissent, maintaining that the system is working amenable to change but never to revolution.We learn these stories to justify the oppressive treatment that we experience and witness. These stories are delivered to us daily through sitcoms on television, popular songs on the radio, the nightly news, our churches and schools, our parents and friends.Using our analysis, we deconstruct aspects of our system to understand its parts, but these parts all comprise one coherent system of oppression. Race is one of the ways in which class is expressed in the U.S., and the state not only enforces patriarchy but is shaped by it. Ultimately, we wont win freedom unless we take on the whole system, with all of its manifestations, and the story that protects it. To that end, we need our own vision, our own story, and a strategy for winning.Today and TomorrowWe must confront the acute crises before us and build a movement united in a common analysis, vision and strategy one that can overcome these crises and push forward, through the deepest layers of oppression in our society and ourselves, for a free society. Our task is to help build this movement. We must popularize the story of people struggling throughout history and the stories of the people struggling today. We must educate ourselves and those around us, deepen our politics and sharpen our skills. We must engage in collective action so that we can grow from it in order to win tangible, signicant gains today. We must build institutions that belong to us, enable us to struggle over the long term, and embody the world we are ghting for.Moving Forward with OFSMembers of OFS are required to participate in the life and direction of the organization, be involved in grassroots work, attend meetings, and pay monthly dues on a sliding scale.Our organization values the needs of the movement over growing our own numbers, and we do not recruit paper members. We are in touch with prospective members through our work alongside others in the movement and in shared discussion spaces. Because we expect a high degree of unity around values, vision and strategy, and commitment to the organization, when we recruit we ask people to ll out an interest form so that we can know them better, work with them, and make collective decisions about bringing them on. Organizers we bring on are then invited to a three-month trial membership, during which they have a chance to ask questions about our politics and participate in and explore the organization from the inside. This period also gives the rest of the organization time to get to know trial members as we work and learn together. We bring people in as part of a group, or class, which offers trial members a support system inside the organization, allows us to balance the class and prioritize oppressed peoples in our internal makeup, and helps us carry out orientation and internal education for new members in a collective process.We want to continue building branches and forming partnerships with other revolutionaries around the country and the world, and we are committed to building sustainably. We are committed to building an organization that reects the realities of the society around us and which is led by oppressed groups, so we actively prioritize people of color, women, queer people, and working-class people in our recruitment. We think it is important to grow, so that more and more of us have this type of framework to build movements, organizations, and political unity.We want to work with you, whether you are someone new to the struggle and looking for guidance, an experienced organizer looking for partners to work with, a revolutionary looking for an organization to join, another organization seeking to collaborate, or a movement veteran with wisdom to share. Footnotesi We use the term participatory socialism to describe our political orientation. We do not mean it economistically, but as a way to describe liberation in all areas of social life. The concept is discussed further in Section II.ii When we use the term the movement, we mean the collection of movements of the oppressed (workers, women, people of color, LGBTQ people, disabled people, etc.), pregurative institutions (cooperatives, communes, schools, etc.), third-party electoral campaigns and progressive institutions, and organizations of revolutionaries, all pushing together towards a free society. We could also call this a movement of movements.iii We use the term grassroots struggle to refer to bottom-up struggles that impact oppressed groups and include the participation and leadership of oppressed people.iv While racism is the oppressive concept that one racial or ethnic group is superior (or inferior) to others, white supremacy is the type of racism that, due to Western European colonialism, is most prominent in the world. White supremacy is also the dominant form of community oppression in the U.S., from where we are writing.v By coordinator class, we mean an economic class a group of people with a dened collective relationship to the means of production whose responsibility it is to manage and coordinate work on behalf of the capitalist class and at the expense of the working class. The coordinator class is made up of professionals who play key decision-making roles in the economy, prot materially, manage themselves and large sectors of the working class, and engage in empowering work. Understanding the role of the coordinator class is essential to our analysis of capitalism, our rejection of central planning as a desirable alternative, and our vision for a participatory socialist economy.vi The gender/sex/sexual binary is an institutionalized ideology that creates a strict binary of woman/man, female/male, gay/straight, and which is enforced through common-sense assumptions about nature and biology. This system treats gender and sexuality as xed and inicts shame and violence onto those whose bodies and gender performance escape this binary. It restricts their access to resources as well as social recognition and afrmation. In turn, it upholds heterosexual, cisgender, monogamous identities and relationships as natural, legitimate, and the only viable option. We consider this binary to be one of the fundamental building blocks of patriarchy.vii The term cisgender refers to someone whose gender identity corresponds to the gender they were assigned at birth, someone who isnt transgender.viii We use the term intercommunalism to describe our vision for relations within and across communities, nations, and cultural/religious groups. Intercommunalism pushes past multiculturalism or separatism toward a vision of society in which people have the right to communal self-determination and autonomy (as well as the institutional foundations necessary to carry out those various identities and cultures), but in solidarity with one another as part of a whole based on shared principles such as equity, freedom of movement, diversity, and active consent.ix The term counterpower can be used to describe both a vehicle of popular power a new power emerging to embody an alternative and threaten the institutions of the status quo as well as a situation in which a counterpower confronts the status quo. The term is often used interchangeably with the term dual power. As revolutionaries, we seek to transform grassroots organizations and institutions into a network of counterpowers to undermine the hegemony of the oppressors system, and to topple the institutional power of the old order on the path to revolution and social transformation.Our WorkInternally, we practice an intentional and exible form of participatory democracy with structures for active decision making and shared leadership. Our organization strives to provide space for the individual growth of our members and for collective action.In our grassroots work(iii) we have fought budget cuts and tuition hikes at universities, mobilized against war, organized in restaurants, fought right to work legislation in the Midwest, fought against the mass incarceration of people of color, and worked with youth from the South Bronx to Palestine to Tibet. We have been active against the foreclosure crisis in New York City as well as the climate crisis in efforts across New York State; we have stood up for reproductive justice and done work to heal the impacts of sexual violence in our own communities.Our members have helped to found political organizations, educational collectives, training institutions and communal living spaces. In addition to our grassroots organizing, we try to popularize our politics and our work through the media to which we have access. We write articles and pamphlets, produce lms and radio shows, perform music and spoken word poetry, and create visual art.Following the lead of oppressed communities and drawing on the experience of movement elders, our goal is to work with others to grow and deepen the movement and to develop a revolutionary, participatory socialist tendency within it. In the service of these goals, we carry out internal study and public education to deepen our theory and analysis and we strategize to use our collective energy to support movements and hone our ability to rally in moments of crisis. Working together, we have played an important role in the Occupy movement and served vital relief, recovery and rebuilding functions in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.We are proud of our work on the ground and we understand that we are one small part of building a movement that is capable of transforming our world into something just, beautiful and sustainable.Totality of OppressionsThe system in which we live is comprised of interwoven methods of oppression that function differently, but work together to maintain what we experience as the status quo.White supremacy in the U.S. exists in many complicated forms, beginning with the arrival of Europeans to this continent, the genocide of and theft of land from Native Americans, and African slave labor. Today, Black and Latino men are under- and unemployed, policed, incarcerated, and murdered, a phenomenon that devastates whole communities. Many communities of color suffer from displacement through gentrication, policing on the basis of immigration status, lack of health insurance and denial of care, and chronically low wages. Entire groups of people are invisibilized and exploited based on immigration status and are constantly harassed and threatened with incarceration and deportation. All of this exists in a framework that gives better treatment to people with light skin, who comprise a ctional white race, created in comparison to other ctional races. The logic of white supremacy bends and twists to accommodate any situation, always with the goal of maintaining a power structure. Within and across communities of color there also exists discrimination on the basis of skin color, from shadeism to outright exclusion of one group by another group, due to notions of superiority among people of different nationalities, regions within countries, and so on. The experience of white communities in rural Appalachia sheds light on the fact that capitalism always requires an oppressed class and remains loyal to no one. In multiracial regions, whiteness is used as a tool of oppression, but in places that are predominantly white, poor white people become the underclass.Capitalism is a prot-driven, market-based economic system premised on a division of society into hostile classes, based on the private ownership of the means of production. In order to maximize prot, the capitalist class must maintain a large, exploitable pool of laborers the working class who are relegated to conditions of physical and psychological subjugation in order to keep them dependent on their jobs. As modern capitalism evolved and as a result of the rapid technological developments and increased division of labor, the economy developed a professional-managerial sector, out of which arose a coordinator class(v), which has class antagonisms to both capitalists and workers.Today, this system is exported and enforced through neocolonial international relations and global power structures inherited from imperialism. Former colonial countries are able to exploit the labor and resources of former colonies via capital, international banking systems, and threat of force. Further enriching themselves, wealthier nations can pacify larger portions of their citizenry with materialism and notions of cultural supremacy, and they can use the unrest in the Global South that this system produces to justify further intervention.Visions of the World We WantVision directs our work and guides what we build; it inspires us to continue working together against all odds. In the words of the Mexican revolutionary Ricardo Flores Magon, If the revolutionary lacks the guiding idea of their action, they will not be anything other than a ship without a compass.Vision is essential and it is something that all participants and organizations in a revolutionary movement should evaluate for themselves and continually revise. A vision is not a blueprint, but rather a thoughtfully articulated aspiration that is based consciously on a set of values.When we imagine a free society, we think of values such as equity, solidarity, and self- management. Based on these values and our vision, we work to build institutions to pregure that society to the greatest extent possible workplace and neighborhood councils, community boards, participatory socialist planning, democratic decision-making structures, and more. We build these institutions because they can make peoples lives materially better and in order to help us learn how to be productive members of a free society. In addition to the immediate benets, the goal of pregurative institutions is to build power towards destroying and replacing the oppressive institutions that prevent us from actualizing our vision.We envision a political system in which people have institutions (e.g. assemblies) that allow them to participate in decision making to the extent that they are affected by the outcomes. We envision a classless and participatory economy where workers and consumers use councils to plan the economy democratically and to meet basic needs collectively. In this economy, workers are compensated for effort, sacrice, and need. Jobs are balanced so that empowering and undesirable types of work are distributed fairly.We envision a liberated and egalitarian kinship in which women and transgender people have control over their own bodies, youth have institutions that allow them to practice self- management, and all people have the freedom to dene their genders, sexualities, and family relations in ways that are liberating, consensual and healthy. We envision an intercommunalist(viii) framework in which historically oppressed peoples have the space and resources to achieve self-determination and cultural autonomy.We envision a dynamic in which human civilization and its structures synchronize with natures diversity, fertility, and creativity. We believe that humans are entirely capable of utilizing the wealth of the earth in a way that leaves intact more than what is needed for the generations to come. With all this in mind, we envision a society that draws on the wisdom and sensible practices of our ancestors who were the original organic farmers, who invented sustainable shing, and who used creativity to maximize natural resources. At the same time, we understand that it is crucial to continually integrate useful technology that improves quality of life and reduces undesirable work for all people. We envision sustainably run metropolises that rely on smart design: public transportation, green infrastructure, subsistence gardening, and urban-rural partnership.The vision we put forward is based on our view of history and the needs and potential of human beings. We are committed to an open, participatory, and continual process of discovery and deliberation on the essence of the free society we are struggling to create. Our vision is not dogmatic. We do not know the future and our vision will transform itself through struggle and experimentation.A Strategy from Here to ThereRevolution is not a singular event, but a process made up of overlapping stages: movement building, counterpower(ix), confrontation, and transformation.In the movement building stage, the task of revolutionaries is to raise consciousness among large groups of people, challenge the dominant narrative, create channels through which people can join the movement and develop as revolutionaries, and lay the groundwork for collective long-term struggle. To build a movement, we encourage people to grow and transform from allies and supporters to movement leaders and revolutionaries, both through collective action and through participatory educational processes. We ght for concrete victories that meet peoples needs and change the narrative about what is possible, and for long-term victories that demonstrate the power of collective action and put us in the position to achieve even more.We work to build a movement that can eventually become a counterpower. A counterpower is a united bloc of institutions that are popularly regarded as viable, functional and legitimate alternatives to the institutions of the status quo, and which actively ght to replace them. Its not en