Alliance for Freedom and Direct Democracy

Manifesto

In our lifetimes we have witnessed a world suffering at the hands of two major global powers. Both the Eastern Communist Bloc and the Western Capitalist Empire have perpetuated war, colonized nations, suppressed freedoms, despoiled the natural world and imposed brutal regimes on the impoverished many in order to further enrich a wealthy and powerful few. Since the fall of the Communist Bloc, a neoliberal elite has proclaimed the "end of history": a dystopic vision of a global capitalist consensus with no possible alternative. Yet as long as domination and exploitation exist, there is still history to be made. Oppression continues to rampage the entire globe through an interlocking system of hierarchies that awaits transcendence. At the center of this system are global finance institutions, wealthy western governments, the military forces they wield, and the corporate constituents they represent. The proponents of global capitalism claim that this system is a beacon of hope to the world— hope for prosperity, democracy, and freedom.

Yet, where is the prosperity for the billions of working people locked into meaningless jobs with meager wages, high rents, and poor public services? Where is the democracy when a tiny elite of corporate selected politicians and business people decide the fates of our communities behind closed doors? Where is the freedom in a society that allows indigenous cultures to be annihilated, women to be treated as sex objects and second-class citizens, people of color to suffer police brutality, mass imprisonment and deportation, and queers to be criminalized and attacked for daring to live and love outside of society's strict gender roles and sexual restrictions?

Global capitalism is the newest phase of the age-old system of colonialism – a system founded on the slaughter of indigenous nations, on the economic bounty produced by slavery; on the relentless toil of immigrants, women, and industrial workers, and on the exploitation of new lands and peoples. Underlying and justifying this brutality are the ideologies of capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and imperialism, as well as that of a centralized state to enforce and maintain them all.

Freedom and Non-Hierarchy

What basic principle holds all of these ideologies together? We contend that this principle is hierarchy: the concept of top-down control, whereby one group of people dominates and exploits another. Hierarchies stifle self-determination and democratic control by usurping power from the many and placing it in the hands of the few. They encourage a culture of obedience, apathy, and ignorance, while suppressing our development as creative agents of our own destinies. Hierarchies are reproduced and enforced by the powerful through the control of political, social and economic institutions, through the manipulation of culture and ideology and, ultimately, through the application of force.

Because we seek the realization of full and substantive freedoms for everyone in our society, we emphasize the need to struggle for both negative and positive freedom. This means freedom from material want, oppression and exploitation, as well as freedom to define our own identities and to collectively determine the destiny of our communities. Only when we are both liberated from the grasp of tyranny and empowered by egalitarian relationships and institutions, may we fulfill our full potential as free participants in a creative and dynamic society.

The new world we envision and struggle towards will be directly democratic, anarchist in its commitment to individual and social freedom, communal in the ethic by which it produces and distributes goods, ecological in its relation to the rest of the natural world, and utopian in its commitment to the permanent process of creating a better world for all.

In addition to non-hierarchy and freedom, we strive to embody the following principles in our confederation and to cultivate them in the greater society.

Confederalism and Direct Democracy

A state is a professional, bureaucratic apparatus for social control. States exist not to protect citizens from one another, but rather to protect the powerful from the aspirations of the powerless. They seek not to administer society for the general good, but for the good of ruling elites. States maintain monopolies of force internally by means of the police, and externally by the use of military power, often abusing the language of "peacekeeping" and "humanitarianism" to disguise militaristic intentions. Militarism is a political, economic and cultural instrument that serves to concentrate state power and support neoliberal expansion, while elevating the most aggressive and antisocial tendencies in society.

While many states are structured as representative democracies, participation is generally limited to election time, and frequently offers only the choice between like-minded parties and corporate-sponsored politicians. Political life in the US is so degraded that less than 50% of citizens even participate in presidential elections. At the global decision-making level, there isn't even the pretense of representative democracy. Institutions like the World Trade Organization and International Monetary Fund make decisions of global consequence behind closed doors.

With this in mind, we support the creation of liberatory institutions that decentralize and equalize decision-making power. Direct democracy is a form of organization in which all people have the right to deliberate over and make decisions about matters that affect their lives, free from the intervention of politicians or bosses. We work toward the implementation of direct democracy in both the social sphere (schools, workplaces, social movements, etc.) and political sphere (neighborhood assemblies, confederal councils, autonomous municipalities, etc.). This political sphere is crucial, in that popular self-government allows everyone to voluntarily interact at the face-to-face level in order to determine public policy in an open and transparent way.

These directly democratic bodies should be based on community charters that express the shared values and commitments of the members of each community. Such charters must be shaped in a qualitatively participatory manner, and include a commitment to a baseline of freedom. Such freedom is both the freedom to actualize one’s potential and the freedom from domination and oppression by others. To carry out the complex tasks of modern society, build relationships of solidarity and cooperation, and avoid parochialism, directly democratic bodies and social institutions need to be confederated across geographic boundaries. Confederations should be based on shared interests and an agreed upon set of principles, as expressed in a confederal charter. We envision such decentralized confederations on the regional, continental, and even global levels. Members of the confederation would democratically empower delegates to confederal bodies on a rotational and recallable basis to facilitate the creation of confederation-wide proposals, which would then return to each self-governing community for deliberation and decision-making. The structure of AFADD attempts to model and embody these principles.

While we believe that a stateless society based on the principles of direct democracy and confederalism best embody our ideals of freedom, egalitarianism and self-determination, we do not seek to impose a political system upon anyone. We realize that freedom comes in many forms and that such forms must be voluntarily chosen and culturally appropriate. For example, we support the freedom struggles of the indigenous nations of this continent and hope to work together to abolish the systems of oppression that affect us all. We realize that the imposition of any foreign political system on indigenous peoples only perpetuates the colonial tradition.

Throughout the ages, there have been many societies with directly democratic political spheres. These include many Native American nations including the Iroquois; Ancient Athens; countless African societies from the Tiv in Nigeria to the Merina in Madagascar; the Paris Commune of 1871; New England town meetings; the Iberian Anarchist Federation of Spain in the 1930s; and today’s autonomous communities of the Zapatistas in Southern Mexico. In many of these societies, however, particular groups have been barred from citizenship due to slavery, patriarchy, racism, ageism and xenophobia. Hence direct democracy must always be accompanied by a commitment to rooting out all forms of hierarchy and domination.

Communal Economics

Commodities are the basic units of a capitalist society and are manufactured for exchange or sale rather than for use; that is, they are produced to generate profit, not to fulfill a social purpose. This profit goes into the pockets of the capitalist class, which sets the terms and conditions under which we work, the technologies we apply, and the economic development of our communities. For the majority of people who do not belong to the capitalist class, capitalism forces us to sell our labor in order to survive, turning our own bodies into commodities. As the things we make and do at our jobs are taken from us and turned into capital, we are alienated from the products of our own labor; as our bodies are commodified, we are alienated from ourselves. It is the continuous accumulation of capital and expansion into previously unexploited arenas— such as the patenting of our genes and the privatization of water— that is the driving dynamic of capitalism. This competitive and cancerous logic seeks to commodify the whole of society, ultimately bleeding people and the planet dry with its grow-or-die imperative.

Capitalism, then, isn't merely an economic mechanism; it is a full-fledged set of social relations that warp human interests around the prerogatives of possession and material advantage. Many citizens of the US no longer identify as political beings, having succumbed so completely to our reassignment as “consumers.” It is a system controlling not just production, distribution, and consumption; it is a system that generates social control itself. Capitalism hides the very social relations it perpetuates, creating a commercial culture that distorts both our public and private lives toward the norms of consumption and other manifestations of capital. Culture, social relations, individual identity and, ultimately, biological life itself, are reduced to commodities to be bought, sold and traded in the global capitalist marketplace.

We believe that the production and distribution of goods should be directed toward meeting human needs and desires rather than profits or private interests. Moreover, we maintain that the social relations produced and masked by capitalism can never be overcome without the abolition of capitalism, private property (as distinguished from personal possessions), and wages. Rather than a constant struggle of individual gains and losses, where "buyers" and "sellers" battle it out in the marketplace, economic life should be transformed by an ethics of mutuality and complementarity that reflects the interconnectedness of social life, and of human society with the natural world. Economics should be re-embedded in culture; that is, the economy should not be viewed as a separate arena of power outside of human control. Since economic decisions affect more than just the producers and consumers of specific goods, these decisions should be made by all the people of a community, by fully politicizing and democratizing the economy. This way, economic issues may be understood holistically, and policy may be guided by a commitment to the greatest social good.

A liberatory economic system must be built and maintained voluntarily, from the bottom up. For instance, directly democratic workers' associations, acting alongside and accountable to self-governing community assemblies, could carry out production and distribution. Work could be transformed from mere drudgery into a joyful expression of one's passions as well as a rich part of community life itself. As a guiding principle for a communal economics, we adhere to the maxim "from each according to one's ability and passions, to each according to one's needs and desires, based on what's available to all." That is, everyone contributes what they can toward the benefit of society, and conversely, everyone receives what they need from that society, taking into account material conditions.

Direct democracy and communal economics, however, are not ends in and of themselves. To be desirable at all, these aims must be accompanied by an equal commitment to the creation of an ethical society that is free from all forms of hierarchy and oppression. In the absence of such a commitment, direct democracy or communal economics might simply offer new forms of domination. Therefore, the struggle for fundamental political and economic transformation requires a transformation of social behavior, attitudes and ideologies. We commit ourselves to the educational process of consciousness-raising necessary to achieve such a transformation.

Social Freedom

We understand various forms of social oppression as particular manifestations of the general logic of hierarchy. For example, we regard patriarchy as hierarchy manifested in the realm of gender relations, and white supremacy as hierarchy expressed in the arena of "racial" differentiation.

The principle of social freedom affirms our need to be free from externally imposed constraints, and our ability to choose how we achieve our full individual and collective potential. Each of us has a different set of often over-lapping forms of oppression and privilege. Therefore, we challenge ourselves to confront our own privileged behavior while speaking out against our own oppression, as well as the oppression of others.

This vision of social freedom stands in marked contrast to our present society, defined by lack of choice, immense stratification, imposed identities, and a general lack of power over fundamental aspects of our lives. We desire a world that is free from all essentialist categories that assign immutable characteristics to particular groups, or that equate a specific culture with a specific type of human being. Liberated by the principle of social freedom, our lives may be self-defined, consciously chosen, and infinitely creative.

In this current historical moment, there are many forms of unfreedom that warrant particular attention. We choose to focus here specifically on white supremacy and racism; patriarchy, gender unfreedom, and heterosexism; and classism, not because they are more important or more pervasive than other systems of oppression, but because we believe that many revolutionary movements have failed to challenge these systems. We aim to counter this trend, and acknowledge that the struggle against all systems of oppression must include at its foundation the struggle for racial, gender, sexual and cultural freedom.

White Supremacy and Racism

We live in a white supremacist society. By white supremacist we mean an institutionally and ideologically perpetuated system of oppression that values and privileges people racialized as “white” while degrading and exploiting people racialized as “of color.” Race is neither a genetically nor biologically “real” category, but a social and political process of racialization: a process through which individuals and groups come to be marked as “white” or “of color” and come to be privileged or oppressed accordingly. It is for this reason that we prefer to speak of people as being “racialized as white” and or “racialized as of color,” rather than “white” and “of color”. Such terms help us to point to race as an active process, rather than a biological identity or reality. Asserting the idea of race as a process does not imply that race is not ‘real’. Indeed, the idea of race has very real social consequences in the world. Our intention is to point to the myth of race as biological in the genetic or primordial sense— the idea that race represents a static and pre-determined set of biological factors.

White supremacy served as the justification for Europe’s brutal colonization of the planet, by which European invaders massacred and enslaved most of the world’s people for their own power and enrichment. Throughout the colonial process, religious ideologies and pseudo-scientific theories of human genetics have been used in service to this project.

In the US, the massacre and theft of land of the indigenous people, the enslavement of Africans, and waves of immigrant workers, especially from the global South are central foundations of the US economy and society. Today white supremacy serves as the justification for the colonization of nations such as Puerto Rico, while creating new forms of colonization and imperialism where transnational corporations exploit the nations of the global South and communities “of color” in the global North.

White supremacy attempts to deny people racialized as “of color” a sense of their own history through an educational system that only values “white” history and achievements. White supremacy encourages the vilification of people “of color” in the media and popular culture, leading people racialized as “white” to believe that they are losing their jobs and neighborhoods to “criminals” and “aliens.” People “of color” are almost always the first and worst hit by economic downturns. They tend to be locked into the least desirable and most dangerous and poorly paid jobs. People racialized as “of color” are subject to a double standard in the criminal injustice system that punishes them far more harshly than people racialized as “white” for similar crimes, leading to the disproportionate number of people “of color” in prison. On the flip side, all classes of “whites” are offered material, social and psychological incentives to align themselves with the “white” ruling class.

Historically, predominantly “white” social movements have ignored the demands of movements “of color” in order to secure short-term gains for themselves while sacrificing the long-term goals for everyone’s collective liberation. Examples of this are, the labor movement excluding workers “of color”, the early women’s rights movements uniting “white” women while ignoring the voices of women racialized as of color, and environmental movements ignoring struggles against environmental racism. This tradition is carried on in our movements today through the silencing of people racialized as of color, the normalization of “white” culture, the deprioritization of issues of importance to people racialized of color, and the domination of positions of influence by people racialized as white.

People racialized as of color in the US have a strong tradition of powerful resistance movements because their survival has depended on it. By challenging fundamental issues of power and the white supremacist foundation of the US these movements have constantly inspired and informed broader revolutionary social struggles. In the contemporary era, for example, the Civil Rights movement opened up the radical space necessary for the flourishing of the student, anti-war, women’s liberation and queer liberation movements.

Our critical solidarity with struggles against white supremacy is vital. Without the revolutionary overthrow of the white supremacist foundation of US society, and the uprooting of white supremacist dynamics within our social struggles, we will never realize the free society we envision and struggle towards.

Classism

Class exploitation leads also to class-based discrimination, which privileges middle and upper class culture and degrades working class culture. In order to justify their subservience, working class communities are characterized as stupid, unsophisticated, and incompetent. The history of the working classes is omitted from the textbooks of our public school system. Folk culture and working class culture are ignored, dismissed, or exoticized by middle and upper class society. The voices and interests of working class and poor people are excluded from most public forums. Class discrimination plays out in our movements in a variety of ways including the normalization of middle class culture, the use of economically inaccessible forms of organizing, the de-prioritization of issues of importance to working class and poor people, the use of needlessly academic language, and the silencing of the voices of working class and poor people in our organizations.

Patriarchy, the Gender Binary, and Heterosexism

Sex, gender, and sexual-based oppressions are institutionally and ideologically based systems of domination that affect the lives of women, transgendered people, intersexed people, and queers. These oppressions rest on the foundation of binary systems of categorization, legitimizing and reinforcing systems of patriarchy, gender-based oppression and heterosexism.

Patriarchy is the institutional domination of women by men. In particular, it entails the systematic privileging of the male sex, masculine gender expression, and those perceived as men over the female sex, feminine gender expression, and those perceived as women. Patriarchy expresses itself by force, direct pressure, or though ritual, tradition, law, language, education and the division of labor. All women are exposed to degrees of the ongoing and everyday stresses of sexual objectification, male violence, and exploitation. These conditions are intensified and particularized by women's material, social, and cultural circumstances such as poverty, racism, and heterosexism.

The gender binary system is an institutionalized ideology that recognizes only two natural and legitimate genders: masculine and feminine, as they correspond to male and female sex categories. For the sex and gender binary systems to retain legitimacy, there must be a strict policing of the categories of male/female and masculine/feminine. This results in violence toward all those whose bodies and gender expressions transgress the sex and gender binary systems, most commonly intersexed and transgendered people. Frequently, the genitals of intersexed children are mutilated at birth in order to force their bodies into conformity with a singular, easily identifiable sex. Acts of violence against trans and intersexed people seek to erase their existence both figuratively and literally, from denial of self-definition, employment, housing, marriage and family, to daily physical and psychological violence. People who seem to conform to the confines of the gender binary system are rewarded with relative acceptance, safety, and social privilege, with the constant reminder that transgression will be punished. The human potential of all people is severely limited by this coercive process.

Heterosexism is a system of oppression that values and privileges heterosexual relationships, while marginalizing and even criminalizing same-sex relationships. People whose behaviors, desires and relationships fall outside of these heterosexual rules are considered criminal, unnatural, and immoral. There exists a continuum of violence against gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and queers in which they are subject not only to daily threats of physical and psychological violence, but also to the denial of civil rights such as housing and employment, as well as familial and social ostracizing. Violence against queers also manifests through internalized homophobia and self-loathing leading to substance abuse, eating disorders, and epidemically high suicide rates.

All people are subject to punishment when they challenge patriarchy, the gender binary, or heterosexism. This punishment limits all of our capacities for expression, creativity, dignity, and self-determination. Dynamics of patriarchy, the gender binary, and heterosexism play out within our movements and communities in many ways, including the devaluation of the voices and issues of women, transgendered peoples and queers. We support the feminist movement, the transgendered and intersexed liberation movement, and the gay, lesbian, and bisexual liberation movements — in short, all movements that seek to create a society in which all are free to determine their own sex, gender, and sexuality along passionate and creative lines.

Ecological Sensibility

Domination in general and capitalism in particular threaten not only human health and happiness but also the rest of the natural world. Ecological crises are social crises in that they stem from the hierarchical, unaccountable character of political and economic institutions at present. As the destiny of humanity is tied inextricably to that of the natural world— of which we are a part—ecological disasters inevitably become social ones. Because of racist and classist environmental policies, poor communities and communities of color are often the first and worst hit by ecological crises, and often have little access to emergency services.

We nevertheless reject eco-philosophies that blame ‘technology’, ‘population’, or ‘civilization’ as the root cause of ecological problems. Such philosophies misdiagnose mere symptoms as the total disease, and can lead to anti-humanist and racist conclusions. Reformist strategies that seek to build a "greener capitalism" are also unacceptable— as they fail to acknowledge that capitalism is driven to exploit the earth in new and ever-more pervasive ways due to its growth imperative. Finally, we reject the notion that humans, due to our expanded ability to reflect on and thus change the natural environment, should stand above and dominate it.

This very capacity to imagine another world and reflect back on our actions should place a unique responsibility on our shoulders: to seek a complementary relationship with the natural world, and to develop and promote an ecological sensibility. In fact, our unrivaled capacity for negative ecological impact makes the actualization of our positive potential — a conscious ecological sensibility — a necessity. We view human consciousness as emergent from, and inherently embedded in the natural world. At the same time we recognize that, to a greater degree than any other animal, we can theorize about our environment, make ethical decisions, and imagine a better world. Thus we believe that the non-dominating relationships we strive to create between human beings must be extended to our relationship with the earth.

A conscious understanding of ecological integrity, and the long-term dynamic stability of ecosystems needs to inform all decisions about our food systems, land and energy use, production, consumption, and all other spheres of social activity. We advocate for the development of appropriate technologies that can sustain both people and the planet, and believe that egalitarian, humanly scaled, and popularly controlled institutions are most compatible with this aim. Technology both influences and reflects the values of social institutions and relationships, and should be advanced along distinctly ethical, humanitarian and ecological lines, in a manner that is fully subject to public debate and decision making.

In a free society, labor-saving technologies can open up time for leisure, creative pursuits and people's democratic involvement in the self-management of their workplaces and communities. To attune technology with the ecological integrity of both the human and non-human realms of the biosphere, we need to institutionalize an ecological consciousness in the very fabric of direct democracy.

Consistency of Means and Ends

The history of revolutionary movements has been tarnished by those who use authoritarian means in the struggle for liberation. We believe that in order to achieve our goal of a free society, we must organize in a manner that prefigures such a world. We must act as ethically as possible to dismantle this unethical world, and always strive to use anti-authoritarian methods to replace authoritarian institutions. For many, it has been incredibly empowering to participate in directly democratic forms of organizing against the patently anti-democratic global institutions such as the WTO, IMF and World Bank. Therefore, we are committed to our principles in practice as well as theory.

Internally, the organizational structure of AFADD attempts to reflect our ideals of non-hierarchy, direct democracy, communal economics, libertarian ethics, and an ecological sensibility to the greatest extent possible in today's hierarchical society. Therefore, we seek to prioritize the voices of oppressed peoples within our own confederation and to work in solidarity with oppressed peoples struggling for justice and freedom. Likewise, we respect and support the right of all marginalized peoples to organize autonomously for their freedom.

Revolutionary Strategy

To achieve our vision of a free society, we must strive to dismantle all hierarchical institutions and systems of oppression, put power into the hands of the people, construct a moral economy, and reestablish a mutual relationship with the natural world. Such a complete transformation of the power and priorities held in our society would constitute a social revolution.

The revolution we work toward is not the violent takeover of society by some centralized party apparatus or military force. Rather, it is a process of education and action through which people come to recognize the need for social transformation, realize their own collective and individual power, and voluntarily embrace the need for revolutionary political change. It is, moreover, the active confrontation with authoritarian power and oppression by directly democratic movements aimed at institutionalizing liberatory forms of social freedom and popular self-government. We do not wish to impose a "revolution" on anyone from the top down but rather help to build a revolutionary movement of the majority that seeks to democratically remake society from the bottom up.

Beyond Rejection, Beyond Reform

Many of us have been deeply inspired by and involved in the movement against global capitalism. Yet within this movement we have witnessed the same ideological battle playing itself out over and over again: Are we fighting to reform the state and capitalism, or simply to reject them? We believe that both of these strategies are deficient. While one attempts the impossible – to reform the state and capitalism into benevolent institutions – the other rejects the state and capitalism outright but cannot clearly articulate an alternative.

Reformist strategies often succeed in providing for people's needs in the here and now. However they fail to address the root causes of social oppression and injustice and do little to dismantle the systems of power that perpetuate them. Though they may affect the outcome of a decision, they do nothing to challenge who is empowered to make that decision, nor by what process the decision is arrived at. Thus if a reformist group does succeed in “winning” a campaign, the win has little security. One need only look at the fates of the Endangered Species Act, Welfare, or Social Security to see that reformist legislation is often as fleeting as the moral integrity of the professional politicians that usher it in. Therefore, while reformist strategies may achieve victories, they are not equipped to lay the groundwork for a new and free society.

On the flip side are the many protest movements and alternative social institutions that aim simply to reject hierarchical systems of power. While essential, we find that they too are often insufficient. Through protest movements we are able to raise consciousness, foster coalitions and a sense of global solidarity, practice directly democratic decision-making, reveal the violence of the state, and release our anger and express our hope. In so doing, we may tangibly obstruct the functioning of oppressive institutions. Yet, alone, protest movements do little to lay the structural foundation necessary to actualize a revolutionary shift in power. What do we do once the walls have been torn down?

Similarly, those of us who focus on building alternative social institutions often do invaluable work. We create alternative currency programs, free schools, tool shares, and community gardens. Such institutions are invaluable in that they teach us how to take democratic control over our lives, meet some of our needs while drawing power and resources away from our oppressors, and many have the potential to provide the nucleus from which a revolutionary movement could emerge. Yet, unless we are clear in our intentions to confront, dismantle, and replace the hierarchical systems of power that we reject, our institution building efforts will languish as mere marginalized alternatives with little revolutionary potential.

To truly bring about revolutionary change, we must turn our sights away from reforming, and far beyond simply rejecting hierarchical systems of power. In all of our projects, we seek to maintain an active opposition to all systems of oppression, prefigure the world we hope to create, and meet peoples’ needs in the here in now. We must help build a revolutionary movement to confront, dismantle, and ultimately replace hierarchical systems of power with a society of empowered participants, free to pursue their needs and desires within a network of popularly controlled institutions and a culture of liberation. This is the strategic basis of dual power.

Building Dual Power

The strategic approach that we believe has the greatest potential to actualize our revolutionary vision is dual power. A dual power strategy focuses simultaneously on both opposition and reconstruction, seeking to combine these forces into a counter power that erodes and ultimately replaces the dominant power structure. Though dual power may emerge from a protest movement or an alternative social institution, its scope of vision transcends the revolutionary potential of both. The counter institutions created through a dual power strategy would be popularly empowered and radically egalitarian. To eventually replace hierarchical systems of power, such counter-institutions must begin building the structural foundation now for the society we work toward for the future. Dual power seeks to erode the legitimacy of the state and other systems of centralized power by developing popular power at the grassroots level in communities, workplaces, schools, and wherever else we see the potential to do so. While working to meet people's material needs and satisfy their desires for freedom, these counter-institutions consistently create dissonance with the top-down institutions they seek to dismantle. They challenge and encroach on the hegemony of the hierarchical systems of power they seek to replace, and transform support for centralized forms of power into a widespread demand for popular self-government.

To effectively challenge a hierarchical system of power, the counter institution strives to broaden the scope of its legitimacy to the most general extent possible. The ultimate aim is to establish a dual power that offers all community members the opportunity to participate directly in making democratic decisions on all matters of community concern, for the benefit of the community as a whole. As a confederation, we are committed to the reconstruction of the civil sphere. Within this arena it is the neighborhood assembly that we feel embodies the most general possible scope of legitimacy, in that it does not require that its participants be workers, parents, or students, but only that they be residents.

Direct Action

We define direct action as taking immediate action toward meeting revolutionary goals, without asking a higher authority for permission. Direct action can take many forms, from the reclamation of public space through street blockades, guerilla gardening, and pirate radio, to the creation of extra legal neighborhood and workplace assemblies. A direct action approach frees us from having to limit our vision of what is possible to what is presently sanctioned, and allows us to define our struggle on our own terms. We prioritize forms of direct action that are 1) directly democratic in their design, 2) fully accountable to the oppressed communities most affected by our actions, and 3) embedded within a broader dual power strategy.

While most conceptions of direct action are limited to confrontational and militant tactics, we view direct action as being much more than a mere tactic. We regard direct democracy itself as a form of direct action. The popular participation and empowerment that we seek to institutionalize in decision-making is presently so lacking in current systems of power that challenging these systems using directly democratic means is truly a form of direct action. Direct democracy institutionalizes direct action as a proactive process of taking direct control over our lives and the future of our communities.

Illustrative Opposition

Building a dual power is no simple task. What we can do quite easily, however, is to begin where our community is at. We can look for the particular struggles against oppression that are of great concern to our community, (the WTO, gentrification, or the lack of access to health care) and use these particular issues to illustrate our wider revolutionary analysis and vision. We call this approach illustrative opposition.

Illustrative opposition is a process of drawing out the broader revolutionary potential that lies nascent within the struggle against any particular form of hierarchy or oppression. It allows us to frame any particular struggle such that it is presented as a logical first step in a much greater struggle; logical because the particular issue being addressed is shown to be but one manifestation of a much more insidious system of hierarchical oppression. Through illustrative opposition we can begin to knit together a broad coalition of resistance movements, united in both analysis and vision.

Prefigurative Politics

To achieve our vision, we believe that we must organize now in a manner that is consistent with our principles and that prefigures the world we wish to create. Organizing prefiguratively provides us with an arena for experimenting with new liberatory forms of decision-making and social interaction, while it offers us a glimpse of the society we hope to create. Therefore, in all of our work we seek to create functioning models that demonstrate both the feasibility and desirability of our reconstructive vision.

Revolutionary Organization

The vehicle that we believe offers us the greatest foundation from which to begin to actualize our vision is our revolutionary organization. AFADD is premised upon a shared revolutionary analysis, vision and strategy. It may provide us with a framework to further develop our ideas, share resources, and unify our action in our struggle for a free society. We do not claim to be "the movement," but rather one tendency within it; nor do we aspire to become the dual power, rather we participate in the creation of counter institutions that could.

We are a membership-based organization, as opposed to collective or affinity group models of organization. We choose to organize around political affinity, rather than personality or lifestyle affinity, in order to remain politically coherent while keeping the organization as open as possible. Our confederal organizational structure allows us to act with a high degree of unity and coordination, without sacrificing the benefits of directly democratic decision-making and local autonomy.

Education for Revolutionary Transformation

Every revolutionary project must have, at its foundation, an educational component. Therefore, primary to our work as revolutionaries is our commitment to an on-going study of our world as well as the movements that have historically attempted to transform it. We develop our understanding through study groups, discussion forums, workshops, conferences, and through direct engagement in diverse social movements. We support educational projects that explore the detrimental effects of white supremacy, patriarchy, classism, and heterosexism on movements for social change. In addition, we seek to develop different approaches to uprooting these forms of oppression. While we value having a coherent theory as a guide for our action, we view it as a living entity in constant engagement with the world in which we live and struggle. Just as our theory influences our actions, our actions influence our theory— and we expect them both to evolve over time.

In addition to furthering our own theoretical development, we are committed to creating educational forums for people outside our organization. This can take a variety of forms, from teach-ins, public debates, and publications, to direct actions. We offer these forums out of a desire to engage in mutual dialogue with others about the state of the world and how we might transform it. We don't endeavor to lead people to the "correct" conclusions, but rather to create liberating forums where we can all realize our own collective and individual power. We seek to create a society of free, independently minded participants, not of uncritical followers of a new ideology.

Solidarity Work

In order to confront obstacles that have traditionally divided and weakened movements for social justice and freedom, and to demonstrate active solidarity with oppressed peoples, we enter into coalitions to launch collaborative campaigns of mutual interest. When we engage in collaborative campaigns we neither discard our politics nor push for a particular line. Instead, we attempt to integrate our unique political approach with the objectives of a coalition, creating a dynamic interplay that is honest, non-manipulative, and mutually enriching. When working in coalition with groups whose voices have been marginalized throughout history, such as people of color, women, queer folks, and working class people, we try to make space for those voices to be heard, as we do in our own organization. We believe that our own freedom is linked inextricably to the freedom of all. Therefore, we must actively combat the specific forms of oppression, such as white supremacy, patriarchy and heterosexism that inhibit the freedom of all. This means standing in solidarity with those groups and organizations that are already challenging such systems of oppression.

Join Us!

There are many other political approaches and revolutionary organizations, and we encourage you to explore them all. However, if you find that the collection of ideas expressed in this document resonates well with your own, we invite you to join us in our struggle for a free and democratic society.