Revolution 2.0
1.
Eco-cultural 'activists' tend to resist adopting a revolutionary stance and frame for their work. I believe this is mistaken. The mistake is that their imagination of 'revolution' is stuck in revolution type 1.0.
2.
Revolution 1.0 was violent. It was insurrectionary. It's goal was to overthrow a government and to replace that government with another form of government. (Not all governance is government.)
3.
Revolution 1.0 was in accord with concentrated and centralized power and authority, for it sought to storm the capital's buildings and replace one group of authorities with another group of authorities. The same basic style of system would remain in place, a system of concentrated and centralized power.
4.
Revolution 2.0 is in dissension with concentrated and centralized power. Revolution 2.0 does precisely the opposite of concentration and centralization of power (i.e., decision-making power; e.g., authority, responsibility). Instead of concentrating and centralizing power centripetally it distributes it centrifugally. Instead of creating power hierarchies it distributes power in a weblike network of mutualistic power-sharing, cooperation and egalitarian mutual aid.
5.
Instead of bringing a battle or a contest to the centralized, concentrated power system, Revolution 2.0 (hereafter R2) mostly simply ignores the system of concentrated power and it's capital city or cities, capital buildings, etc. In this way, the revolution is everywhere. It is in every location, every place, and networked.
6.
Participants in R2 do not seek hegemony. They know that the hegemonic system of concentrated and centralized power will not allow itself to be 'overthrown' at the voting booth. R2 participants may vote, but they know the revolution will not occur in the voting booth. They know The System (concentrated, centripetal power arranged in a hierarchy) cannot be overthrown and that it must, instead, be replaced from outside of its own hegemonic systems of domination and control.
7.
The praxes of R2 are praxes which interweave language, imagination, thought, action, creativity.... Imagination is as crucial a key as anything. Serving the emergence of a new form of culture, after all, requires imagining its possibility and the steps one can take in collaboration with others to begin to build the emerging world in parallel with the existing one. A motto might be: "Let us re-imagine together!" Imagination, in this way, becomes dialogical -- distributed in the way R2 would distribute responsibility and authority.
8.
This present writing is not a manifesto. R2 has no manifesto. It requires no manifesto. It requires an awakened imagination which is distributive rather than concentrative -- centrifugal rather than centripetal, collaboratively evolving. Imagination is not lodged in our personal heads or hearts, but is a process we share out distributivity in dialogue, poetry, dance, song and magical acts of loving-kindness and ecstatic joy. Our sharing of imagination resembles a murmuration of starlings. Birds of a feather dance together.
9.
Love is the revolution. The revolution is love.
10.
We have no hierarchy of leadership, no charismatic leaders for the assassin's bullets or poisons. As we mature in our leadership our skills at distribution of leadership and responsibility have grown into a ripening. Everyone leads. Everyone is a leader. No one follows.
11.
We distribute our charisma, our charm, our joy, our love, our revolutionary inspiration. We scatter it everywhere we can like flower petals or pollen.
12.
We are not only non-violent, but we are the opposite of violence. Our revolution at its heart and core is the antipode to violence. We are as a balm to the current world's violence.
13.
Not seeking hegemony, our revolutionary movement grows like a wildfire in the wind, but these are not destructive flames, and they burn no one and nothing. Our passion is gentle, subtle, loving, joyful, and it is the antipode of harm. It turns harm inside out and upside down. What was thieving becomes gift. The mine becomes ours, and we stop mining. We wed the I to the we so that you cannot tell the difference -- and all is we and all is I. Poetry becomes prose becomes poetry again. Imagination flowers and scatters its petals and pollen.
14.
This is not a manifesto. This is a conversation.
15.
The revolution has already begun.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from the Birmingham Jail
One of my tasks here at The R-Word is to conceptually, factually and imaginatively flesh out a space of politics which is neither strictly "public politics" (structured and dominated by the state) nor mere "private politics" -- such as making decisions about what happens in a private club or group in a political culture utterly shaped by the presence of the state and the social and cultural habits of politics which derive from living in a state-dominated society.
To my knowledge, this "third sphere" (with the original two spheres being public and private) just isn't being acknowledged as "a thing" by sociologists, anthropologists, historians, political theorists... or anyone with a university post or published book. So you can see I have my work cut out for me.
About politics, public and private:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQjcmDGY2vA&list=PLU4FEuj4v9eDFFfwwAcTPMQGuEZxLhtzj&index=15&t=978s