Different Kinds of Social Movement Organizations:

There are multiple kinds of social movement organizations people can form or join to meet needs and contribute to liberatory social transformation. There is community organizing, workplace organizing, student organizing, and beyond (FARJ, 2008). The following section will be a brief overview of some of the most important kinds of social movement organizations. The following kinds of groups can be infused with the above elements of liberatory social movement organizations. It is important to note that the following kinds of groups do not necessarily have liberatory qualities and wise content. Social movement organizations and participants thereof must develop and recreate such elements while adapting to relevant variables.

Community assemblies are organizations people can start or join in regards to specific blocks, neighborhoods, villages, towns, and cities to meet needs through collective action (Bookchin, 2007, Ocalan, 2014). Community assemblies can use self-management to make decisions. Community assemblies can form direct action committees and implement direct actions and direct action campaigns against specific political and economic hierarchies. Community assemblies can potentially oppose any kind of domination, exploitation, and oppression within or even beyond a given region. Community assemblies can also help develop common infrastructure and create a plurality of mutual aid committees and projects according to people’s needs and desires. Communal and intercommunal economics would be self-managed by assemblies of people who need and interface with the economy. Such communal and intercommunal commons would be rooted in meeting needs and desires of people as well as mutual aid and responsibility to upkeep the commons through collective agreements to share the implementation of decisions. Community assemblies and co-federations thereof can be both alternative forms of governance that provide self-managed ways to make decisions and meet needs AND oppositional forces against class relations and hierarchy more broadly.

Labor unions enable workers to meet needs and better their conditions through workplace organizing in opposition to class relations and exploitation. Labor unions can utilize direct action and organize in self-managed ways autonomous from state and business interests. Radical student unions are groups where students can organize against hierarchies on campus, within the education system, and beyond. And while the various functions of tenants unions can be done via community assemblies that also have other functions, tenants unions can be formed when needed and desired. Some tenant struggles can even culminate in the development of common housing connected to community assemblies! There are also prisoners’ unions that can enable prisoners to struggle against the prison system. Various Issue specific direct action groups (and committees of groups) can exist to are focus on something like stopping a gentrification development, or some particularly anti-ecological project, or stopping a war, or stopping a prison from being built, stopping a racist, patriarchal, or xenophobic policy, or confronting fascist and far right mobilizations, or a myriad of struggles against domination, exploitation, and oppression. And there are many issue specific mutual aid groups (and committees of various kinds of groups) that can exist focused around provisioning general and specific needs for participants, social movements, the most impoverished, and people more generally.

The Good Place:

In a good society, self-management would flourish on every scale. In a good society, there would be non-hierarchical, directly democratic, and participatory community assemblies (and co-federations thereof) with embedded councils and rotating delegates, means of existence and production would be held and managed in common, politics and economics would meet needs and desires of people, direct collective decisions would be made through dialogue, people would share in the implementation of policies in agreed upon ways, everyone would be free from domination, exploitation, and oppression, and everyone would be free to make collective and individual decisions about what they do bounded and enriched by the freedoms of others to do the same (Kropotkin, 1906, Bookchin, 2007, Ocalan, 2014, Sixth Commission of the EZLN, 2016, Ostrom, 2021, Dirik, 2022, Usufruct Collective, 2022). Such a goal (and principles in relation to such a goal) shapes the general strategy that should be used which shapes the more variable sub-strategies and tactics that should be used (Correa and Walmsley, 2022).
https://usufructcollective.substack.com/p/elements-of-liberatory-social-movement

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