Today’s postulate:

One genius of the system we live under is that the strategies it requires to survive it from day to day are exactly the opposite of what is required to change it. — Catharine MacKinnon (1987), The Art of the Impossible , in Feminism Unmodified , p. 16

(MacKinnon is talking about the survival strategies women have to adopt under patriarchy. The point generalizes, or analogizes, for many other forms of domination.[ ])

Today’s corollary:

The point of practical counter-economics, as a strategy for social transformation, is to reverse the polarity. You do some grassroots organizing, and when you do it right you open up new social spaces, within the shell of the old, where the best strategies that help you flourish from day to day — the ways you make yourself a living — become precisely those that weaken the system’s supports, and drive its mechanism towards collapse.

Today’s epigram:

Establishment (military-industrial) economic life processes us all into the oil for the gears of the machine. Grassroots organizing has to free us up to become the sand.

See also: