Symbiosis is a confederation of community organizations across North America, building a democratic and ecological society from the ground up.
We are fighting for a better world by creating institutions of participatory democracy and the solidarity economy through community organizing, neighborhood by neighborhood, city by city.
A Crisis of Democracy
Even as decisive, radical action to halt ecological devastation is needed more than ever before, the world’s ruling classes plow ahead, enriching themselves at the expense of people and planet and preparing their fortresses to hold back the coming tides.
It is ordinary people who face devastation in the ecological crisis, and it is ordinary people who do not hold the reins of power. From climate change to state violence to gentrification, this is the essence of the problems we face: a crisis of democracy.
More Than Resistance
When we organize, we can resist, but resistance is not governance.
We need a better approach, beyond the particular struggles to contain the excesses and brutalities of our present system, toward a coherent movement strategy that creates the systems of tomorrow.
As we cultivate local cooperative economies and ever-more sophisticated systems of mutual aid, we can grow a new commons in the hands of ordinary people, a genuine socialism from below, an economic democracy.
Dual Power
Together, we can create institutions of real democracy and human connection out of the places we live and work. Through organizing participatory institutions at the grassroots, we can meet our immediate human needs and form a new basis of power, organizing society in parallel against capitalism and the state.
This framework—of building popular power outside the governing institutions of our present system, to challenge and displace those institutions through truly democratic ones of our own—is called “dual power.”
This dual power strategy can help sustain our communities under capitalism, channel our collective action to fight back more effectively, and eventually supplant the institutions of capitalism to become the governing structures of a liberated society.
Beyond the Local
As the branches of the tree grow outwards, its roots dig deeper.
Our organizations have come together because we recognize that the changes required to secure our future are more than what each of us can do at the local level. We need to escalate our strategy towards a strong network, or confederation.
By organizing locally, we are pushed to embrace experimentation, but the lessons of experimentation should circulate between us so that we can dedicate our energies to pushing ahead into new territories of radical possibility. The future of our movement will depend on the rapid cultivation of radical democracy in all sorts of communities across the continent.
For this, we need the visibility of a common platform, with the capacity to support people through developing their own initiatives or connect them to those that already exist.
Ruling-class power is organized globally, and if democracy is to win, we must be organized at that scale as well.
Our full launch statement is available here:
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