Rolling Thunder
"At this moment, an employee in a grocery store is setting out genetically engineered produce rather than tending the garden in her own yard;
A dishwasher is sweating over a steaming sink while dishes stack up unwashed in his kitchen at home;
A line cook is taking orders from strangers instead of cooking for a neighborhood barbecue;
An advertising executive is composing jingles for laundry detergent rather than making up bedtime stories for his nieces;
A poor woman is watching rich people's children at a daycare program rather than spending time with her own;
A child is being dropped off there to be cared for by strangers rather than those who know and love him;
A sociology student is doing an ethnographic study of squatters rather than actually participating in the activities that interest her;
An activist, tired from a hard day's work, is putting on a Hollywood movie for entertainment;
A man who could be exploring his sexuality with a partner is masturbating to internet pornography;
A demonstrator who has unique perspectives and reasons to protest is carrying a prefabricated sign issued by a bureaucratic organization;
And a would-be revolutionary who left behind everyting he knew to pursue an engaged, beautiful, meaningful life is making references to television programs with his fellow dropouts in utter boredom and dejection.
The system runs on the blood and sweat of our hijacked lives. The more we invest ourselves in surviving according to its terms, the more difficult it is to do otherwise. Seizing back our time and energy from its jaws is the essence of and the precondition for any real resistance.
The paralyzing commonsense notion that everyone, even the most radical, plays a role in the status quo hides the subversive possibility that all of us - even radicals - can refuse our roles. Dropping out means refusing to play our parts, removing ourselves from the circuitry and reclaiming our lives.
If you are a student, it means rejecting institutional instruction in favor of self-education.
If you are an employee, it means refusing to take orders, ceasing to sell your time and labor and conscience for a wage, and developing projects of your own, instead.
If you are a tenant, it means not fattening the pockets of landlords, but inventing new ways to secure and use space.
If you are a consumer, it means ceasing to make purchases, reducing your needs, and finding other sources for what you require.
If you are a producer, it means seizing the means of production, and applying - or not applying - them outside the logic of capitalism.
If you are a traveler, it means going off the beaten path.
If you are an artist, it means living creatively, not creating commodities in place of life.
If you are a girl or boy, it means becoming inscrutable to the gender binary system, a living counterexample to the equation All ___s are ___.
If you are a lover, it means refusing the expectations and obligations of conventional romance.
If you have white skin, it means challenging the racist structures that make this an advantage.
In a hierarchical society, it means refusing to command or obey.
In legal terms, it means ceasing to recognize the authority of judges, courts, and police, sorting out conflicts without recourse to armed strangers or impersonal institutions and defending yourself and your community against their incursions.
In moral terms, it means rejecting the authority of any code beyond the dictates of your own conscience, becoming a law unto yourself.
In aesthetic terms, it means shunning conventional norms in order to develop new standards and values.
In political terms, it means refusing to be represented or to represent others, finding ways to wield political power outside the established channels.
In terms of socialization, it means unlearning your conditioning so that you neither accept your prescribed role nor impose such roles upon others.
In terms of ambition, it means redefining success.
And if you are already a dropout, it means finding ways to reconnect to others on your own terms."
Dropping Out: A Revolutionary vindication of Refusal, Marginality, and Subculture, Rolling Thunder #2
Crimethinc Ex-Workers Collective