NO bosses borders banks: Integral Revolution Manifesto

The basic principle is the fight against all forms of domination and the construction of alternative societies by way of an Integral Revolution.

We shape this as a set of ideological bases that we are illustrating in the following points, which will require further work and elaboration to form the founding manifesto of the Bloc:

1) Equitable human relations based on freedom

• We reject any form of domination or discrimination between people, based on any reason, like sex, gender, sexual orientation, culture or ethnicity, age, inheritance, class, etc.
• We promote mutual aid, solidarity, trust, respect and fellowship. In general, love between human beings.
• We want to revert the degradation of the human beings, which occurs in the majority of places around the world, which we see as consciously cultivated by the dominant elites. Because the more empowered people are, the more insecure the current system is.
• We need a desire for improvement, based on active listening and constant reflection, as well as on the habit to accept criticism from others and from ourselves to enable this improvement.
• We want to extend good practices in interpersonal relationship across humanity.

2) Self-organization and sovereign popular assemblies

• The popular assembly, as a way to decision making with equality of voice and vote, is the legitimate form of organization of any collective, community or peoples, as it is a necessary condition for freedom.
• Sovereign popular assemblies: the self-determination of peoples through this form of horizontal social organization, free commitment of individuals and peoples to communities and federations.
• Relationships between peoples and communities based on solidarity, freedom and decentralisation: equitable and horizontal interdependence; a willingness to coordinate and interact, from the most local and regional level to the wider geographical scale, deciding on a small scale whenever possible and only on a wider scale when absolutely necessary (principle of subsidiarity, confederation, fractality, etc.)
• Building-in diversity, respecting human and personal differences, including minorities in all assembly-based decisions.
• Therefore, contesting the State, in all its forms.

3) The commons, the public

a/ Recover common ownership for the benefit of all, with popular possession and control

• We have to recover control of land and means of production for the common good, granting its availability through collectivization (communal ownership) for the public good.
• We reject private property as a tool of the powerful classes to accumulate capital and establish control over the ownership and use of land and the means of production, perpetuating the regime of domination by wage labor, accumulation, exploitation and speculation.
• Self-interest brings to us alienation and disaffection, destroys communal ownership and communal goods.

b/ Build a cooperative system that is public and self-managed, based upon mutual aid

• We work for the common good, to ensure that all of our vital necessities (food, health, housing, education, energy, transportation, etc.) are covered through a truly public system, built by ourselves and based on self-management, cooperating with one another and promoting the values and abilities that are essentially human.
• We reject the State as a system of control based in exploitation of humans by humans. So we also reject the paternalistic social services provided by the State, which support individualism and undermine self-empowerment. We reject the control of public services by powerful minorities (either the State or the markets). And therefore we also reject the private corporate-elitist network controlled by those minorities.

c/ Liberate access to information and knowledge

• We reclaim free access to information and free creativity.
• We foster our natural disposition to experimentation and investigation as sources of knowledge.
• We share knowledge among us all to build a greater common good.

4) A new economy based in cooperation and proximity

• We denounce capitalism as a means of production and trade based on competition, exploitation of the weak and limitless growth.
• We denounce the current financial system, dominated by centralized and private banks, and we reject charging interest on money.
• We embrace the maxim “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.”
• We commit to horizontal cooperation as the basis for economic relationships.
• We intensely promote cooperative work and consumption. We are for the eradication of wage labor and in general against the exploitation of labor.
• We propose alternative currencies, direct barter, gift economies and community economies as practical tools for a new economic system.
• An economy as local as possible and avoiding the need for intermediaries. Equitable relations between producers and consumers.
• When necessary, a public-communal financial system, without interest.

5) Cooperating with Life and the Natural environment

• We apply the principles of cooperation, conservation and respect in our relationship with the natural world, of which we are part, and we ensure good shared lives with the rest of living beings. What’s more, local popular sovereignty allows and fosters these principles.
• We take into account the cycles of natural life, to ensure the sustainability of human activity, from generation to generation.
• We denounce the values and dynamics of the current system that destroy or put at risk many forms of life, including ours, and at the same time exhausts non-renewable resources.
• We must take advantage of renewable resources in a decentralised way, promoting the self-sufficiency of human communities, reducing the scale of large cities, eager for vast amounts of resources.

6) How can we do this?

• Coherence between means and ends: the process of the Integral Revolution is a transition from the current system towards a new society and humanity. The path to go from one to the other is one of learning and must reflect where we are going. It matters, then, that the means to effect this transformation be in agreement with the ends that we desire.
• Dialectical and simultaneous relationship between values and structures: a change in values is necessary to change the structures, but achieving a deep and broad change of values requires new structures that foster and enable their practice.
• In coherence with our ends, we have to realize the Integral Revolution from a base of local groups, standing for decentralization and local actions, but with a global vision and thinking. If this simultaneously progresses in several territories and regions, it will be much stronger and unstoppable.
• The peoples, and the communities that comprise them, have an inalienable and legitimate right to organize themselves, and to defend their life, their security, their culture and their lands and territories in the way that they consider most convenient, as long as they aim for the maxim “to minimize violence against human beings and maximize respect for freedom and life of others.”
• In order to be able to achieve this revolution, we consider general disobedience legitimate and necessary in order to extract the maximum of resources, work and legitimacy from the current system and dedicate them to the new society in construction. We think we each have to use disobedience in our own context in whatever way that maximizes our transformative action.