The Cheetah and the Waterfall: Unleashing the Creativity of a New Era

Remaking the Economy of the City

Greetings from a small batch of do-it-yourself folks, operating out of garages and backyards, tiny offices and cozy apartments; roaming the savanna.

We no longer see the need nor have the time to fuck around with mutant ideas of profit like green, natural, social, or ethical capitalism. We hunger for liberation, not the glory of the con artist.

More and more of us are promoting large-scale change in the real world by taking our energies out of the current economic and social structures and putting them at the service of living well in and supporting our communities.

We are stripping the mask off the “free market,” that ugly tool of the ruling classes, and replacing it with a free and ethical exchange model that wears no velvet gloves nor forms any iron fist. Our model needs no state for enforcement nor corporate greed for efficiency but grows with the free will and good intentions of honest people willing to defend what bits of our lives we can salvage from the overlords.

From this salvage operation, we are finding, with a little luck and as we apply ourselves with verve, that the powers of equality, creativity, muscular action, and thoughtful direction we are putting into play can upset the best laid plans of the overlords.

We strive not to be the little kings of yesteryear, each with his own little domain to protect and enforce and abuse. We are men and women with vast creativity that we are now unleashing into the world, free of capital and its dictates. We are confederated and free of sluggishness.

We are simultaneously free of the tame and newly-minted ideas of some children of the bourgeoisie who are now seeking to remake a shifting world into one that maintains and fortifies their access to flows of status and wealth in a new world. We are not seeking to capitalize on the new era for old-fashioned self and status and wealth; we are imagining a world where all may feed, clothe, and house themselves and others.

We have found viable means of creating meaningful, self-determined work without capitalist ownership or bureaucratic spirit-killing. We put people before profits, eliminating profit from all levels of coffee service and consumption in a major city as a first step in modeling the elimination of profit from all levels of economic activity. In substituting a focus on social justice and social change for profit-making, we find that people are responsive to and appreciate our practices.

We prioritize ideas that have the potential for dramatic economic and cultural transformation. There is very little political and social power without economic power. There is greater economic and social power in taking over essential chunks of the economy, like food and clothing and manufacturing, than there is in making specialty items or fetishes, things that only certain people can afford.

Our work is an experimental incubator, pursuing the ideas and practices that feed a transformation of this capitalist economy into one that serves the real economic and ecological needs of all people and the earth. We are consolidating resources and ideas apart from the usual segregated pathways of class, ethnicity or color, and gender.

We are addressing the current site-specific problems of capital, not last century’s. We are not Marx nor Kropotkin; we are not associated with the current batch of wacko right-wingers.

We confederate our knowledge and practices and our resources, a loose style appropriate to the era and aware of the need to flee the jack-boots that knock on the door from time to time.

We are weaving strings of horizontal relationships, not cumbersome and slavery-dependent pyramids.

We put all poor people at the table. We are relatively poor whites and we act from here. We are legion, many or most of us are not as stupid as portrayed by those who find themselves superior to us. We are more capable of concerted action than a thousand atomized and isolated lovers of social classes and their status. We speak for ourselves, not through the lusterless representatives this system has coughed up, nor through book-based sociologists of poverty nor the white trash-fakers of the art world.

We long for an end to social classes, and the deformation of personalities that they produce. And an end to the line artificially dividing wealth from the majority of the people of this earth.

We promote lateral, horizontal expansion, determined by the interests and energies of our companions. We move beyond the level of micro, while maintaining horizontal growth – growth that seeks the participation of all Chicagoans who are interested, with full participation especially amongst the most vulnerable and the poorest.

Sometimes we choose to roast and purvey coffee out of happenstance, luck, and also the ease with which it can be value-added and delivered. Coffee is an essential for it cuts the edge off hunger, which after all is all too common.

Traditional methods of organization and control are not adequate to meet the new reality we live in. Nor are traditional methods of liberation.

Our movement open sources new information.

Our movement also open-sources the inspiration that is the real fuel for the motivation to make change real and large.

We look to the practices of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies), seeking to completely organize a single industry. The Confederation seeks to further decentralize organizing and structure. We’re more like kudzu than the gardens at Versailles. New media and social networking technologies, integrated with old-school, nuts-and-bolts social action, will yield a clear, concrete model of turning capitalism on its head, with theoretical flights applied to the current context.

We span great distances with energy and inspiration and skills, not through fluorescent strategic planning and other tools of a deceptive management society.

We will “scale up,” and we will scale as we see fit, not as outsiders with little practical knowledge dictate.

Will our revolution be slow, stymied by endless process and strategy sessions that never leave the desk or the disk and devolve into endless discussions of principles?

We think not.

Will our efforts be rewarded, when we make a world free of the useless borders between peoples and the boundaries that separate us from the healthy aspects of wealth – like roofs and good food and health care and the riches of love?

We think so.

Our theories are grand, so that our practices may fill with grandeur. And vice-versa.

We rush and we roar like the waterfall. Pounce like the cheetah.