Trump is president again, and things are bad. You probably heard about what he is going to do to the environment, and the grift, and that unqualified criminal cabinet, and the Nazi salute and the firing of government employees, and the deportation, and the tax cuts for the rich and…oh god What Are We GOING TO DO!
First allow yourself a moment and really feel sorrow for the situation we are in. It’s good to grieve, we have lost a lot, and the world is a demonstrably worse place now. It’s ok to be sad, it’s ok to take a break if you can, it’s ok to feel deeply about what we have lost and what we will lose. A deeply traumatic thing is happening, and if we don’t admit it and mourn we will twist and warp from holding all the sadness inside.
We are now locked into a depressing amount of future suffering, the time to make a purely good decision is gone, and we are now left with only difficult and painful choices. Climate change will burn and drown our cities, and ravage our children’s future. Our immigrant and trans neighbors are now in the crosshairs. Black people, women, working people, government employees, scientists, basically anyone who isn’t an oligarch is now the target of oppression.
Even with that avalanche of horribles raining down upon us, know that it will not only be suffering. There will always be something to save, always a way to make things better. There will be moments of joy, beauty, and friendship. But we shouldn’t lie to ourselves, the rest of our lives will be spent dealing with the effects of electing Trump for a second time.
But how, you might be asking, can we do anything about Trump? Doesn’t he have the house and the senate and a corrupt supreme court that has given him immunity from crimes? Let me ask you this, are you sure you are asking the right question? Is it really Trump we need to deal with? Trump is the fever, a symptom of the real illness. Capitalism is the cause of this fever, it is capitalism we need to sabotage.
Capitalism grew out of feudalism, and like feudalism capitalism is antithetical to democracy. The current oligarchs see themselves as the new monarchs, and like monarchs they think they should decide the fate of everyone not as rich as them. They have used wealth so vast that most have trouble thinking of a number so big, to rig the system in their favor.
Think for a moment about the machine you find yourself in. You hang up your rights to democracy the moment you walk into work. Money is speech, and you don’t have enough to be heard. “There is no alternative”, work or go hungry, hardly a free choice. You can’t opt out of capitalism, it has expanded and consumed the entire planet. Many of us hate the way things are, but feel helpless to do anything.
Capitalism gobbles up the labor of working people and the resources of the earth, then translates it into money. Almost all that money goes to the oligarchs at the top, the very same group of robber barons who sat in the audience at the inauguration of the president they paid to elect.
Normal human beings don’t like this. They don’t like feeling trapped in a job they hate because they need money and health care. They don’t like seeing their fellow humans evicted as rents soar. They don’t like seeing nature degrade and watching the oceans rise. The vast majority of people don’t want to live like this. This is an existential crisis for the capital class. The oligarchs are very few, and we are many. If the working masses decided to change the system, the rich would lose everything.
So the rich devise ways to divide the workers, keeping them from joining together. They create the myth of the “American dream”, convincing workers that they are all on a trajectory towards immense wealth. When in reality there are only two classes, those that must work to live, and those that own things and charge to use them. If you can stop working, and still live, you are in the capital class, but if you must continue to work in order to live, you are working class, there is no such thing as a “middle class.”
They insist gender is essential so they can pit male against female. They create the idea of race, so they can justify enslaving an entire group of people for free labor. They create the idea of human inferiority in order to justify genocide and land theft. They will always blame the other, if there isn’t an “other”, they will invent one (Trans people are not the ones raising your rent). The oligarchs use these tactics to keep us fighting each other so we don’t attack them. The tools of the oppressor have only gotten more efficient, as the propaganda has become digital and algorithmically directed, it now runs all day and night, pumping out hatred and division on corporate owned social networks, tv stations, radio, movies and every other imaginable media money can buy.
Because their greed is endless, so too must be the “efficiencies” to keep the machine growing forever. Move the jobs to the cheapest, most unregulated places on earth. Build things to break so people have to buy more of them. Make everything a subscription so no one really owns anything but instead must pay rent forever. If serving people digital outrage keeps them using your service more, feed them outrage, even if it’s fake. Everything is in service of making the machine more efficient in order to siphon money from the bottom and concentrate it at the top.
The machine of capitalism is hyper efficient at destroying human lives and the world for money. But efficiency is not the same thing as resiliency. The current machine is huge, voracious, and destructive, but also incredibly brittle. So brittle in fact that we can sabotage it. You may think sabotage is blowing up a pipeline, but in reality sabotage is the removal of the efficiency that capitalism needs in order to function. The modern machine of capitalism has support structures, and without these structures, it will stop working. So let’s talk a bit about what holds capitalism up, and how we can remove those supports until the system no longer works.
The Problem: Lonely People
Capitalism needs us to be lonely and atomized. Atomized and alone people can’t form coherent political movements, and are easier to divide and conquer. Lonely people are unhappy, and unhappy people are easier to sell things too. Capitalists want everyone to think of themselves as solitary economic units. They want every aspect of your life to serve in the project of making them more money. They don’t want you “wasting time” on community, and leisure.
How to Sabotage: Build Community
Americans used to spend a lot of time together in “third places”, but 50 years of neoliberalism, and a worldwide pandemic, have left our community building muscles atrophied. There is even talk about an epidemic of loneliness. The good news is that this loneliness is not only easy to sabotage, but fun too!
Start small by getting to know your neighbors. Go to your neighbors and knock on the door. Say “Hi I am your neighbor, My name is {say your name}, and I live next door. I am trying to get to know all my neighbors.” It helps if you bring some cookies, get your neighbors names, contact info, and cookie preference. Commit to talking to them regularly, have them over for dinner, figure out what their interests are, gossip, laugh, make friends.
If you need a little more structure, you can also join or start a club. Maybe you like running, or soccer, or knitting, find a club that deals with that, and join it. If you can’t find one, start one. Just getting to know other people in your community will get you out from in front of atomizing social media and instead get you building relationships with real live human beings.
If you want to meet people and also learn something useful, take a class. The stuff you learn might even help you build community (learn to knit, then start a knitting club). Many libraries, local governments and universities offer them for free. If you happen to be very knowledgeable about something you can teach a class as well.
There are an almost infinite number of ways you can build community, and every connection with another human helps to sabotage the atomizing force of capitalism. It’s hard to go along with an oligarch’s plans to destroy the town you live in when it’s full of friends instead of strangers. Strong communities are also fertile grounds in which to grow even more ways to sabotage capitalism. If you only have time for one type of sabotage, make it community building.
The Problem: No one is coming to help
Capitalists have gotten so wealthy that they have literally purchased our political system. Trump and his ghoulish oligarch conspirators have used the machine of capitalism to turn exploitation of worker labor into money, and then turned that money into political power. They now plan to loot the government so they can turn that political power into even more money. They will hollow out the administrative state, destroying the parts of our government that provide everything from weather reports, to safe food and drugs, to education for our children.
They are already pushing out long serving public servants, destroying the institutional memory of everything from the post office to the EPA. Once degraded beyond repair they will privatise those parts of government selling them off to other oligarchs who will charge you huge amounts of money to do (badly) what the government used to do (well) at very low cost.
How To Sabotage: Mutual Aid
For at least the next four years, we may be on our own. It’s very possible that help simply won’t be coming (at least from the federal government, and likely the state and local one as well). That doesn’t mean we are helpless. Mutual aid, the idea that everyone has something they need, and everyone has something they can give, can allow neighbors to lift up and support each other, even if the government wont or cant. This is not charity, not philanthropy, but rather neighbors coming together to meet their common needs together.
Mutual aid can be something as simple as a spreadsheet where people put what they need and what they have. It can take the form of food sharing, money sharing, tool libraries, delivery services for the homebound, potluck clubs, group child care, disaster relief and so much more. With the advent of vicious and unfair deportation roundups, some mutual aid groups are even devising ways to help protect their immigrant neighbors from hateful government thugs.
Mutual aid is not conditioned on any prerequisite or profit motive, but rather community members combining their skills and resources to meet the needs of everyone in the community. While hard, It can also be a very personally rewarding activity. One example is running a “free store” where unwanted old items can find a new home with someone who needs them. These redistributive activities can be a great way to meet and help others in your community, clean out old stuff from your home, and keep good items from ending up in the landfill.
Helping your neighbor when they are in need, and having them help you builds ties that go beyond the crude transactional relationships capitalism demands. Allowing neighbors to reconnect on the level of their humanity, instead of turning every interaction into a dollar sign. Transforming ourselves from “consumers” into “neighbors” sabotages the capitalist system that wants to reduce us to “homo economicus.” Mutual aid helps rekindle our human spirit, builds community, and prevents the commodification of every aspect of our lives, and that is satisfying sabotage indeed.
The Problem: Democracy Ends Once You Enter The Workplace
You can vote for your senator, your mayor, even the local dog catcher. But the moment you enter a workplace, you give up all your democratic rights, and enter a feudal state where the boss makes all the decisions, and you are left to do all the work.
At the workplace you serve a capitalist by creating profits. Put simply, you produce more value per hour than the boss pays you. They also don’t have to pay you for all the things you have to do in order to make it possible for you to create those profits for them. They don’t pay for your car, or your commute, or the child care you had to buy so you could go to work, they don’t pay for any of the social reproduction that has to happen to keep supplying them with workers. Seems pretty unfair, without you working, they wouldn’t make any money at all!
It would seem that once it is widely known that workers produce all the value, and bosses get all the rewards, that workers would rise up and demand change. That is why the capitalists have built a system that not only encourages work, but necessitates it. Workers must take on crushing student debt for a degree to even get a job, locking them into economic chains. Work is also where most Americans get health care, forcing most to sell their labor for the ability to see a doctor. Even though worker productivity has gone through the roof in the last 40 years, wages have remained low in order to keep profits high. Wages are depressed by the threat of losing your job, or being replaced by an immigrant or AI program. Wages are kept low enough that most workers make just enough money to pay it all back to a capitalist for rent or a mortgage.
You can choose not to work, but then you will lose your home and potentially starve. You could get another job, but that would present you with the same lack of control over a new workplace. To rub salt into the wound, we spend a majority of our lives at work, so we spend the majority of our lives without any power to control our own destiny.
How To Sabotage: Form or Join a Union!
The boss might seem to control all the power in a workplace, but that is a lie. Without workers to code the programs, or build the cars, or pour the coffee, or stock the shelves, the boss is the little lord of an empty kingdom. Workers create more value for a company than they are paid, and they should act that way. Alone they may not have much power but together, by creating a union, the worker can sabotage the unfair power structure of the workplace.
By joining with their fellow workers, they can demand better wages, better benefits, equal pay for everyone, and a say in how the workplace will function. Workers in solidarity can rebalance the scales, getting more of the value of their own labor back from the bosses and putting it where it belongs, in the hands of the workers who created that value through their labor. Unions got you the 8 hour work day, and the 40 hour work week, and the weekend! With a renewed and powerful union movement we could push for a 4 day work week and other pro-worker laws. Unions are powerful forces for sabotage against the capitalist system.
Forming a union is hard, the capitalists know they are the beneficiaries of an unfair deal, and they will fight hard to keep themselves in that position. But there is one thing the workers have going for them that the boss doesn’t, without the workers the company stops working. Through collective bargaining, and the threat of withholding their labor, workers have incredible leverage to sabotage the unfair structure of the workplace.
Unions are also engines of change outside the workplace. They provide a framework for workers to build community, and struggle for a better world. This struggle opens the eyes of people, turning them into agents of social change (saboteurs if you will). Unions have been at the forefront of the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, the fight to end the horrors of war, to free Palestine, and so much more. They are not perfect, and can be led astray, but the basic structure of a union is one of the most effective ways to sabotage the machine of capitalism.
The Problem: Everything Sucks Now
Have you noticed that everything is just…worse than it used to be? Clothing is worn once or twice before it starts to fall apart, food costs more, but there is less in the box, it’s impossible to fix anything, furniture falls apart before you even get it put together…everything seems to be so much shittier than it used to be.
The machine of capitalism requires endless growth. Profits, sales, units shipped, and most importantly stock prices, those numbers must go up! Once you run out of ethical ways to make money, you have to start on the unethical. Cutting labor costs, destroying the environment, engaging in complicated financial schemes, soaking the customer with unfair terms, or making the products shitter. Use cheaper materials, make everything a subscription service, dump all your waste into the ocean, move your factory to a place with no regulations, bribe politicians for tax cuts, package mortgages into complicated financial instruments and then bet on them, hype up AI, release a crypto coin, use slave labor, all of these choices were made by a capitalist, to keep the money flowing. Because the most important rule of capitalism is to always, no matter what, grow.
How to sabotage: My art is a weapon!
They say art doesn’t pay, and that is true if you are measuring only in dollars (the only exception being advertising, because that is the kind of art that serves a capitalist). But art and craft is a vital form of human expression, and we must not let the endless thirst for more profit drive it from our souls. People find so much joy in art and craft but often feel like they can’t justify these pursuits because they don’t come with a profit attached to them.
Besides this being a sad example of how deep the capitalist propaganda had soaked into our brains, it’s also not true. Your art and craft can be a weapon of sabotage against the enshitification of modern goods and services while at the same time making you and your community happier and better off.
Capitalists want you completely dependent on buying everything. But what if you take old clothing and fix it up, what if you learn to repair your own car, what if you get things from the waste stream and give them to people in need, what if you grow your own food…all of these things deprive a capitalist of money, re-build the connection between you and your community and allow creative people to express themselves at the same time. Clothing swaps, art swaps, poetry nights, seed swapping, food canning, potluck parties, dumpster diving, free stores, buy nothing days, vintage thrifting, building things from reclaimed waste, all of these activities can restore and enrich people and allow art and craft to infuse and enhance the lives of your neighbors.
Communities have set up clubs where they take old furniture, fix it up, and give it to people in need. There are “bike kitchens” where those with skills and tools help community members fix up their bicycles. Garden clubs and seed savers can help people grow food on their window sill, suburban lawns can be killed and turned into gardens that can feed whole families.
People sew old clothing into new beautiful one of a kind creations that look better than anything on the market, art swaps can bring beautiful art into people’s homes without costing thousands of dollars. Some people have even become “freegans” rescuing hundreds of pounds of perfectly good food, and thousands of items that are wastefully tossed out. These folks spend almost no money, and have so much abundance in their lives that they can easily share it with those in need. The artistic and creative expression of folks doing these kinds of things also puts joy and beauty into this world, something too valuable to put a price tag on.
Problem: The Rent is Too Damn High!
Anyone who has tried to buy or rent a home knows that the cost of housing has gone from ridiculous to absurd. Many can not afford to even rent a place near where they work and often spend hours a day commuting in from cheaper locations. Even those locations are getting too expensive!
Homes are often the largest single “investment” that most people have for those that can afford them. While at the same time rental housing is seen as a way to make large amounts of money for the owning class. Combined this has made it nearly impossible for normal people to afford housing. Because capitalists view housing as just another way to make money, and not a basic human need, the machine of capitalism cares only for maximizing that profit, even if it means making millions miserable.
How to Sabotage: Join a Tenants Union, and Get Creative!
Capitalists hate it when people combine their power. Which is why it’s such effective sabotage to form a tenant union. If you have never heard of a tenant union, it is a group of people coming together and demanding better conditions where they live. Much in the way union members have power because they can deny their labor, tenants have power too, if they don’t pay the rent, the landlord makes no money. Anyone can form or join a tenant union even if you don’t have a home, find one in your area, or if there are none, start one! Collective action from renters can even force local governments to invest in social housing, or other forms of public support for homes. Many places in Europe have such successful social housing that there is great desire from the populace to live in them.
You could go into massive debt to buy a home, or you could rent for the rest of your life. Or you could try something a bit off the beaten path. What if you and a few others got together and purchased a mansion to turn into a co-op? What if you and an even bigger group of neighbors purchased an apartment complex? What if you and a community of people purchased land and built a dense multi-family co-living space? What is impossible for one person or family to do, might be very doable if many people or families got together. Co-living also has the benefit of having built in community, someone to look after your kids, or bring you soup when you are sick, folks to talk to after work, or have movie night with.
The housing crisis is going to require large, sustained, government attention to fix, but since that is not going to happen anytime soon, thinking outside the box can allow you to live a good life, with good people, in a good home.
Will this even work?
The in your face brutality of the Trump administration is only going to cause this crisis to intensify. It is very important that your neighbors know that when times get tough, what they need to do is come together and help each other, and not blame “the other.” Dividing us is necessary to the capitalist’s plan, and we can sabotage that plan by refusing to turn on each other.
Will all this sabotage destroy capitalism? Capitalism has shown an uncanny ability to mutate and metastasis into new and more craven forms, it’s unlikely we will all wake up tomorrow and it will die on its own. Will all this sabotage make the world better, absolutely!
As they say, the best time to have planted an apple tree was 5 years ago, the second best time to plant one is today. We must build a culture that sabotages capitalism in order to weaken and eventually replace the system that is destroying our world. This new system must center the thriving of human beings, the planet, and our souls. This will not be easy, but it will be rewarding. The great news is that everything mentioned in this guide is already happening and has been for a long time. More and more people are sabotaging the endless growth of capitalism and building something better, sustainable, and fulfilling.