Notes from J Call Open Source Democracy

Problem: The Current Nationwide Movements to Resist the Threats to American democracy/rising Tide of Authoritarianism Mirroring Nazi Germany Are Primarily Reactive, Ad Hoc, and Focus on One-day Mass Protests at the expense of Building Long-term, In-person Relationships that Are Foundational to Resilience to Fascism at both Local and National Levels

Further, in order to overcome the highly organized and distributed nature of threats to democracy (see digital takeover, Heritage Foundation and Project 2025, Russian influence and interference), We the People must become equally (or more) organized, connected, dedicated to not just put the immediate fire out, but take action to strengthen and use technology to modernize democracy as a counter to the ever-increasing rise of authoritarian nations who use technology to enhance the power of their regimes.

Need to Find Citation: Looking at the History of both the Rise of Fascist Regimes and Revolutions, only about 15% of the Population Needs to Be Active supporters/footsoldiers/participants

See:

• Balkans pro-democracy movements in 90s,

• Nazi Party’s rise from fringe and outlawed to total power with most Germans concerned about economic issues but were happy to have a clear scapegoat for their very legitimate suffering

  • (and the volunteer police battalions who committed massacres in Eastern Europe and Ukraine, civilians who were more eager than many Nazis to commit mass atrocities. This was great for the regime because during the Holocaust of Bullets in Europe, a lot of Nazi soldiers ended up getting traumatized by how horrible and personal the mass executions were, so having a cadre of eager civilians helped relieve that burden. Ultimately how horrifying and draining all the killing was became the motivation to build the concentration camps and devote SS doctors to become engineers of death, always coming up with more efficient ways to systematize the genocide. Citation: Hitler’s Willing Executioners, The Nazi Doctors

• Most CIA coups overthrowing democratic governments, like Iran in 1954 and Chile 1973, I’m sure the list goes on here

Solution: Provide Playbooks (strategy) and Step-by-step Templates (tactics) that Any American Anywhere Can Follow to Build a Proactive, Future-focused Grassroots network/organization at the Local Level

Our Message May Resonate More with Progressives, but the Tools Themselves Are Party-agnostic and Meant to Empower ALL Americans to Address the Systemic Threats to Democracy, Weaknesses that Have Been Simmering for years/decades and Are now at a Boiling Point

Issues that Prioritize the Wants of the Powerful over the Needs of Everyday People

Fight the Corruption and Moral Decay within Their Preferred Political Party and Expand the

Key Values

• Defeat isolation and meaninglessness with human connection. And this isn’t best friends club—we see the political divisions play out in our personal lives, and pop psychology tells us to “go no contact” or just cut people off rather than have (healthy) confrontation/conflict.

• We don’t need to agree on everything to work together. We are fighting to keep democracy and freedom of speech before they’re gone forever, which hurts everyone except EPICOE. After democracy is saved, we can go back to arguing about

• Organizing is not a luxury or a privilege, it’s not something you need to be an “activist” to do. It’s a matter of personal and collective survival.

• Being open enough to always grow and include new people, but zero/low-trust enough that a few disruptive people can’t derail things. A network united by smaller circles of trust / a spiral configuration where anyone on the spiral can see the person at the center, who is a servant leader with responsibility to serve, not power to hold.

  • See: Zapatista’s caracoles https://chiapas-support.org/2019/09/05/the-zapatista-caracoles/

  • “The Caracoles have a similar function, that of “windows to see us inside and for us to see outside,” that of “megaphones to get our word out and to hear the ones far away,” say the rebels in the southeast.

    For their part, the *Juntas de Buen Gobierno *(Good Governance Boards or, simply, Juntas) operate through the principles of rotation, revocation of mandate (recall) and accountability. **They are true networks of power from below. **In them the municipal councils, which group together the community authorities, are articulated. This is how that emancipatory form of power is woven, in which the rulers become servants, people that will govern by obeying the people.”

  • See: Kurdish democratic confederalism

    “A key element of democratic confederalism is** a focus on grassroots, bottom-up political organising through a variety of different structures**, ranging from small neighbourhood communes, unions, co-operatives, councils and committees, through a confederated system all the way up to the world-wide KCK. In conjunction with these, parallel structures provide an autonomous space for women’s and youth organising.”

• Having a culture of asking members to distill their particular knowledge and experience into products that can help the group/movement as a whole.

  • If you’re a project manager or engineer with 0 activist experience, help us systematize and scale what will become a very complex system with a lot of moving parts.
  • If you’re an activist with decades of hard-earned lessons to share, distill that knowledge in a useful way that’s not overly preachy and leaves room for baby activists to keep it in mind while learning for themselves.

• We don’t waste time trying to figure out if someone is a disruptor or asshole or troubled/needy in some way that’s becoming problematic. Maybe use some gentle parenting techniques? Like if someone is freaking out, have “vibes” people who can try to be empathic with them and get to the bottom of what’s really bothering them.

  • To this end, the strategic goals/mission has to be very fleshed out and easy to understand to be used as a guiding star. If the mission is unclear, it becomes much more subjective whether a given behavior is disrupting the mission or not.

Resources on Strategy

Gene Sharp’s work on strategic nonviolence (setting aside our personal views on pure pacifism, it’s really important meta-strategy stuff about how to overthrow regimes through grassroots mass movements)

• https://www.aeinstein.org/self-liberation-toolkit
• 2-pager for 198 Methods of Nonviolent Action (it’s also a longass book)
• From Dictatorship to Democracy
• The Anti-Coup

Paulo Freire and Coyuntura Analysis

• Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed was the source inspiration for the South American iteration of coyuntura
• Ok so I’m not trying to Jewsplain Spanish here, but coyuntura in Spanish encompasses several different words in English like juncture, conjuncture, moment. So the form of political analysis known as coyuntura is often translated as conjunctural analysis, but in more plain terms is known as “naming the moment”
• From Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
  • NOTE: With its roots in Marxism there’s probably a lot of Russia-aligned proponents of this model. We will take what is helpful and discard the rest / don’t shoot the messenger. My main familiarity with coyuntura is not the historical anti-Mussolini Gramsci version, but the modern movements in South America that embraced and implemented coyuntura in 60s/70s through present day.
    • Conjunctural analyses are an important tool for understanding that complexity, since they seek to explain the dynamic process of history at a certain point in time. Any given point in time is rooted in a past and a future: the past shapes the present, but the present also presages what may come in the future depending on how one intervenes now. That is why conjunctural analyses, derived from a history of Marxist analysis and from the work of the political and social movements that conduct them, are rooted in four principles:
      1. History. Since events do not take place in isolation but are part of a long-term process, there must be a distinction between incidental or occasional events and organic or structural events.
      2. Totality. Events are interconnected. They are part of a complex structure that encompasses various possibilities.
      3. Structure. Events take place within a lattice that includes economic, political, social, and cultural aspects and within which people are organised into classes and power blocs that interact through institutions and ideas.
      4. Politics. Events must be understood in an active way, which means asking how a political force will act to shape the future, rather than passively watching the future unfold. Answering this question requires a close analysis of the nature of class formation, the balance of political forces, and cultural traditions that could advance a certain political agenda.

Tl;dr On Coyuntura (added 9/25)

From Methodology of Coyuntural Analysis Notebook # 1

Page 7

We will understand coyuntura as: a cut in the actual moment or in the moment of the development of the social totality or structure, form the point of view of the correlation of forces.

In notebook #5 we will discuss in more detail what the significance of a “cut in the actual moment of history” signifies and in Notebook #7 what the “correlation of forces” is.

Coyuntural analysis in general refers to the study of the actual moment in which we are living. However, and analysis of coyuntura can also be done on understandings of the past even if they are from many years ago.

The analysis of coyuntura implies two things:

1. A diagnostic of the correlation of forces in the actual moment of a national social totality. (Although generally it is used for national analysis it can also be used in regional and local analysis as well—of the state, department, region, colony, barrio, sector, canton, etc.).

2. A diagnostic of actions (and its practice) that are necessary to influence in that correlation.

Page 9

The fundamental question of the epistemology in general terms is: What are those conditions that make possible4 the understanding/knowledge in the science? (page 9)

Soviet Understanding of Correlation of Forces

From TomDispatch: A regular antidote to the mainstream media, author Michael Klare

In Western military circles, it’s common to refer to the “balance of forces” — the lineup of tanks, planes, ships, missiles, and battle formations on the opposing sides of any conflict. If one has twice as many combat assets as its opponent and the leadership abilities on each side are approximately equal, it should win.

The notion of the correlation of forces has a long history in military and strategic thinking.

Writing about Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812, Tolstoy observed that wars are won not by the superior generalship of charismatic leaders but through the fighting spirit of common soldiers taking up arms against a loathsome enemy.

As the Bolshevik Party became an institutionalized dictatorship under Joseph Stalin, the correlation-of-forces concept grew into an article of faith based on a belief in the ultimate victory of socialism over capitalism. During the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras of the 1960s and 1970s, Soviet leaders regularly claimed that world capitalism was in irreversible decline and the socialist camp, augmented by revolutionary regimes in the “Third World,” was destined to achieve global supremacy.

For U.S. strategists, the Soviet decision to intervene [in Afghanistan in the 80s] and, despite endless losses, persevere was proof that the Russian leaders had ignored the correlation of forces

Huge quantities of munitions were given [by Reagan[ to the mujahideen and rebels like the Contras in Nicaragua, usually via secret channels set up by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Putin and his close advisers viewed the sudden American withdrawal as a conspicuous sign of U.S. weakness and, in particular, of disarray within the Western alliance. American power was in full retreat, they believed, and the NATO powers irrevocably divided.

This left Putin and his inner circle convinced that Russia could act with relative impunity in Ukraine, a radical misreading of the global situation. In fact, along with top U.S. military leaders, the Biden White House was eager to exit Afghanistan. They wanted to focus instead on what were seen as far more important priorities, especially [containing Russian and China]

As a result, Moscow has faced the exact opposite of what Putin’s advisers undoubtedly anticipated: not a weak, divided West, but a newly energized U.S.-NATO alliance determined to assist Ukrainian forces [I don’t agree with this point]

We also know that Putin’s top intelligence officials fed him inaccurate information about the political and military situation in Ukraine, contributing to his belief that the defending forces would surrender after just a few days of combat. He subsequently arrested some of those officials, including Sergey Beseda, head of the foreign intelligence branch of the FSB (the successor to the KGB).