Solidarity Equality Dignity Power

Private charity will never fully meet the needs of personal want.

Both are symptoms of a competitive system that exploits the individual and maintains an unequal distribution of resources.

Only the solidarity of collective action and the power of collective demand will secure equality and dignity for all.

The arms of the homeless are neither guns nor money, but rather KNOWLEDGE — the KNOWLEDGE that the cause of homelessness is a competitive system that infects, parasitizes, and degrades society with divide-and-control tactics; the KNOWLEDGE that the isolated individuals of a society thus degraded are all the more easily exploited so as to artificially impose and enforce an unequal, exclusionary distribution of material resources and social worth; the KNOWLEDGE that gifts of private charity to the individuals thus isolated, degraded, and exploited are merely for show, and will never change this system, only perpetuate it; the KNOWLEDGE that to change this system requires the integrated solidarity of collective action and the integrated power of collective demand.

We are also armed with the knowledge of history, which informs us that freedom’s legacy is freedom’s future, which cruelties past can never blight.

Therefore, charity, gifts, handouts, reparations — these do nothing to dismantle the inhumane system of humiliation and privation.

Charity, gifts, handouts, reparations — these are simply the degrading and patronizing means by which the dominators dominate the dominated even more effectively, even more serenely.

Charity, gifts, handouts, reparations — these are the whips that make dogs out of humans.

Dignity for all will be secured only when an exclusionary hierarchy is replaced by an inclusive complementarity; when elitist domination gives way to the free and equal participation of all.

To those ends, we follow the principle that those affected by a decision are those who make the decision.

We meet in face-to-face assemblies of the people where all have a say in discussing the matters that affect our lives, in articulating the changes to make our lives better, in taking action to make these changes real.

We meet in face-to-face assemblies of the people where all may take part in fulfilling our potential for freedom and expanding our power to act for ourselves.

We meet in face-to-face assemblies of the people where each and every one of us, regardless of background or current circumstances, can exercise the playfully argumentative and sensuously associative capacities of self that make each of us a unique human individual secure in the theory and practice of equality.

We meet in face-to-face assemblies of the people where the uniqueness of each complements the diversity of all, where individual dignity unites with the inclusive power of collective action.

For with the solidarity of collective action and the power of collective demand, we resist the system’s depredations.

With the unified diversity of effective selves that come from making our own decisions and taking action accordingly, we overcome the system’s exploitation.

And by breaking down privilege with equality, competition with complementarity, we remove the system’s structures of domination and exclusion and reshape space according to the needs and pleasures of humanity, rather then the venal pressures of money.

The streets belong to us. The buildings belong to us. The city belongs to us. The nation belongs to us.

We are the people.

The world is ours to make and take care of and enjoy; its riches, ours to share equally and freely with all.

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