The Modest Manifesto:A Better World is Possible [1]

Chris H. Gray & Steven Mentor
"Neither Slave nor Master" – Camus 

We need to start our manifesto with epistemology.  Not just as homage to the Age of Information but because working knowledge starts with understanding how we know what we know.  Hubris indicates excessive naivete about epistemology, because: 

• Knowledge is limited.

• Knowledge is situated.

• Knowledge is deeply empirical and relentlessly discursive.

• Heteroglossia is better than genius.

• Praxis is the process.

• Trust the process.

• The best answers are beyond binaries, even beyond dialectics.

• Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis, Prosthesis, and again.

• Reality is beyond materialism vs. idealism.

• Reality is infinitely complex, not pure.

• Reality is improbable, not random.

• To be whole is to be part.

A better world will be based on commons, not just of nature and resources but of knowledge.  Commons assume community. 

A better world will be based on liberatory practices:

Strategic

• Nonviolent Direct Action for political change

• Prefiguration in Art, Action, and Life

• Resistance: personal self-defense, non-cooperation, to property as violence.

• Reclamation: of nature, of politics ("Throw them all out!"), of

• community, of morality.

• Liberatory Information: open source, shareware, anti-commodification.

We want information so we can be free.

Tactical

* Détournement, Irony, Reversion, Subversion, Seduction, Inspiration, Sacrifice, Communication, Coordination, Tolerance. 

A better world is based on principles, not prescriptions: 

• Autonomy -- community

• Commons -- land and knowledge

• Nature -- bioregions, sustainable, active

• Cultures -- autonomous, sustainable, actants

• Markets -- controlled by individuals, families, and syndicates

• "Thin" government -- many democratic institutions at many levels.

• (The more governments, the less government.)

• Property -- individual, family, syndicate, NOT corporate.

• Syndicates -- affinity groups, unions, alliances, NOT corporations.

• Families -- Based on complexity, life, choice, and tolerance, not nuclear ideology.

• Work -- Those who do the work, decide.

• Labor -- If it is alienated, it is oppression.

• Economics -- Profit is not policy, efficiency, or "natural".

Understandings 

"The Future is not yet written."

-- Sara O'Connor, The Terminator
 

• The personal is political; the political is personal.

• Bodies are personal.

• Technologies are embodied.

• Technologies have politics.

• Politics is about bodies.

• Bodies are sources of power.

• Knowledge is power.

                                  -- The Syndicate for Initiative

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  [1] This manifesto uses both the liberatory political experience of recent times with the same ideas of information theory the corporate globalization movement and contemporary militarization try and deploy, but for quite different ends.