This is going to seem like a stretch, but try to stick with it.

At first glance, the idea seems ridiculous that it’s any kind of revolutionary act to make sure you’re using your bathroom breaks at a leisurely pace, posting memes from the Internet or watching till the end of a video.

However, as Amazon has showed us, your bosses would make you piss in a bottle and shit in a bag if they could get away with it, or force you to clock out when you continue doing the bodily functions necessary to live but don’t benefit your bosses directly.

It’s also true that when all workers are behaving this way, it’s solidarity for people who, for example, have IBS or any other issue that might leave them singled out by bosses looking for excuses to force out disabled people.

For all of the talk about “General Strike!” and “Revolution now!”, there are moments of swell of unidentifiable common feeling. Mostly, though, people have to practice to gain courage for the next step. We don’t ever become; we are always becoming.

And you may dream of how you’re going to learn how to camp, deliver first aid, and use a firearm as part of a team, but if you’re going to do that next month, today you should figure out how can you loaf at work and get away with it? what can you shoplift safely? What is the group text with your coworkers where you agree not to respond to bosses off the clock if they’re not paying you for your time?

You may not be able to abolish police today, so how can you commit to not involving cops in anything & de-escalating situations so they’re unlikely to be called?

When Americans learn about slavery at all, it tends to be only to be about how wretched and powerless it was to be enslaved, a handful of armed uprisings, and some figures who escaped, like Harriet Tubman (tho we don’t learn about her as a warband leader).

It is important to learn about Nat Turner or the Stono Rebellion; it’s important to see how the most important aspect of abolition was the enslaved people freeing themselves during the Civil War as part of what was a general strike. But for decades between these incidents and exceptions, all the resistance that was possible for most people was to work slowly, to steal when they could, sabotage, and vex. (The slavers tried to diagnose these expressions of resistance as dysaesthesia aethiopica.) People were enslaved by someone who the law said had complete power over their bodies, and successful flight or uprising wasn’t always ready in the moment. But they did what they could, where they could, as much as they could, because they were not slaves: they were human.

The power of slavers was overwhelming, but it couldn’t be everywhere at once, exercising itself all at once; their pretenses at totalitarianism were doomed to fail even if they were brutal enough to keep it all going.

As we look at the power of modern bosses and the state, we can hardly say we are worse off than enslaved people of the past. we are not free, we are controlled, we are surveilled, but the power of our masters is far more brittle.

Exercise the muscles you want to strengthen. Feel as proud resisting their power every single day with every way you can get away as a liberal is proud when they announce “I voted!” every couple of years. And build up so that when the big moments swell, you’ll be ready to do even more, with as many people around you as possible.