"Social movement organizations are groups where people can come together to meet the needs of participants and others through reconstructing new practices, ways of relating, and decision making while also opposing domination, exploitation, and oppression. Social movement organizations can help meet people’s short-term needs while also taking actions to transform society. Social movements organizations vary in many ways. They can be in relationship to community issues, workplace issues, student issues, and beyond. At their best, social movement organizations wisely use free and egalitarian processes to meet short-term, mid-term, and long-term needs of people. However, not all social movements organizations have the kinds of organizational relations, qualities, and contents that make them ethical and effective. Free and egalitarian relations and practices require the means thereof; they will not emerge out of nowhere. The freedom of each and all has objective, universal, and necessary features as well as subjective, particular, and contingent features. The freedom of each and all needs to be continuously recreated, co-authored, and given life by people responding to unfolding conditions.
While social movements are needed to transform society outside of the official channels of business as usual, social movements can go terribly wrong. For example, some attempts at social movements replicate unfree and unequal structures and contents of the social order that they oppose! Some social movements do not meaningfully oppose unfreedom while others fail to meaningfully reconstruct new ways to meet people’s needs. Given the goal of using free and egalitarian processes to develop free and egalitarian social relations, the following are some foundational elements for social movement organizations. Participants in social movement organizations can agree to shared practices, processes, and goals without participants agreeing on a specific ideological line. With something like the following as a compass, social movements and participants in them will be better able to navigate from here to a better society. "
"Elinor Ostrom’s rules for governing the commons provide criteria for how a common sector can function well (Ostrom 2021). Even though her politics differ in crucial ways from libertarian communism, many of the overall principles and practices for managing the commons that she outlines can strengthen libertarian communist praxis (Libertarian 2013). And although not stated until now, the above approach of libertarian communism satisfies Elinor Ostrom’s 8 rules for governing the commons: It has clear and non-hierarchical processes/practices/nomos/decision making, planning, and rules, it matches rules governing commons to local conditions (while also retaining specific universalist features), it ensures that those affected by decisions can modify them, it aims towards the commons being respected by others (through a focus on global revolution as well as defending the commons against hierarchical forces), it develops ways for people to hold each other accountable to rules of the commons without resorting to hierarchical strata and without hierarchical security forces, it has ways of dealing with rule violations as well as accessible dispute resolution (via free association/disassociation, self defense and defense of others, breaking up fights, diffuse social disapproval, and dispute resolution via mediation), and has responsibility for governing common resources in nested tiers from lowest level up to the entire interconnected system. "