By Thomas Oxford | Fuck The System
Let me say something that will make a lot of people uncomfortable.
The system isn’t winning because it’s more powerful than us.
It’s winning because it’s more organised than us.
That’s it. That’s the whole problem. And until we’re honest enough to say it out loud, we will keep losing; on Gaza, on surveillance, on housing, on the cost of living, on the slow digital enclosure of every aspect of our lives.
We have the numbers. We have the moral argument. We have the rage.
What we don’t have is a plan.
The War We’re Already In
This is not a metaphor. And I am certainly NOT being hyperbolic. This is a war…
Not a war with tanks and missiles, though that exists too, and we fund it. This is a class war, fought across multiple fronts simultaneously, by a highly coordinated opponent against a largely disorganised population.
Think about what they have:
Lobbyists who work every corridor of power, simultaneously, on every issue, for decades. Intelligence agencies sharing information across borders. Tech companies building infrastructure that governments then use to monitor their own citizens. Arms manufacturers funding think tanks that shape foreign policy that creates wars that sell more arms. Media conglomerates that decide what is a story and what isn’t.
They are not confused. They are not spread thin. They know exactly what they’re doing, and they’re doing it together.
Now think about what we have.
Protesters on different marches who don’t talk to each other. NGOs competing for the same funding. Activists burning out in three years. Movements built around charismatic individuals who get arrested, discredited, or worse; and then the movement collapses because it never existed without them.
We are not losing because the enemy is unbeatable.
We are losing because we have not taken the fight seriously.
The Martyrdom Trap
Here is a pattern that repeats throughout history with devastating consistency.
A movement rises. It gains momentum. It starts to scare the people in power. And then — the leader gets taken out.
MLK. Lumumba. Malcolm X. Allende. Sankara. Fred Hampton. The list is long and the method varies — assassination, imprisonment, character assassination, legal persecution — but the result is always the same. The movement stutters. The energy dissipates. The moment passes.
This is not bad luck. This is strategy.
COINTELPRO, the FBI’s covert programme to neutralise political movements in the 1960s and 70s, was explicit about this. Target the leadership. Create division. Sow paranoia. And the movement, built around those leaders, collapses from the top down.
We keep building movements with an off switch, and we keep being surprised when the enemy uses it.
The question is not how to protect our leaders better. The question is: how do we build a movement that has no off switch?
The Architecture of Resilience
Look at what survives.
The Iranian clerical network, for all its profound moral failures, was designed to withstand exactly this kind of attack. Power was distributed across overlapping institutions: the Revolutionary Guards, the clergy, the bonyads, and the Basij. Remove any node, and the system reconstitutes. There is no single point of failure.
The Zapatistas in Chiapas built something similar. When Marcos, their most visible figure, said he was a symbol, not a commander, he wasn’t being modest. He was being structurally intelligent. Decisions flowed from community councils. The movement didn’t live in him. It lived in thousands of communities that would continue with or without him.
The early Christian church survived the Roman Empire’s sustained attempt to destroy it because it was cell-based, decentralised, and held together by shared text and practice rather than central authority. Kill a bishop. Ten more appear. The faith was in the people, not the hierarchy.
This is the model.
Not a single general. A network of commanders. Not a headquarters. A thousand cells. Not a message that dies with its messenger — an idea so embedded it cannot be killed.
And here is the crucial insight that most people miss: every time a node is removed, the network should get stronger, not weaker. The removal creates a martyr, who recruits more people. It creates a vacancy, which forces others to step up and develop capabilities they didn’t know they had. It creates outrage, which drives more people into the cause.
You don’t build that by accident. You build it by design.
What We Actually Need
This is where we have to stop being vague and start being specific.
We need ex-military leadership.
Not because military thinking is the only kind that matters, it isn’t, but because people who have served inside hierarchical power structures understand things that most activists don’t. They understand operational security. They understand how to assign objectives, measure progress, and hold people accountable without it collapsing into either chaos or a cult of personality. They understand the difference between strategy and tactics, and how badly things go when you confuse the two.
There are former soldiers, intelligence officers, and military strategists who left those institutions precisely because of what they saw inside them. They are an underutilised asset. They belong at the coordination layer of this movement.
We need principled hackers and technologists.
Much of this war is going to be fought in the digital domain, and is already being fought there, largely by one side. Our communications are monitored. Our organisers are tracked. Our movements are predicted before they happen. Our social media is algorithmically suppressed when it gets too effective.
We need people who understand that landscape intimately. People who can build secure communications infrastructure, who understand how surveillance works well enough to route around it, who can expose the systems being used against us, and who can be trusted with that knowledge. The tech worker who walked out of Google over Project Nimbus isn’t just an inspiring story. They are a model and a resource.
We need insiders.
In government. In big tech. In the arms industry. In finance.
There are people in every one of those institutions who know things the public doesn’t, and who are sitting on that knowledge because they don’t know what to do with it, or because they’re afraid, or because there is no infrastructure to receive and protect them when they come forward.
We need to build that infrastructure. Secure channels. Legal support networks. Communities that will absorb and protect people who risk everything to do what’s right. Frances Haugen changed the public’s understanding of Facebook more than a decade of advocacy had. Daniel Ellsberg changed the course of history with one set of documents. These people are out there. We need to be ready for them.
We need people of means who are willing to use what they have.
Not billionaire saviour fantasies. But people with resources, whether that’s money, skills, platforms, or connections, who understand that neutrality at this point is complicity, and are ready to act accordingly.
And we need the general population to understand what is actually happening.
Not just to be angry. Not just to share posts. But to understand the structural reality of this war clearly enough to make intelligent choices about where to put their energy, their money, and their risk tolerance.
The Principle of the Lane
Here is one of the most important and most ignored concepts in movement building.
Stay in your lane. But know who’s in the lane next to you.
The anti-data centre movement and the anti-war movement are fighting the same enemy, the same corporations, the same financial interests, the same political infrastructure. But they are not the same fight, and pretending they are leads to diluted messaging, confused priorities, and activists burning out trying to be everything at once.
What is needed is not a merger. What is needed is coordination.
The person campaigning against surveillance infrastructure in their city should know that the person campaigning against weapons contracts two towns over is fighting the same beast from a different angle. They should be sharing intelligence, not strategy. They should be amplifying each other, not absorbing each other. When one front wins a victory, the other should understand what it means for their own fight. When one front comes under attack, the other should respond.
This is how a military thinks about a multi-front war. Not every unit fights every battle. Every unit knows what the other units are doing, and they coordinate at the strategic level while maintaining operational independence.
The anti-data centre campaigner doesn’t need to become an expert on the arms trade. But they need a direct line to someone who is.
The Structure That Strengthens Under Attack
Here is how you build an organisation that gets harder to kill the more it is attacked.
At the base, you have cells: small groups of people, ideally five to ten, who know each other well enough to trust each other, and who know as little as possible about other cells. Each cell has a specific focus: a campaign, a front, a function. They operate with substantial autonomy within agreed principles.
Above the cells, you have coordination nodes: experienced people whose role is not to direct cells but to facilitate communication between them, to identify where resources should flow, and to spot when a strategic opportunity is being missed because no single cell can see the whole picture.
Above the nodes, you have a council of principles: not leaders in the traditional sense, but custodians of the movement’s values and strategic direction. This council has no operational power. Its authority comes entirely from moral credibility and the trust of the cells. It can be ignored. That is a feature, not a bug.
And running through all of it is shared doctrine — a clear enough articulation of what this movement is, what it believes, and what it is trying to achieve, that any person at any level can make autonomous decisions that are consistent with the whole. Not orders. Principles.
Now. What happens when someone is taken out?
If they are at the cell level: the cell reorganises, or is absorbed into adjacent cells. The loss is local. The movement barely notices.
If they are at the coordination level, the cells they are connected to find other paths to each other. The gap creates a temporary inefficiency, not a collapse. Other coordinators expand their networks. Within months, the coordination structure is denser than it was before.
If they are at the council level, the martyrdom of a credible, principled figure is one of the most powerful recruiting tools a movement can have. New people step up. The council reconstitutes with fresh energy and broader legitimacy. The attack has done more for the movement than a year of organising.
This is the design. The movement should be structured so that every attack on it is a miscalculation by the attacker.
The Honest Assessment
Right now, we are losing.
Not because the cause isn’t just. Not because the people aren’t there. Not because it isn’t possible to win.
We are losing because we are disorganised, undisciplined, and still operating as if we are fighting for change within a system that is prepared to accommodate it. We are not. The system is being restructured in ways that will make the current inequalities look moderate in comparison. The window is not indefinitely open.
But here is what is also true.
Every major transformation in power in human history — every one — began from a position that looked like defeat. The labour movement, in its early days, was up against industrialists with private armies and governments in their pocket. The anti-colonial movements were up against the most powerful empires the world had ever seen. The civil rights movement faced a state apparatus willing to use lethal force.
They didn’t win by being stronger. They won by being smarter, more disciplined, and more committed to the long game than their opponents expected.
We can do the same.
But not like this. Not scattered, not leaderless in the bad sense of the word, not burning out in individual campaigns while the larger strategic picture remains unaddressed.
We need to organise. Not as a lifestyle. Not as an identity.
As a war-fighting force that intends to win.
The people are there. The cause is just. The analysis is clear.
What is missing is the decision to take this seriously.
Make it.
Thomas Oxford writes at fuckthesystem.id — Wear the message. Fund the resistance.