Art of the Manifesto

If you want to inspire and motivate others, try writing a manifesto.

What is a manifesto?

It's the nuts and bolts of a concept or movement.

The manifesto is a list of briefly stated ideas around a specific topic, issue, or desire.

Manifesto. Making manifest, presto!

A short, easy to understand declaration of your beliefs.

A clarification and a call to action.

A dramatic sequence of key points that causes others to understand and participate.

The manifesto is designed to quickly transmit the essence or basic practices, in a way that gets other people to wake up, consider, and decide if they're for you or against you.

Manifesto. Marching orders. Trumpet blast.

Fast, orderly announcement of intentions and goals.

Bullet points that simplify and categorize your primary objectives and insights. Have you ever tried doing that for any of your personal viewpoints? It doesn't matter what the subject is, manifesto writing is a good exercise in communication.

Take some issue of your life. What are you passionate about? What do you think about, work on, and learn more about all the time? Can you nail down the top 10 or 20 aspects, rules, elements, highlights, or facets of it?

Write a manifesto about something, and see if you really understand it well, and can state things in a manner that sparks excitement or deeper understanding.

Try it. See how clear it is when other people read your manifesto. Ask someone to critique it for you.

Here's one.

Working Class
Vegan Manifesto

Working Class Vegan is based on the 6 principles of animal rights as explained by Gary L. Francione:

1. The abolitionist approach to animal rights maintains that all sentient beings, humans or non-humans, have one right: the basic right not to be treated as the property of others.

2. Our recognition of the one basic right means that we must abolish, and not merely regulate, institutionalized animal exploitation—because it assumes that animals are the property of humans.

3. Just as we reject racism, sexism, ageism, and hetero-sexism, we reject species-ism. The species of a sentient being is no more reason to deny the protection of this basic right than race, sex, age, or sexual orientation is a reason to deny membership in the human moral community to other humans.

4. We recognize that we will not abolish overnight the property status of non-humans, but we will support only those campaigns and positions that explicitly promote the abolitionist agenda. We will not support positions that call for supposedly “improved” regulation of animal exploitation. We reject any campaign that promotes sexism, racism, heterosexism or other forms of discrimination against humans.

5. We recognize that the most important step that any of us can take toward abolition is to adopt the vegan lifestyle and to educate others about veganism. Veganism is the principle of abolition applied to one’s personal life and the consumption of any meat, fowl, fish, or dairy product, or the wearing or use of animal products, is inconsistent with the abolitionist perspective.

6. We recognize the principle of nonviolence as the guiding principle of the animal rights movement. Violence is the problem; it is not any part of the solution.

Fluxus Manifesto.