One of the ways that capitalism works to make us less effective organizers is by teaching us that money is equivalent to power. And it works so well because it's almost true. And in some situations, this way of viewing things can be useful, such as when planning a protest, the goal is often to threaten the profits of businesses and financial institutions in order to get them to capitulate to demands or to get them to put pressure somewhere else.
That is only one tactic and one way of viewing how to protest and is as a result limited in where it can and should be implemented as a tactic.
But as I stated this is only one way of viewing power; the lens through which capitalists and capitalist enterprises maintain their control and thus what should be deprived of them to wrest that control from their hands. In reality, money is a proxy. And as a proxy, it only has power by the nature of what it represents. Labor. Capitalists derive most of their power from money: the accumulation of labor value that is extracted from their workers and converted into little pieces of paper that represent that value.
And because money is such a tempting form of power to focus on. We often forget that labor in and of itself is powerful and as such, can also be leveraged in the same way.
Take your average city for example. There are most likely a large number of different and varied businesses, some of which may be fantastically wealthy. However, if you focus on which forms of labor are most vital to the operation of the city, then you get a much more accurate representation of where the most valuable labor is being performed than if you only look at where wealth is concentrated.
Places like water treatment plants, garbage and waste management, electrical and gas infrastructure, transportation infrastructure such as roads or bus garages and specifically areas where transit is most concentrated, and more recently; centralized digital infrastructure.
These are the hubs of labor power that can shut a city down (or a state or nation even).
They are also the locations that (with some exceptions) should generally be a last resort due to the massive negative externalities which would occur if one were to for example blockade a water treatment facility to prevent the work from being done. Such forms of direct action lends incredible bargaining power to movements that can pull it off but should be weighed against the negative consequences.
These along with political locations are also the critical centers of power that should be captured if and when a revolution is underway.
