Communalism is the most appropriate global political project for social ecology.
To begin with, we will clearly distinguish between power and domination. Power should not be limited to the negative of permission andprohibition, a normative legal and discursive concept distilled by the State. We must conceive of it as a necessity inherent to social life, that of deciding and doing. Claimed or concealed, it is a flow circulating in any human collective while organizing it, realizing it in different ways: coercive or not. At the heart of this project is a deep conviction: where there is political, that is to say the experience of freedom, of deciding and doing together, domination tends to disappear; conversely, where domination reigns, this political dimension fades from the experience of citizens and becomes the object of a war of egos leading to destruction. The political contains much more than Politics, in the sense that parties and bureaucrats of the public sphere can understand it, this spectacular and repetitive state fact that diverts and proceeds to box the former.
“Power that is not in the hands of the masses must inevitably fall into the hands of their oppressors. (…) Social revolutionaries, far from removing the problem of power from their field of vision, must ask themselves how to give it a concrete institutional form of emancipation.” Murray Bookchin
In the current context, which could not be more confused, within this complex social totality, in order to rid ourselves of our condition as objects, we will need to identify the Power, the one that centralizes all domination, be it objective, symbolic or subjective: the State. The State, an essential category of Capitalism, being to this day the sanctuary of the political aspects of this social totality, we will have to differentiate this monopoly that we will call Politics from this other power to which we aspire: The political.
“One cannot think of the social without the political: in other words, there is no society without power.” Pierre Clastres
The main difficulty in advancing the communalist project essentially lies in the fact that it remains essentially a societal abstraction, something not experienced.
It must be said again and again that most “communal” experiments, past or contemporary, have only a distant or at best embryonic relationship with communalism as a realized society. In order to materialize, it requires a qualitative and quantitative expansion that has found neither the time nor the place to begin to materialize, except during too brief revolutionary interludes such as the Paris Commune or the Spanish Civil War, which were crushed in blood by reactionary forces, or in particularly unfavorable contemporary circumstances, such as Rojava or Chiapas.
The forces of domination, wherever they are and whatever their ideological trappings, have always shown the utmost hostility towards all attempts at self-organization by the people. This is hardly surprising, since it is all about maintaining their hold and avoiding social and political emancipation at all costs. Whatever its nature, be it state (Empire), economic (Capitalism) or even religious (which, as we can see, are difficult to dissociate), a structure of domination cannot allow itself to be seen by populations enslaved by its works as a possible model of social organization with the aim of escaping from it.
Giving substance to this idea, in our particular circumstances, is the aim of a communalist movement as a process, in order to begin to create here and now communal self-government institutions in parallel with and in tension with those of the State.
The first experience of communalism is that of the grassroots assembly where a given population gathers to discuss its problems and which, thanks to its direct and concrete knowledge of the nature of these problems, will be able to determine the solutions that are appropriate to the needs of the community.
It is immediately clear that the decisions that emerge under these conditions will always be more relevant than decisions made from above, by an overwhelming parasitic bureaucracy, made up of people who are ignorant of the territories and the particular realities on the ground or whose interests lie elsewhere. If only in the defense of their privileges and their hierarchical status.
These are the same people who, very generally, claim that it is not possible to reach agreement in assembly practices due to overly divergent opinions.
But all those who accept the principle of these grassroots assemblies and have experienced them, despite the initial difficulties, see the opposite to be true. The practice of debate in assembly often has a revealing effect, shedding light on certain aspects of things that had previously escaped them. Through constant dialogue, it makes it possible to overcome egos and inter-individual conflicts and to break free from fixed opinions.
In contrast to the current system of domination, which locks everyone into a sterile individualism and ignores the realities of others, exacerbating conflicts and reducing everyone to a permanent struggle for mere survival.
Instituting communalism also means establishing a shared world where each person can affirm not their individualism but their individuality. Because communalism, far from seeking to restore old hierarchical communities, also means abolishing all hierarchies of domination and all institutional privileges. Equality is not an abstract principle but a permanent process so that all women and men belonging to a Commune can take their place and express themselves within the decision-making processes with the same rights. The assembly debate is in itself a formidable educational tool, if only in the learning of how to live together.
The frenzied productivism that the forced search for the valorization of value that characterizes the capitalist system entails is the direct cause of the ecological catastrophe that is destroying the conditions of life on the planet. Creating needs, however useless they may be, is the stock-in-trade of this system. Establishing communalism would also mean putting an end to this permanent inflation of “needs”. On the one hand, because a large part of the practical utilities could be produced and organized at the municipal level, effectively tackling the hold of the logistics empire and its disastrous ecological footprint, which is as much colonial as it is extractivist and energy-based. A practice which, at the same time, socially speaking, would prevent everyone from having to fend for themselves, and therefore from having to buy everything, often marginalized because they cannot even sell their labor. On the other hand, because we know that consumerism is for many the compensatory effect of the loneliness and frustrations of a fundamentally disappointing life. A life devoid of meaning and more often than not crushed by the necessity of having to do a job that is routine and unrelated to one’s own aspirations.
“Suffering, insofar as it has a social cause, calls the domination into question all the more, as it blatantly exposes its arbitrariness and highlights its irrationality. It is living proof that what is passed off as the rational organization of society, based on the immutable laws of the economy, is in reality a mythical irrationality that nothing can ultimately justify. (T. Adorno)
Yet the very Communalist project aims to put an end to this alienated labor, which is merely the consequence of a world governed by political economy and its total social irrationality.
This requires a complete reversal of the global organizational mode by relocating the decision-making center in the human being, in his or her relationships and living environments.
The current domination has done everything in its power to disrupt the territories, to the point of making them totally incomprehensible to those very people who are supposed to “live” there, transforming them into non-places where no one can recognize themselves and distinguish any common place at all.
The land use planning is done “from above”, above ground and almost without any consultation of the populations concerned, who see their environment and their particular cultures destroyed on the basis of profitability criteria that ignore the real life of the people. So much so that everyone ends up feeling like a stranger in their own country. Crushed by norms and regulations over which they have no control. Based on this observation, that the majority are experiencing in their own skin and to their greatest misfortune, it is easy to understand the value of giving decision-making power back to those directly concerned. And this is exactly what the communalist project proposes by giving this decision-making power to the communal grassroots assemblies.
“Despite the complexity of its results, capital has only one precondition: people must be deprived of direct access to the goods they consider necessary for their lives, and thus forced to obtain them through the mediation of the market.” (Endnotes1)
Relocating the production of the essentials of our vital needs, starting with food, is also a priority. We can clearly see that we are in an absurd and costly dependence, in ecological and energy terms, on distant imports whose real provenance and production conditions we know nothing about. The Market, as it takes shape in the capitalist world, has become a kind of entity which, once again, is totally foreign to us and yet imposes its rules on us on a daily basis; the way we eat, the way we dress, the way we keep warm and even the way we have to work to ensure our own survival. Worse still, this market system traps us all in a competitive mindset that seeks to abolish all the solidarity that makes up our human reality and gives it meaning.
The framework and objective of this Workshop is to breathe new life and meaning into a human society that is once again respectful of its natural environment, by offering it new organizational perspectives that put an end to the aberration of today’s world. The communalist project rejects any ideology that is rigid in its dogmas. It does not claim to have all the solutions or to have a magic wand. On the other hand, it knows what it no longer wants and therefore takes an active stance in the search for possibilities to overcome this, starting from current realities. We will start from the struggles against all forms of domination, social exploitation and exploitation of our natural environment, but also from the search for alternatives and attempts at autonomy.
This is why this workshop will itself be open and receptive to all proposals that are clearly and uncompromisingly outside the forms of the current system of domination and all its appellations.
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Translated by TerKo with the help of a free translation tool.
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