This text follows on from “Capitalism and the State: Know to Subvert!”, in which we attempted to identify the systemic foundations of domination—the logic of the state and capitalism—in order to better deconstruct them. But criticism is not enough. To radically transform our conditions of existence, we must organize the response.
In this second part, we propose to explore the levers of a concrete communalist strategy, rooted in everyday life. It is a matter of instituting, here and now, forms of collective life free from the logic of centralized power and the market, by rebuilding our capacity to act from the bottom up: in our streets, our neighborhoods, our communities.
For a communalist strategy here and now
War is never an isolated act. – if, for example, we question the will of the adversary – This will is not something completely unknown; what it is today teaches us what it will be tomorrow. – Clausewitz – On War –
Learning from the past
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Fukuyama, in his book The End of History, proclaimed the absolute and definitive supremacy of the ideal of liberal democracy, the very necessity of progress, and the unassailable horizon of our time. It is up to us to shatter this leaden shell. Now more than ever, we must draw attention to this sudden resurgence from the past in order to suspend this frenetic pace of current events, where one event follows another in rapid succession. For “if only the present is the time of politics, any event in the past can acquire or regain a higher degree of relevance than it had at the time it occurred.” – Walter Benjamin – For him, it was a question of considering the past as a reservoir of vengeful energy. It is by drawing on the past without illusions that it is possible to generate the energy necessary to invent a completely different world, a world that is emancipated but not predetermined. So the words of the past touch us by making us feel their disturbing strangeness, like the arrow of the question they pose to us, with the collisions of the present acting as their conduits. It is up to us to pick up this arrow and shoot it back, following in the footsteps of Murray Bookchin, a thinker on social ecology and communalism who drew heavily on the Spanish Revolution for his vision of a way out of capitalism.
The Spanish Revolution1 – 1936-1939 – was the result of a process spanning decades of intergenerational struggles and daily learning on the job, but also of the libertarian culture in the libertarian athenaeums. This young proletariat, still largely unformed by industry and peasantry, demonstrated unparalleled creativity and inventiveness in both the social and political spheres. With the socialization of the means of production, the development of production and consumption that was as local and territorial as possible, and the elimination of money in many communities, these revolutionary achievements took a big step toward the elimination of the essential categories of capitalism. But this attempt was doomed to failure if it did not spread to neighboring countries and on a global scale. At the same time, cities and industrial production had to be decentralized, as theorized by the secretary of the CNT intellectuals, thus anticipating and preceding the proposals of social ecology2. With the revolution defeated by the capitalist international armed with its fascisms, all these hopes were dashed, but not lost, since history allows us to reclaim them.
Since then, we have seen how and why capitalism has mutated many times in order to continue its mad rush towards greater valorization of value. In the war between the proletariat and Capital, the latter has for the moment won3 by naturalizing work and returning the former to its logic of consumption, a logic leading to the society of the spectacle, social separation and atomization, but also to ecological devastation. It is these latter effects that give us the measure of the ultimate contradictions of capitalism, those of a war against life itself. The current challenge is enormous at a time when techno-science and digital technology are confusing, blinding, and controlling us to the point of accepting the fatalism of a destruction programmed by the very dynamics of this system. A sudden awakening of consciousness is vital if we are finally to decide to prepare ourselves to win this war. We must understand from the outset that no movement with revolutionary pretensions can arise or develop by turning its back on its past. An African proverb says, “If you don’t know where you’re going, look behind you.” This humility gives us a measure of what we can learn from the war and revolution in Spain, from fascism and the truncated responses of anti-fascism. We will discuss strategies and tactics for concretely building such a movement, beyond electoral illusions and institutional dead ends. The primary objective is to share experiences, exchange ideas on how to organize politics against politics, and open up avenues for the establishment of new popular assemblies that promise direct democracy. This is a strategy developed not by well-known intellectuals but by a Collective Intelligence developed emotionally in the heat of action, in collective struggles and alternative achievements, in close complicity for a common goal: libertarian communism. It is this capacity for dialogue, combined with enthusiasm for our daily lives, that could well be one of the keys to developing a collective intelligence which, let’s face it, is far from being able to respond to the enormous challenges currently facing us.
Spanish anarchists were concerned with the concrete aspects of a future libertarian society and eagerly discussed almost every change that a revolution might bring to their daily lives. – Murray Bookchin – The Spanish Anarchists – Lux Editions – 2023
To act here and now
Another important lesson to learn from our Spanish predecessors, in terms of the here and now of an established movement, is not to wait for a revolution to happen before taking action. It is essential to immediately establish flexible but solid institutions as the embryo of the world to come. It is this historical fact that feeds Murray Bookchin’s essential political proposal of communalism, which will determine the very essence of the communalist strategy: “The tension between confederations and the state must remain clear and uncompromising… libertarian municipalism is formed in a struggle against the state; it is strengthened and even defined by this opposition.” This must continue until we achieve a balance of power that is favorable to us.
In the current geopolitical context, the political and social question is inseparable from that of ecology. It is asserting itself on the margins, through practices, in restricted territories, in municipalities, and wherever human groups are seeking to regain control of their lives (housing, peasant agriculture, health, energy and essential goods production, artistic life, etc.). No alternative project will truly succeed without the development of a movement that brings together both the struggles against all forms of domination and for dignity, and the concrete alternatives that are consciously seeking to move beyond capitalism. It is therefore necessary to increase exchanges between these spaces, to create bonds of solidarity, and to anchor them in and between communities, regions, and internationally. Equipped with this communalist culture and practice, the many ongoing experiences in social pedagogy, alternative education, popular education, shared housing and spaces, self-managed production, collective farms, anti-patriarchal struggles, feminist struggles, struggles against digitalization, active solidarity with migrants and ZADs, can contribute to enriching this political dynamic, which, starting at the local level, must federate within a territory and confederate beyond it.
Three recent events provide us with fundamental elements for developing a concrete and relevant strategy. The first to consider is undoubtedly the pandemic, which has allowed a large number of people to experience firsthand our dependence on global market-driven mass distribution for our food and healthcare systems. This glaring demonstration of our lack of food autonomy has enabled many people to see things more clearly. Closer to home and still on the same theme, the Soulèvements de la terre (Earth Uprisings) have shown us the way forward, demonstrating the determination of a movement to denounce the agro-industry’s monopolization of water and mobilize forces to achieve victories. Even closer to home, farmers across Europe are mobilizing to denounce the acceleration of agricultural market globalization through free trade agreements, such as Mercosur, which sacrifices small farmers and deprives us of all food autonomy. We have reached a point where the process that began with the enclosures is coming to an end, with the disappearance of our farmers, both in the North and in the South, converting the land into an energy-intensive and polluting factory world. This growing awareness that we are at the mercy of a machine that is increasingly fragile in terms of food resources shows us the way forward, bringing together those who are fighting and those who are creating alternatives.
This is a whole process that must involve and unite in a communalist movement all the collectives in cities and the countryside that are fighting against domination and capitalism in order to create and anchor our own communal self-institutions in tension with those of the state. The world of tomorrow is being built today. In these assemblies, through shared reflection and action with a view to a new world, and with the help of empathy, we will be able to determine together our real food needs, thinking of the most disadvantaged and working closely with small farmers, with the aim of repopulating the countryside that has been emptied of its inhabitants. This is a joint creation of the power to decide and create, either politically4 as a strong link within our diversity and embedded in the natural environment, or through a conscious and voluntary move towards a definitive exit from capitalism and towards social ecology. Currently, given these vital mobilizations that concern everyone, we need to align our strategy with this path of regaining food autonomy, which is an indispensable ally of political autonomy.
What forces do we have at our disposal? Not potentially, but actually? We must admit that the balance of power is far from favorable to us due to a lack of support for our proposals, but above all due to a lack of organization. This is where the problem lies, and it is this lack that our strategy must first address. If we manage to set this dynamic in motion, we will have taken the first step, which is undoubtedly the most difficult. It is up to all of us to identify the points we have in common with other spatially dispersed collectives, to bring together and develop this collective intelligence, in a constant and determined dialogue to create a diverse and unifying emancipatory movement that brings hope, locally, regionally and beyond. The primary strategy remains the creation of a vast autonomous socio-cultural and political movement capable of bringing together the scattered emancipatory struggles and sensibilities against the yoke of domination united by capitalism, which is necessarily totalitarian. This movement will be the seed of a new parallel world where we can decide what tools we need, to the point of largely dispensing with digital technology, in order to put ourselves back in the flow of life, where human relationships will be a priority in all areas, starting at the local level. This vast and now vital task involves the dynamic interaction of three inseparable elements: theory, practice—dialectically united—aiming at an emancipatory horizon.
Floréal M. Romero
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- Notes:
- [←1 ] See: Revolution and Collectivization in Spain
- [←2 ] See:
- Agir ici et maintenant. Penser l’écologie sociale de Murray Bookchin (Soon to be published in English.) by Floréal M. Romero Ed. Du Commun 10-10-2019 P-81 to 84
- [←3 ] This is what billionaire Warren Buffet said in 2006: There is a class war, it’s a fact, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s winning, and we’re winning it (New York Times, November 26, 2006).
- [←4 ] We only defend what we love. In addition to the bond of trust, and even direct collaboration through mutual aid, this practice is in itself a school of life, fostering the development of empathy and immersion in the natural environment through a sensory understanding of our connection to nature and the pleasure of being part of it and collaborating with it.
- [←5 ] See: Reprendre la terre aux machines (Reclaiming the Land from the Machines) by Atelier Paysan, Ed du Seuil, 2021.
Further reading:
Translated by TerKo using free tool.