📜 The POLITICAL versus politics

“Politics” for state institutions

Today, “doing politics” means entering the game of state institutions, parties, elections, and careers as professional politicians. This game, forged by the bourgeoisie in the 16th century to accompany the rise of capitalism, claims to represent the people while organizing their dispossession. Under the guise of representative democracy—an oxymoron—it is in reality nothing more than the management of dominant economic interests.

Initially, this politics was reserved for the elites. Gradually, the working classes, women, and people of color were “included” in this theater, but without ever really being able to change the rules. They were simply integrated into a system designed to neutralize any profound transformation by making them dependent on the market and state institutions.

This system produces a specific caste: that of politicians. Their function, regardless of their party affiliation, is to manage the contradictions of capitalism, not to escape it. Their careers depend on their ability to adapt to the logic of political economy, not to challenge it. This is why institutional politics today is synonymous with empty promises, careerism, and submission to the powers of money.

“The” Political for Communalism

Communalism, on the other hand, claims “The Political”—a completely different way of thinking about collective life. The political is not reduced to state institutions. It refers to what organizes social life in any human society, as Pierre Clastres reminded us, following Aristotle: “Man is a political animal.”

The Political is the power to decide together, on an equal footing, without hierarchical mediation, in locally rooted popular assemblies – villages, neighborhoods, communes. It is there, and not in national palaces, that democracy can once again become a living, embodied principle.

Communalism therefore proposes a radical transformation: replacing state institutions with direct democracy based on local assemblies federated at the local level and confederated at the supra-local level. Delegates are mandated, revocable, and their role is not to govern in place of others, but to ensure the coordination of collective decisions. Mandates are rotated and power is not delegated, but shared.

Rehabilitate “The” Political as a collective practice

Faced with the current masquerade, reclaiming the political means refusing to resign ourselves to being mere spectators or voters. It means relearning how to decide for ourselves, to think together about our needs, our interdependencies, our solidarities, our ties to our communities.

What communitarianism offers us is not a distant utopia, but a concrete and living political path, breaking with the illusion of representation and closely linked to the struggles, alternative practices, and aspirations of those who refuse to suffer.

Further reading:

• “POLITICS” – Social Ecology ABC
• The political project: Establishing Communism