A tool for emancipation to be revived at a time when resistance to oppression is once again mobilizing
The history of revolutionary struggles cannot be reduced to major strikes, insurrections, or street clashes. It also plays out in more discreet spaces where a common culture, collective intelligence, and the capacity for self-organization are forged: public libraries, workers’ circles, and self-managed community centers. Among these experiences, the ateneos libertarios of early 20th-century Spain occupy a unique place.
A social and cultural invention of the libertarian labor movement
The ateneos libertarios (workshops, cultural centers, libraries, and places for debate) emerged in the 1910s and 1930s in the heart of the working-class neighborhoods of Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia, and Seville. They were:
- places of learning: literacy classes, evening classes, hygiene and health classes, philosophical, scientific, and political lectures;
- spaces for socializing: poetry, theater, choirs, excursions, popular festivals;
- schools of self-management: each ateneo was run by an assembly of its members, without hierarchy, on the basis of voluntary participation;
- political laboratories: debates on anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, anticlericalism, rationalist education, social urbanism foreshadowing social ecology, women’s emancipation (partially addressed, given the era), and libertarian communism.
On the eve of the 1936 civil war, these ateneos had become a veritable network of popular counter-societies, capable of rivaling the Church, state schools, and employer propaganda. They fueled a central cultural battle: that of the autonomy of the oppressed, confidence in the people’s ability to think and act for themselves toward a horizon of emancipation: breaking free from capitalism.
“The emancipation of the workers must be the work of the workers themselves.”
– First International, taken up by Spanish anarcho-syndicalists
A dialectic between culture and revolution
The ateneos libertarios did not separate social struggle from culture. On the contrary, they made them two sides of the same process of emancipation. In the Spanish revolutionary dialectic, a general strike without a common culture remained sterile; culture without social conflict dissolved into folklore.
Therein lay their power: they had managed to unite the act of educating oneself with that of organizing, the desire for knowledge with the desire to transform the world.
Why reinvent them today?
In France, at a time when the September 10 movement is attempting to break through the resigned course of institutional politics, one question arises: how can the momentum of mobilization be transformed into a lasting, rooted, autonomous force?
General assemblies, or popular assemblies, are already places of collective decision-making. But to last, they must also become spaces where we learn, share, and build a common vision of what could be, beyond simple immediate defense.
Reviving the idea of ateneos libertarios means imagining places today for:
- self-managed popular education, rooted in neighborhoods, villages, and workplaces;
- concrete solidarity (material mutual aid, sharing of know-how, local cooperatives, etc.);
- cultural and artistic creation in the service of struggles and individual and collective emancipation;
- strategic debate and political education, from a social and communalist ecological perspective;
- experimentation with material autonomy: self-build workshops, local food production, self-managed healthcare systems, solidarity-based mobility.
Autonomy that is inseparably material and political
The spirit of the ateneos reminds us of a fundamental truth: there is no political autonomy without material autonomy, and vice versa. Claiming the power to collectively decide our own lives means reducing our dependence on state institutions and commercial circuits. Conversely, cultivating material autonomy—producing our own food, repairing our homes, inventing collective modes of transportation, pooling healthcare resources—only makes sense if it is accompanied by political autonomy, i.e., assemblies capable of debating, deciding, and organizing.
It is in this articulation that the potential strength of new communalist ateneos lies: places where everyday life (feeding, housing, healthcare, transportation) is linked to the collective struggle for emancipation (debating, deciding, acting together).
“Freedom without community is an illusion; community without freedom is a prison.”
– Murray Bookchin, Towards an Ecological Society
A communalist reinvention
It is not a question of mechanically reproducing the Spanish experiences of the last century. But their spirit resonates with our times:
- In this era of ecocide, Bookchin’s social ecology invites us to rethink freedom in its articulation with the commons and with nature.
- In this age of digital atomization, we need physical, rooted spaces where conviviality awakens emotions and solidarity is truly practiced.
- In this age of democratic crisis, the ateneos can once again become living schools of direct democracy, bridges between popular assemblies and the social fabric of everyday life.
“Autonomy cannot be reduced to an individual issue; it must be built collectively, as the capacity of communities to take control of their living conditions.”
– Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society
A call for experimentation
September 10 and its general assemblies must not remain just another date of anger, but a starting point. Let us propose, in each general assembly or popular assembly, to experiment with the creation of “communalist Athénées”: open, horizontal places where culture, politics, solidarity, and material autonomy come together.
This is how we will be able to influence the cultural and social battle in the long term. Not by waiting for others to speak for us, but by relearning, together, how to build society ourselves.
Rebound: