📜 Movement

– against stagnation –

Everyone is familiar with this “action by which a body moves from one place to another”, which traverses the entire universe, from atoms to celestial bodies, including all living beings on our planet. But in recent centuries, humans and their social bodies have undergone a spectacular and increasingly sustained acceleration. In the technical and social spheres, the pace of change has intensified to the point of becoming a driving force, dictated by the imperative of rationalizing time linked to the economy. This founding element of techno-capitalism, which seeks to exploit every sequence of our personal lives under the aegis of the market and “security”, is now transforming the world into metadata. On a daily basis, social acceleration translates into a frantic, all-out quest for accumulation, an imperative illusorily compensated for by consumerist escapism, which in turn only accelerates our own alienation and the destruction of the natural environment that shelters us.

“… a simple observation that could be described as deterministic, pessimistic, or demoralizing. (…) And those who call it deterministic should remember that it was necessary to understand the law of gravity in order to build aircraft that could effectively combat it.” Pierre Bourdieu reminded us.

From there, it is not far to think that the inability of all self-proclaimed anti-capitalists to combat their enemy lies in their partial, even superficial, knowledge of the laws of economics, that Megamachine that draws us into its workings at exponential speed. The reason for this deficiency is undoubtedly due to the fact that, while already caught up in social relations, our subjectivity continues to be constituted by them. As a result, the acceleration of the degradation of the social whole and the natural environment that hosts it is opposed only by a facsimile, a logic of urgency in all struggles that privileges immediacy. Our lack of understanding of the economy and its power, but also our unconscious economic behaviors, which extend to all social spheres, even the most intimate, lead us, when it comes to considering longer-term issues—despite and because of the urgency—to a “dazzling immobility” – Virilio – or to a “paralyzing frenzy” – Pollmann -. And out of spite, we end up turning to political parties to moderate the state, to give it “a human face,” which only serves to perpetuate the ignominy by making it more socially acceptable. This is despite the obvious fact that “Politics in the traditional sense is dead (…). From now on, the revolutionary movement must appear for what it is: a total movement concerned with everything that people do and suffer in society, and above all with their real daily lives.” Castoriadis

To establish a revolutionary movement is to go far beyond well-organized demonstrations limited to marching from the Place de la Bastille to the Place de la Nation, or even the beginnings of the Yellow Vests social movement or that of the Indignados in Spain, despite their strength and duration. History shows us that revolutions are long-term processes and that individuals are not desocialized and resocialized in a single day, but through a gradual process, a movement that carries us towards a new world. Bookchin, who did not believe in the “laws” of history, — those of a certain brand of Marxism — and who learned to doubt spontaneity, which runs out of steam or ends up fueling extremist populism on the left or right, returned to a pedagogical conception of revolutionary change, which would make the promoters of the communalist idea essential actors, like ferments within the movement. A communalist movement with at its heart the struggles—against domination, exclusion, and other barbarities of economic tyranny—but also alternative practices—social, ecological, and educational. These complementary actions are both complicit in a common emancipatory perspective, guided by an imagination, a sufficiently powerful “realistic utopia,” capable of proposing a sociopolitical system to supplant capitalism. For capitalism will only be truly overthrown if we are able to replace it in its entirety within society. Not to mention the essential development of a political subjectivity as authentic politics, which is the reconstitution of a unity already present in current social practices but also in those inherited from the past. As Castoriadis reminded us: “When a movement of self-institution or re-institution begins, the community that is self-instituting receives itself, in a way, from its own past, with all that this past carries with it, with all that it entails.”

We will retain in particular the lessons of the Spanish anarchist movement, which gave birth to the most successful revolution of the 20th century. Struggles, strikes, occupations, and insurrections were conceived as “revolutionary gymnastics.” Trade unions, libertarian cultural centers, rationalist schools, and production, housing, and food cooperatives were all tools for acquiring the numbers, conviction, and revolutionary capacity necessary to overthrow Capital by sowing the seeds of their emancipatory horizon—libertarian communism—on a daily basis. This was a growing intergenerational process that lasted more than 70 years and restored a form of energizing hope, giving greater influence over the course of history. Of course, copying and pasting cannot work either in time or space, both of which are unique, but the principle remains relevant today. The beginnings of a communalist political practice here and now can only be nourished and built on the seeds of social autonomy rooted in our given time and space. But to limit ourselves and focus solely on social protest—the convergence of struggles that never converge due to a lack of common ground—or on alternatives, both of which disregard the “political” versus politics, would be tantamount to providing a simple “alternative” that would return us to powerlessness, to a hopeless normality, to stagnation. The communalist movement will aim to combine the two spaces, enriched by a constant back-and-forth between theory and practice. This is what we call praxis. “The very object of praxis is the new” and “its subject itself is constantly transformed from this experience in which it is engaged and which it does but which also does it.” Catoriadis

Not to mention that “a libertarian municipalist-communalist movement must be international, like any other radical movement for that matter. And we need a dynamic International, solidly rooted in a local base.” Bookchin

Rebounds :

• 📜 The POLITICAL versus politics
• 📜 Anticapitalism