The political project: Establishing Communalism
Communalism (libertarian municipalism) is the political project best suited to the philosophy of social ecology.
To begin with, we will clearly distinguish power and domination. Power should not be limited to the sole negative of what is permitted and what is forbidden, a normative legal and discursive conception distilled by the State. We must conceive of it as a necessity inherent in social life, that of deciding and doing. Claimed or hidden, 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, a deep conviction: where there is politics, that is to say, the experience of freedom, of deciding and doing together, domination tends to disappear; conversely, where domination reigns, this politics fades from the experience of citizens and becomes the object of a war of egos leading to destruction. Politics contains much more than Politics, in the sense that parties and bureaucrats of public affairs can understand it, this spectacular and boring state fact that diverts and proceeds to the canning of the first.
« The power that is not in the hands of the masses must inevitably fall into those 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, we could not be more confused, within this complex social totality, ridding ourselves of our condition as objects, we will have to identify Power, the one centralizing all dominations, objective, symbolic and subjective: the State. The State, an essential category of Capitalism, being to this day the sanctuary of political things of this social totality, we will have to differentiate this monopoly that we will call Politics from this other power to which we aspire: politics.
« We 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 lies essentially in the fact that it remains essentially a societal abstraction, something unlived.
It must be said and repeated, most « community » experiences, past or contemporary, have only a distant or at best embryonic relationship with communalism as a realized society. Indeed, in order to materialize, this requires an extension that is both qualitative and quantitative, which has found neither time nor place to begin to be realized except on the occasion of too brief revolutionary interludes such as the Paris Commune or the Spanish Civil War, 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 appearance, have always shown the greatest hostility towards all attempts at self-organization of populations. This is hardly surprising since it is a question for them of maintaining their hold and avoiding social and political emancipation at all costs. Whatever its nature, state (Empire), economic (Capitalism) or even religious (which, as we will note, are difficult to dissociate), a structure of domination cannot allow populations enslaved by its works to glimpse a possible model of social organization with the aim of escaping them.
Giving substance to this subject, in these particular conditions that are ours, is indeed the goal of a communalist movement as a process, in order to begin to create here and now institutions of communal self-government in parallel and in tension with those of the State.
The first experience of communalism is that of the basic assembly where a given population meets to discuss its problems and which, thanks to its direct and concrete knowledge of the nature of these, will be able to determine the appropriate solutions to the needs of the community.
We understand immediately that what will emerge in these conditions will always be more relevant than decisions taken from above, by an overwhelming parasitic bureaucracy, made up of people 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 find agreement in the practices of assemblies because of too many divergent opinions.
But all those who accept the principle of these basic assemblies and have experienced them, despite the initial difficulties, find quite the opposite. The practice of debate in assembly often has a revealing effect, shedding light on certain aspects of things that had previously escaped them. It allows, through constant dialogue, to overcome egos and inter-individual conflicts and to escape fixed opinions.
Contrary to the system of domination in place which, by confining everyone to a sterile individualism and ignoring everything about the realities of others, exacerbates conflicts and reduces everyone to a permanent war for their simple survival.
Establishing communalism also means establishing a common world where everyone can assert not their individualism but their individuality. Because communalism, far from wanting to restore the old hierarchical communities, is also the abolition of 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 learning how to live together.
The frenzied productivism that results from the forced search for the valorization of value that characterizes the capitalist system is the direct cause of the ecological catastrophe that is destroying living conditions 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 practical utilities could be produced and organized at the communal level, thereby attacking the grip of the logistics empire and its disastrous ecological footprint, both colonial, extractive and energy-based. A practice that at the same time, socially speaking, would prevent everyone from having to fend for themselves, and therefore having to buy everything, often marginalized because they cannot even sell their labor force. On the other hand, because we know that consumerism is for many the compensatory effect of the solitude and frustrations of a fundamentally disappointing life. A life that has lost its meaning and is most often crushed by the need to have to do routine work that is unrelated to one’s own aspirations.
« Suffering, insofar as it has a social cause, calls into question domination all the more because it exposes its arbitrariness in a flagrant manner and highlights its irrationality. It is the lived proof that what is passed off as a rational organization of society, based on the immutable laws of the economy, is in reality a matter of mythical irrationality that nothing can ultimately justify. » (T. Adorno)
Now precisely, the communalist project proposes to put an end to this alienated work which is only 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 resituating the decision-making centrality in the human, in his links and his territories of life.
The present domination has done everything to dislocate the territories, to the point of making them totally incomprehensible to those who are supposed to « live » there, to transform them into non-places where no one can recognize themselves and distinguish any common place.
The development of the territories is done « from above », out of the ground and almost without any consultation of the populations concerned who see their environment and their particular cultures destroyed based on profitability criteria of an order that knows nothing about the real lives of people. So much so that everyone ends up finding themselves like a foreigner in their own country. Crushed by standards and regulations over which it has no control. From this observation, that the majority are living in their own skin and to their great misfortune, we understand the full interest in giving decision-making power back to those who are directly concerned. And this is what the communalist project proposes by giving this decision-making power to the basic communal assemblies.
“Despite the complexity of its results, capital has only one prerequisite: people must be deprived of direct access to the goods they deem necessary for their lives, and thus forced to obtain them through the mediation of the market.” (Endnotes1)
Relocalizing the production of most 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 origin and production conditions we know nothing about. The Market, as it is embodied in the capitalist world, has become a kind of entity that, again, is totally foreign to us and yet imposes its rules on us daily; the way we eat, the way we dress, the way we heat ourselves and even the way we must work to ensure our own survival. Worse still, this Market locks us all into competitive logics that seek to abolish all the solidarities that constitute our human reality and that can give it meaning.
To restore life and meaning to a human society that is reestablishing itself in respect of its natural environment, by offering it new organizational perspectives that put an end to the aberration of the current world, such is the framework and the objective in which this Workshop intends to situate itself. The communalist project refuses any ideology fixed in its dogmas. It does not claim to hold all the solutions or have any magic wand. On the other hand, it knows what it no longer wants and positions itself accordingly in an active search for the possibilities of this overcoming based on current realities. We will start from the struggles against all dominations, social exploitation and those 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 attentive to all proposals that are clearly and uncompromisingly outside the forms of the current system of domination and under all its names.
To grasp the concept of Social Ecology, we refer of course to the works of Murray Bookchin, including “From Urbanization to Cities The Politics of Democratic Municipalism” published by AK press, or “The Third Revolution: Popular Movements in the Revolutionary Era”. But also “Acting Here and Now” by Floréal M. Romero, coming soon.