A-Infos (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria: VIRTUOUS COMMUNITIES (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Energy communities represent a model of alternative society, very dear 
to anarchists, since they combine production, distribution and 
consumption (separate economic sectors in the capitalist world) and 
present glimpses of life potentially alien to the protection and control 
of states. ---- However, as happened in the past with mutualism, trade 
unionism, cooperativism and communalism that arose from below, from the 
real needs of the popular masses and from the aspiration for a free and 
egalitarian society, energy communities also risk be totally entangled 
in the statist swamp and recovered, in one way or another, by the 
mechanisms that regulate current political and economic inequalities.

Regulation, in fact, is the main vehicle for this recovery. With the 
excuse of "giving a line" and "creating order" the potential 
development, self-centered, coordinated and as free as possible, is 
limited, as well as of every source of life, including community energy.

This is the meaning of the first and last of the government decrees, 
which claim to limit and bring back to the control of the State, with 
the aid of considerable funding (certainly attractive but which we can 
also do without), an area of the new protean economy, fluid, elusive, 
but also generally opposed to government plans. "Energy community" 
essentially means rejection of the logic of the mass-produced, 
standardized, scale-based, predatory, colonial economy, of the cartels 
and multinationals, dominated and above all complicit, like the 
governments that support them, of the oil companies and the local 
entrepreneurs of fossil fuels and polluting production.

"Compatibility" with the national energy system: this is the watchword 
of the latest government measures; we could add another: "integration" 
to market logic; and end up with "growing economic profitability", but 
always a niche one, if compared to the billion-dollar deals guaranteed 
by a "green" reconversion totally subservient to large industrial and 
commercial groups, and to international geopolitical interests.

Yet "energy communities" could allow us to experiment with economic 
realities completely free from bureaucracy, managed directly by citizens 
(with participatory and transparent decision-making processes), 
supported by technological innovations that partly already exist, which 
make it possible, with limited expenditure and ease of use, not only 
producing energy on its own but exchanging it from below, in a virtuous 
circuit of territorial reciprocity. Without unnatural connections with 
the current masters of energy and without pro-institutional interference.

This will certainly trigger new generation struggles to build and 
maintain management autonomy and control of the plants. It will probably 
be necessary to connect with the ongoing struggles against invasive 
mega-plants, environmental devastation and the wild exploitation of the 
human and material resources of the territories. You cannot win alone 
and without the help of local populations.

As was the case with those forms of mutualism, trade unionism, 
cooperativism and communalism that have emancipated themselves, energy 
communities too will have to make room for the awareness of their 
otherness to the dominant system and the vision of a viable social 
alternative, participatory, part of a large and supportive human 
community which, despite everything, grows with every passing hour. Even 
though we often don't realize it.

Natale Musarra

http://sicilialibertaria.it
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