A-Infos (en) France, OCL CA #339 - Editorial: Affirm our libertarian communist utopia (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

A contemporary adage states that it is easier to imagine the end of the 
world than the end of capitalism. The dynamics of today's world are 
indeed frightening for those campaigning for collective emancipation. 
From the Palestinian genocide to the environmental catastrophe, from 
murderous cynicism towards migrants to the rise of far-right ideas, from 
the risks of generalization of wars to ever-increasing poverty, we have 
few elements to rejoice in . The madness of capitalism is revealed by 
its political personnel: Trump, Milei, Putin, Netanyahu, etc. We feel 
absolutely powerless in the face of the enormity of the task and the sum 
of past failures. What flame animates us so as not to despair and 
continue the fight?
We know that capitalism generates conflict which will only increase: 
climate crisis, economic crisis, social crisis, war crisis, etc. 
necessarily leading to future movements of revolt. We know that such 
movements transform the people who experience them, making them embrace 
emancipatory aspirations which most often go beyond the initial reasons 
for the revolt. We do not know who will lead such movements, nor where, 
nor when, nor the reasons for their emergence. We just know that this 
will exist because the current world recurrently causes situations of 
tension or struggles. However, for those whose perspective is The Great 
Evening, that is to say the hope of a global uprising of the working 
world at a given moment which would overthrow capitalism and establish 
communism, the failures of the past leave us little 'hope.
The beyond of capitalism can be envisaged differently. The future will 
emerge from the present, that is to say from the current material bases, 
from the contemporary class struggle, and not from our imagination. We 
must therefore rely on past experiences without mythologizing them. The 
current world resembles neither Paris in 1871 nor Russia in 1917 nor 
Catalonia in 1936. Obviously, capitalism is based primarily on an 
economic relationship, but the oppression of capitalism today goes far 
beyond the only wage exploitation by commodifying every aspect of our 
lives. This brings legitimacy to other forms of struggle than those 
based on the simple relationship of wage exploitation. Today there are 
constant struggles, that is to say, kinds of anti-capitalist breaches: 
strikes, self-managed places... Of course, they are small and often 
ephemeral, sometimes repressed violently. They are not sufficient to 
overthrow capitalism but they show the path to collective emancipation 
towards libertarian communism. These are moments when the revolt against 
the dictatorship of capitalism is created collectively, where people 
find social cooperation by emancipating themselves from the 
individualism in which we are locked in, where they build a common 
locally. Larger breaches sometimes emerge (G.J., suburban revolt, Sainte 
Soline, retirement movement, etc.). They reveal class confrontation at a 
more macroscopic level and they often carry within them the same 
processes of emancipation from the capitalist straitjacket through the 
construction of a collectively self-managed movement.
These revolts are so many spaces against and beyond capitalism. They 
must be seen as participating in a multiplicity of singular battles but 
belonging to a common constellation, a network which converges against a 
single object: the form of life imposed by capitalism. The various 
current and future struggles are part of the construction of a common 
which is the fight against capitalism and all its forms of oppression. 
We must think of these breaches, sometimes microscopic, sometimes 
macroscopic, in terms of emulation, of contagion. We must deepen them, 
work at their confluences, make them connect and help them resonate, to 
build the beyond of capitalism in a multiple and interrelated way. On 
this basis, the revolution takes on another meaning. There is not a big 
evening to hope for but a current movement to amplify. The important 
thing is not the limits of each movement but their directions.

Capitalism has many weapons to slow down, crush, divert such breaches. 
If we analyze capitalism as a fixed system, capable of constantly 
reproducing itself identically, there would be little hope of imagining 
overcoming it definitively. However, the tensions of capitalism are only 
increasing and generating multitudes of protests. The fact that 
contemporary movements most often seek an autonomous and grassroots 
political form makes possible the genesis of a libertarian communist 
society, that is to say a world completely different from the one we 
know today. Indeed, the particular forms of social life that emerge from 
such struggles make it possible to envisage a form of management of the 
common without a State separated from society, with modes of government 
integrated into social life. The production of wealth will be 
reorganized on the basis of the current world and therefore will retain 
economic and social connections from the present. This future can 
therefore be a world made up of multiple interrelated worlds, considered 
as a living process, therefore in permanent modification. Libertarian 
communism will arise from these struggles and the reappropriation of our 
lives in territories where social life has a human meaning, while 
retaining the necessary links beyond geographic localism. The idea from 
then on is no longer to choose between two impasses: building a single 
communist world doomed to failure or locking oneself into small isolated 
communities also doomed to failure.
Capitalism is not infinitely flexible, it has its own contradictions. We 
do not know the path to our collective emancipation, we do not know if 
we will succeed, but the dynamics of capitalism allows us to hope for 
the amplification of protean revolts; a bush of breaches carrying the 
overcoming of capitalism. From these multiple struggles can be born the 
future libertarian communism. We must affirm our libertarian communist 
utopia and affirm that this ideal is already inscribed in all these 
current breaches, sometimes microscopic, sometimes macroscopic.

http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4124
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