A-Infos (en) Spaine, Regeneracion: The Voice of a Militant of Especifismo - A Response to "Class Power or Popular Power" by Carl Eugene Stroud (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

This article is a response to the article "People Power or Class Power" 
by Daniel Rashid, published in Red&BlackNotes in the context of a public 
debate taking place in the US between the Black Rose Anarchist 
Federation and the Libertarian Socialist Caucus (LSC) of the Democratic 
Socialists of America (DSA). If you want to read the original in 
English, you can download this PDF: 
https://www.regeneracionlibertaria.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/The_Voice_of_an_Especifismo_Militant.pdf
Ideas move, especially influential ones. Translation is part of this 
movement, as is education. Of course, some ideas are lost in 
translation. But there is also gain from this movement. Militancy 
consists of inserting, defending, and refining certain ideas to ensure 
their coherence over time. As a specific activist, I'm often tasked with 
bringing a specific set of ideas to anarchist, socialist, and activist 
spaces. This has involved translating into English, French, Spanish, 
Portuguese, and Catalan. But it's not simply translation work; it's 
activism.

Militancy is about taking responsibility for taking a project to new 
ground, but in the recent article "People Power or Class Power?" 1 , the 
author, Daniel Rashid, never mentions militancy, revealing a major 
problem with the Anglophone conception of revolutionary politics. 
Without an understanding of militancy as the fundamental force driving 
revolutionary ideas around the world, politics seems limited to 
selecting the best ingredients for the perfect mix. This reduces 
political education to an eclectic, and often personal, conglomeration 
of references that are either rejected or added to the soup. But who 
articulates a consistent line, the line that runs through study groups, 
debates, and writings and still comes out ahead? Without militants 
maintaining these lines over time, there would be no revolutionary 
corpus to choose from.

When it comes to inserting the ideas of Especifismo into the 
Anglosphere, it's more than simply incorporating words from another time 
or place into 21st-century discourse. For example, in the "Anarchist 
Digest" 2 , the Center for the Study of Especifismo (CES) compiled notes 
from seminars with hundreds of participants over several years at an 
annual event called Militant Kindergarten . These documents speak with a 
collective voice composed of three elements: the participants of 
Militant Kindergarten , the militants of CES, and the international 
current of Especifismo. This means that these texts, like everything 
produced by the organization of which I am a part, are the product of 
our effort to translate ideas from an international level to a real 
group of people in dialogue, and back to an expanding international 
level. These ideas come from diverse sources, both current and 
historical, and the participants also come from different places, 
geographically and ideologically.

I say all this to point out the organic production of theory involved in 
the international current of Especifismo, but also to make clear that, 
like Rashid, I write this in my own voice. As a tool, my voice is 
different from the voice of my organization, but both have in common the 
undeniable influence of Especifismo. For me, it's not about 
identification; it's about militant formation and political education. 
Translating the ideas of Especifismo from one language to another, from 
one continent to another, has shaped me in such a way that I am not 
choosing Especifismo and leaving behind platformism, anarchist 
communism, or even Marxism. Rather, it is from Especifismo itself that I 
receive a political formation that allows me to understand and learn 
from other currents, whether anarchist, Marxist, or otherwise.

Criticisms of Especifismo sometimes assume a kind of exoticism related 
to Latin America, but the borders between the different "Americas" are 
not as clearly delineated in practice as they are on maps. In the United 
States, social life takes place in Spanish or English, depending on 
location, work, school, family, etc., something evidenced by the 
bilingual name Black Rose/Rosa Negra (BRRN) . In this context, 
Especifismo has become a natural conduit for the arrival of a certain 
style of revolutionary militancy to North America, since Latin America 
and Spanish are not exactly foreign. For people like me, it is through 
studies of Especifismo that we arrive at communism as committed 
militants, not the other way around.

We now turn to the content of Rashid's article. I think that saying that 
"mass organizations should not have a specific class base" to point out 
a fundamental problem creates the possibility that criticisms become 
excuses for not engaging with emerging labor movements. The strategy of 
especifismo is to explicitly defend a class bias in mass organizations, 
but to do so as rank-and-file participants, not from leadership 
positions. Some organizations have referred to this as dual militancy . 
Such social embeddedness is obviously necessary, since, today, not even 
all unions have a working-class bias, let alone a combative character or 
a revolutionary program. It is not the "type" of organization that 
determines its position in the class struggle or the content of its 
politics. The same is true of the phrase "actor in struggle," which 
refers to individuals involved in a developing conflict. These actors 
have the potential to organize and structure themselves in various 
configurations. Thus, like social movements and mass organizations, 
there is nothing about the "actors" that makes them revolutionary or 
working class.

In general, I disagree with the use of the term "class reductionism ." 
While I've certainly used it before, I've come to consider it an insult 
hurled at people from a variety of sources without much significance. 
However, I agree with BRRN that class is not the only "site of 
domination." Specifically, it is the site of exploitation, what is known 
as the economic sphere or what some Marxists call the base or 
infrastructure. By rejecting the theoretical separation of the economic, 
political, and ideological spheres of society, Rashid reduces the state 
to a mere arm of capitalism and limits class power to the economic 
sphere. BRRN is right to point out the double game of the state, even if 
it is not always a reflection of class struggle.

Domination clearly extends beyond class. Rashid seems to agree on this 
point, but he misunderstands BRRN's political practice, as it focuses on 
different forms of domination. The argument against domination and 
oppression is that these factors cannot be ignored by a revolutionary 
project, just as factors of exploitation cannot. They must all be 
considered because they are conjunctural conditions of political 
practice. Therefore, if we are all willing to engage in struggles beyond 
the workplace, the difference really lies in "how we should do it." 
Given this, it is not only dogmatic to speak of a "secret to abolishing 
white supremacy," but also anti-strategic to claim that this hidden 
treasure can only be discovered by searching for the "origin or basis of 
class." I don't think this is the path we should follow.

I completely agree that anarchism should not be a simple moral ideology. 
In fact, much of my interaction with anarchists is based precisely on 
this argument against the moralization of political practice. But it is 
a strategic argument, not an ideological one. I don't believe anarchists 
should question their most fundamental moral values and ethical 
practices. This brings me to another important aspect of especifismo: 
the differentiation between ideology, theory, and political practice . 
This means that especifismo unites the doctrine of anarchism (ideology) 
with a scientific understanding of the ever-expanding world (theory) and 
collective activities based on strategy (political practice). The 
practices of an organization are not the same as its ideal goals or the 
tools and techniques its members use. Therefore, in especifismo, the 
political organization combines these elements to produce a 
strategy-that is, an analysis, a projection, and a plan.

The BRRN's "Turning the Tide" program exaggerates the "balance" in its 
definition of power . 4 For example, the concept of "contested sites of 
power" presents power as a zero-sum game, rather than a project to 
increase the capacity of social movements outside the state. This ends 
up confusing People Power with dual power, relying heavily on the 
"asymmetrical" aspect of power relations between all possible groups. I 
don't think it's wrong to say that this affects its understanding of 
strategy and class. But much of this has already been written by BRRN 
activists themselves , 5 implying that these positions are defended from 
within the organization, even if they do not currently represent the 
unified theoretical line of the entire organization. The same is true of 
the CES, where we continue to debate many of the same criticisms raised 
in Rashid's article. The externally recognizable theoretical unity of an 
organization does not represent the full scope of militant training and 
theoretical development that occurs behind the scenes, in militant 
seminars, debates, and individual meetings. In specificism, the 
political organization is an instance in the struggle to learn new ideas 
and form opinions about them. It is the arena of class struggle, a 
rearguard support for front-line confrontations.

Theoretical unity, like political analysis, must always occur in 
context, from a specific perspective. This is both a methodological and 
ethical imperative, which is avoided by overly general statements about 
"current society," as if contextual specificity and politics had nothing 
to do with class struggle. When BRRN refers to mass organizations as 
"large and broad," "oppositional," and "identifiable with one or another 
dominated group," it presents a practical definition, collectively 
articulated in the voice of its organization.

An organization's ideological and theoretical lines may not necessarily 
reflect the personal views of any particular group, as they are 
conceived and realized as a group. This ensures a high degree of unity, 
which in Especifismo is the basis not only of a political program but 
also of the organizational platform itself. However, over time, that 
unity must also be refined and strengthened. Therefore, while there may 
be ideological, theoretical, and strategic criticisms of its 
understanding of mass organizations, BRRN's political program should not 
be interpreted as the final word on Especifismo. I'm sure they would 
agree. The same should be said of other programs one can read from other 
organizations. Especifismo is an international current, not a political 
organization or an instance of political practice. By articulating an 
organizational understanding of its own political practice, BRRN joins 
the international current. For me, it is due to their exemplary activism 
that they want to share documents like this publicly and not just 
internally. It relates to what is called a "performance model," a term 
used by FARJ and Militant Kindergarten that refers to the active 
demonstration of commitment and responsibility, i.e., convincing through 
action.

The article states that:

The most important thing is not that things interact in general -that is 
meaningless -but that they interact as characteristics of a 
working-class rebellion, and that their struggles only make sense from 
this perspective.

For Rashid, this perspective is a structurally grounded class analysis. 
I completely agree and would go so far as to say that the structural 
primacy of class is not something that should be questioned in any 
socialist project. However, I also understand "from this perspective" to 
refer to the conjunctural aspects of a working-class rebellion. Thus, 
following McCarthy and Desan, 6 I would say that especifismo is a form 
of class analysis that maintains the structural primacy of class without 
assuming its political primacy. This relates to conjunctural analysis 
and especifismo's emphasis on prefigurative politics over prefigurative 
forms and predetermined actors.

The context of a rebellion goes beyond the context of class struggle in 
general, since, again, that would be meaningless. We consider the 
antagonists of a labor action. They are not "capitalists" in an abstract 
sense; they are real people making decisions in the concrete world. 
Overlooking the need for conjunctural factors means conceiving of 
strategy as something with universal meaning, rather than something that 
fits into a particular paradigm or stratagem. This confuses strategy 
with ideology, which is neither characterized nor shaped by immediate 
conditions. It pretends that strategy focuses solely on our own plan, 
not on the plans of our enemies.

Actors at the social level are often driven by necessity, but since they 
are limited by will and organizational capacity, their goals should be 
short-term gains achieved through combative demonstrations of force. But 
actors at the political level are militant. Their organizational forms 
are based on unity, and, as I've already said, the content of that unity 
depends on the specific organization. To build People's Power, militants 
of different persuasions must combine and coordinate their efforts with 
social protagonists who have more immediate priorities, as well as with 
activists who might not be committed at all to the long-term struggle.

Specificism emphasizes both the political and the conjunctural aspects 
of the class struggle because the labor movement, like the tenant 
movement or the student movement, is not an omnipresent and uniformly 
constituted feature of life. Furthermore, working-class people are not 
stereotypes devoid of context or background. They bring their own 
baggage with them. That's why it makes no sense to say that a tenants' 
union is definitely not organized with tenants as actors, when 
sometimes, in some places, it is precisely in the tenants' movement that 
people can see a place for all their needs.

Take the Los Angeles Tenants Union (LATU) in California, for example. It 
combines federalism and self-management into a genuinely militant 
organization. And these are, without a doubt, people "mobilized as 
tenants." Indeed, it is by organizing as tenants to specifically address 
the problems facing tenants that they can effectively mobilize around 
issues such as rising rents, immigration policy, climate change, 
international solidarity, and disaster response, to name just a few.

This means that workers from multiple sectors, with multiple identities, 
and speaking multiple languages, can be drawn into the struggle against 
landlords. That's why I suggest that, rather than using "in isolation" 
to describe these diverse cultural and situational factors, it's better 
to refer to "multiple points of view." In a mass organization, this is a 
feature, not a defect. LATU is an organization where workers join other 
dominated classes participating in a tenant front. The same approach 
could be applied to the Barcelona rent strike and the student 
organization mentioned in Rashid's article. Working-class students and 
tenants need to be able to see their actions as part of a broader social 
movement. It is from that context that politics can develop around 
issues like the exploitative class nature of student life and the 
struggle for housing.

A mass organization like LATU is capable of uniting the social strength 
of diverse types of workers, including undocumented immigrants and not 
only paid workers but also unpaid workers, caregivers. It reaches out to 
sections of the working class that don't have direct contact with 
bosses, colleagues, or traditional workplaces. There are homeless and 
unemployed members, and even the potential to incorporate incarcerated 
people into the organization. It is much more than just a "tenants' 
union in an apartment building." In the struggle for housing, the Los 
Angeles working class has articulated its own collective tradition of 
struggle. This history should not be criticized or belittled. Such 
perseverance deserves respect and support. LATU is an asset of the 
working class, outside of bourgeois institutions. I would venture to say 
that if its revolutionary politics have no place in an organization like 
LATU, it is because they are not mass politics.

However, there is still debate about whether LATU is truly 
representative of a broader tenant movement or simply an example of 
effective working-class organizing in a contemporary American city. In 
Washington State, for example, tenants have legal rights that extend 
beyond the municipal level and are unique in the United States. However, 
since they are not the result of mass organizing or fighting for 
reforms, there is no tenant movement interested in continuing to gain 
strength and incorporating more people. Furthermore, since tenants have 
certain guaranteed rights, regardless of how individualistic their 
politics, there isn't even an obvious role for tenant unions. This means 
that there are no organizations prepared to defend these rights if (or 
when) they are challenged. All of this leads us to the need for 
revolutionary politics to be contextual and situational, as there are no 
structural truths that resolve current problems once and for all.

People's Power is a goal of the general strategy of Especifismo, not a 
way of understanding politics in general. As part of a process of 
forming the Popular Organization of society, I think it is similar to 
what Rashid means by "the organized working class." If "working-class 
power" were the name of a type of politics, in Especifista discourse, I 
think we would simply say workers' politics. However, in Especifismo, 
the specific strategy is based on conjunctural analysis, as class 
society has forced class struggle to take multiple forms depending on 
various factors, from race and legal employment status to the cost of 
living and the effects of climate change. The specific strategy of 
Especifista organizations is not about dividing into fronts or 
developing different fronts independently. It is about overcoming the 
fact that the current working class is fractured and dispersed 
throughout society, making it difficult to recognize class struggle 
everywhere and forcing people to grapple with sometimes contradictory 
priorities.

If an organization's current analysis has led it to the conclusion that 
the class struggle isn't divided into fronts, types, modes, or whatever 
you want to call it, then it wouldn't make sense to insert its militancy 
into multiple struggles. But if this is a current reality recognized by 
collective analysis, it would be dogmatic to continue basing its work 
solely on a structural class analysis. It would be the same as having 
only one general strategy and no limited one. For me, this is exactly 
what turns political practice into a project to evangelize people, 
trying to convince them to ignore the reality before them in favor of 
grand ideas that are supposedly more important. More important than 
keeping a job? More important than keeping a home? More important than 
not being deported?

As I've said, there are multiple vantage points from which the working 
class can view what's happening around them, and things look quite 
different from these perspectives. This isn't standpoint epistemology or 
any other academically derived post-class theory; it's politics. To be 
relevant and influential, politics must be formed, propagated, and 
defended. This happens with bourgeois politics, fascist politics, and 
working-class politics. Simply "knowing there's something behind it" is 
a way of ignoring the political work necessary to develop a program that 
can truly support a revolutionary movement, not just a theoretical one.

It's true that the Oppressed Classes Front isn't a concept that has been 
widely discussed at the CES. While I agree that theoretically it 
"represents the union of diverse social causes," I don't think it's 
correct to say that this fits within a single, ambiguous "broad 
movement." The unification of disparate struggles into a singular 
movement will be the result of federalism, not the dilution of 
working-class politics. The path to People's Power must not be too 
broad, or it will not put an end to class domination. Only a 
working-class understanding of this power can be the basis of a 
communist society. Therefore, if some anarcho-communists prefer to rally 
around a different term, that's a decision their organizations must make 
collectively. I will only caution them not to forget that any adjective 
preceding "power," to be revolutionary, must be popular, not only in a 
technical sense but also in a vulgar one.

What would it even mean to consider the dominated classes without the 
working class?
Obviously, that would not leave enough labor for any socialist politics, 
much less for a revolutionary project of People's Power. Therefore, it 
should already be clear to comrades that when especifista organizations 
refer to the dominated classes, they never exclude the working class. To 
the extent that this term means more than just the waged, able-bodied, 
and legally eligible labor force, it is erroneous to assume that this is 
a consequence of the class definition of especifismo or the ethical 
lines of anarchism. Including the oppressed and dominated is also a 
priority for a working class that defends itself and seriously fights 
for victory. Workers also have ethical values and dynamic definitions of 
class. Were the actors in revolutionary Spain "workers led by the CNT" 
or workers who rebelled on their own terms? How could it be stated with 
certainty that a particular reform favored workers and not tenants or 
"the lower class"? Social conditions like rent are not simply reduced to 
wages. I think we'd agree that lowering rents to levels workers could 
afford wouldn't be enough. Surely not because the entire system must be 
abolished, even less because housing is a human right.

Finally, it is true that BRRN does not address violence per se, and 
certainly not at the tactical level. But it would be wrong to assume 
that Especifismo is disconnected from military strategy, especially when 
compared to other anarchist currents. In fact, armed struggle is an 
overlapping factor in the historical development of both Platformism and 
Especifismo. While they may differ on the details, they agree on the 
need for a violent break with the forces of capital, fostered by armed 
struggle.

But violence is not simply "organized" in the way it is always proposed 
to "organize the working class." There is no reason to assume that an 
armed trade union movement or a workers' army is strategically prepared 
or personally committed to a protracted struggle against the national 
forces of a modern army. What might be considered "popularly acceptable 
violence" is the result of political practice. It is the result of the 
revolutionary political expression of a popular movement, in all sectors 
of society, every day. It is the result of political militancy.

Politics is a fundamental element of power, whether dominant and 
exploitative or self-managed and federalist. Dual power, class power, 
People's Power, with or without a capital letter, with or without a 
hyphen, is built through the political practice of committed 
participants, that is, militants. Starting from Carl von Clausewitz's 
idea that war is politics by other means, Abraham Guillén makes it clear 
that revolutionary war requires popular support . 7 This is the concern 
of Especifismo militants and their political and educational organizations.

Carl Eugene Stroud

REFERENCES

See the text here
See the link
"We are committed to a dual-activism strategy, which implies political 
and active participation on two levels. From a specifically anarchist 
platform, we organize ourselves to intervene in mass movements." (See: 
"Founding Text" by Liza, self-described as "a revolutionary organization 
of anarchist socialists")
"Many anarchists, past and present, view power as synonymous with the 
state, as equivalent to exploitation and domination, as something that 
must be destroyed. We, on the other hand, understand power as a 
relationship, shaped by the constant struggle between the social forces 
of society, particularly between the dominant and dominated classes. The 
balance of power between these conflicting classes varies according to 
time and place, depending on which side is able to achieve its goals 
despite resistance from opposing forces." (See: p. 5 of "Turning the 
Tide" by BRRN)
"Tipping the Scales: People Power in an Age of Protest and Pandemic," by 
Enrique Guerrero-López and Cameron Pádraig; and "Clearing Up 
Especifismo: A Response to DSA-LSC's 'Letter to the Libertarian Left,'" 
by BRRN .
"The Problem with Class Abstractionism ," by Michael A. McCarthy and 
Mathieu Hikaru Desan
"[...]because a favorable population hides, protects and conceals the 
combatants of the liberation army" (See: pp. 205-206 of "Theory of 
Violence" by Abraham Guillén)

https://www.regeneracionlibertaria.org/2025/07/03/la-voz-de-un-militante-del-especifismo/
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