A-Infos (en) NZ, Aotearoa, AWSM: Polar Blast - Freedom in Practice: The Twentieth Century and Beyond (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The classical anarchist thinkers developed their ideas in a specific 
historical moment, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, 
the period of industrial capitalism's consolidation, mass working-class 
organisation, and the first wave of revolutionary upheaval. Bakunin died 
in 1876; Kropotkin in 1921; Malatesta in 1932; Goldman in 1940. The 
experiments they theorised or participated in, the Paris Commune, the 
early labour movement, the Russian Revolution's libertarian currents 
,belong to a world that is now more than a century away. It is worth 
asking whether the anarchocommunist theory of freedom has any purchase 
on the world that has emerged since..
The honest answer is more than its critics acknowledge, and less than 
its partisans sometimes claim. The twentieth century was, on any 
reckoning, a brutal period for the anarchist tradition. The defeats 
catalogued in the previous section, Spain, Kronstadt, the Makhnovists, 
were followed by decades in which the organised left was dominated by 
communist parties tied to Moscow, by social democratic parties tied to 
the management of capitalism, and by nationalist movements whose horizon 
was the independent state rather than the stateless commune. Anarchism 
survived in subterranean currents, in the labour syndicalism of the IWW 
and the CNT's remnants, in the pacifist and libertarian wings of various 
social movements, in the counterculture of the 1960s, but it did not 
achieve the kind of mass organisational presence it had briefly had in 
Spain and parts of Latin America.
And yet the late twentieth century produced something remarkable, that 
sits largely unexamined in mainstream left discourse, of a series of 
large-scale, explicitly or implicitly anarchist experiments in 
collective self-governance that demonstrated, in contemporary 
conditions, that the thing being argued for in this article is not only 
historically attested but practically alive.
The most dramatic is Argentina in 2001 and its aftermath. When the 
Argentine economy collapsed in December of that year, the peso devalued, 
the banks froze accounts, the government cycled through five presidents 
in two weeks, the institutional structures of the state and the market 
simply failed to function. What emerged in their absence was 
extraordinary. Neighbourhood assemblies (asambleas barriales) formed 
spontaneously across Buenos Aires and other cities, meeting in public 
squares, making collective decisions about how to organise their 
communities, distributing food, coordinating mutual aid, and, crucially, 
doing so without hierarchy, without formal leadership, through processes 
of direct democracy that anarchists had been describing in theory for a 
century. At the same time, workers in hundreds of abandoned factories 
occupied their workplaces and began running them collectively, without 
owners or managers, producing goods and distributing the proceeds among 
themselves. The movement of recuperated enterprises, empresas 
recuperadas, eventually encompassed more than two hundred workplaces 
employing tens of thousands of people. Some of these enterprises still 
operate today, more than two decades later, on cooperative and 
self-managed principles.
The Argentina experience is significant for the theory of freedom 
developed in this article for several reasons. It demonstrates, first, 
that the capacities for selfgovernance, that anarcho-communists have 
insisted human beings possess, are not utopian projections but real 
competencies that emerge under the right conditions.
The people who filled the neighbourhood assemblies of Buenos Aires in 
2001 had not been trained in anarchist theory, they were ordinary people 
in a crisis, and what they reached for, spontaneously, was direct 
democracy and mutual aid. Second, it demonstrates that genuinely 
collective self-governance can function at significant scale and over 
significant time, not just in the romantic conditions of a revolutionary 
moment, but in the grinding, complicated, unglamorous work of running a 
factory or feeding a neighbourhood week after week. Third, and perhaps 
most importantly for the argument about freedom, it demonstrates that 
people experience this kind of collective self-determination differently 
from the experience of being managed, that there is something 
recognisably and qualitatively different about governing yourself and 
your community, something that people who have experienced it describe 
with a consistency that cannot be dismissed as ideological projection.
The Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, which began on the first day 
of NAFTA in 1994, offers a different but complementary example. The 
Zapatistas, an indigenous liberation movement drawing on both Mayan 
communal traditions and libertarian socialist theory, have spent three 
decades building autonomous self-governance in their territory - 
hospitals, schools, cooperative enterprises, and a system of rotating, 
recallable, directly accountable governance called the Juntas de Buen 
Gobierno (Good Government Boards). They have done this under conditions 
of military siege, economic blockade, and sustained state violence, and 
they have maintained it for longer than the Spanish collectives lasted. 
The Zapatista experiment is not an anarchist project in any simple 
sense, it draws on indigenous traditions that predate European anarchism 
by centuries, but it embodies many of the same principles - 
horizontalism, direct democracy, the insistence that the means of 
struggle must prefigure the ends, the rejection of the vanguard party 
and the seizure of state power in favour of building autonomous 
collective life in the present.
The Kurdish freedom movement in Rojava, northern Syria, offers a third 
example, more recent and more explicitly theoretical. The political 
framework of the Rojava cantons, developed by Abdullah Ã-calan drawing 
significantly on Murray Bookchin's libertarian municipalism, is an 
attempt to build democratic confederalism, a system of nested popular 
assemblies, cooperative economics, and collective self-governance that 
explicitly rejects the state form. It has been built under conditions of 
extraordinary violence, surrounded by ISIS, the Syrian regime, and 
Turkish military forces simultaneously, and it has maintained, 
imperfectly but genuinely, commitments to women's liberation, ecological 
sustainability, and non-hierarchical governance that no existing state 
comes close to matching. Whether it will survive the military pressures 
bearing down on it is uncertain. What is not uncertain is that it 
exists, that it functions, and that it demonstrates, again, that the 
anarcho-communist theory of freedom is not a fantasy projected from the 
armchair but a description of something that real people, in real 
conditions, have actually built.
These examples do not resolve the hard questions raised in the previous 
section about the tension between individual autonomy and collective 
life, or in the section before it about the military vulnerability of 
non-hierarchical movements. They do not prove that anarcho-communism 
will prevail, or that the obstacles it faces are not serious. What they 
do is establish, empirically and concretely, that the vision of freedom 
developed in this article is not merely theoretical. It has been lived, 
it continues to be lived, and the people living it, in the recuperated 
factories of Argentina, in the autonomous communities of Chiapas, in the 
embattled cantons of Rojava, describe their experience in terms that 
would be recognisable to Bakunin and Kropotkin, to Goldman and 
Malatesta, as the experience, partial and precarious but real, of 
governing themselves without masters.

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