Political organisation for the right to housing is undergoing a frenetic
process of reconfiguration. The political subject around which to
organise, the way to form an independent organisation, or what the main
tactics should be are still open debates. The qualitative leap that is
taking place as a result of these reflections is quite remarkable,
giving rise to housing unions as autonomous class structures. A movement
that originally came from spaces more associated with social democracy
is leaving behind platforms and institutional solutions.
Throughout this process, the housing movement has been a space disputed
by different political actors. Different tendencies have been able to
read it as the mass front that it potentially is, and they are fighting
for consensus to direct the struggle in one direction or another.
Those of us who are active in housing find that in our assemblies
coexist: social democratic tendencies that seek to look to the
institutional path, political centralism under the discipline of some
Marxist-Leninist party, vanguardists who believe themselves to be
smarter than anyone else, defenders of autonomism that runs the risk of
atomizing... In short, we know that there are always intentions to
instrumentalize the struggles for political gain by anyone.
What position do we have - or propose to have - from the perspective of
specificist anarchism in these spaces?
For many, it makes sense that we bring the strategy of popular power 1
to these fronts , which is nothing other than ensuring that in these
spaces it is possible to provide the working class with effective tools
for its own emancipation.
There is a key idea, and that is that we should not understand these
spaces as mere containers where we can launch our discourse or our
ideas. Housing assemblies are not blank canvases, nor containers without
content waiting to be politicized. We urge you not to read them as
places where a savior-militant with a strategy learned in a party
formation has to arrive to lead and show the way to anyone.
We believe in the agency of the popular classes themselves to carry out
their struggle and in the learning process of these. Popular classes of
which we are part, and as part of them we act, but we do not understand
them as the herd to be moved. Whether for housing or any other front,
what we do understand as militant responsibility is to work to enhance
the revolutionary character of the structures of political
organizations. Understanding revolutionary as independent, democratic
and self-managed .
We understand that in the collectives and spaces of the housing movement
this revolutionary potential exists and is present (in that they are
self-managed and horizontal organizations that seek their political
independence). However, sometimes these spaces can be co-opted for the
political gain of certain tendencies. That is where we can be useful to
our class. Those of us who have been militant for years in anarchist
spaces usually have - due to our militant background - more tools to
know how to read which path or decisions can compromise the independence
or the true horizontal management of the space. To guarantee that it is
not lost we must be vigilant.
In short, we will be guardians of ensuring that the political potential
of housing is not compromised by other movements.
To achieve this, we propose a decalogue of action.
DECALOGUE OF ACTION
We have thought a lot about what our position could be on such a
disputed front. It seemed important to us to develop a proposal for a
strategic decalogue that would suggest where an organized housing
anarchist militant could push towards.
This Decalogue is far from being proven infallible; in fact, we thought
it would be interesting to make it public in order to open a space for
debate on its usefulness. We want to encourage further theoretical
development, knowing that we will find infinite errors in what is
presented after a time of trying to put it into practice. We do not
believe that practice and theory are two watertight worlds, but that
they must be intertwined like a rope in order to be useful and allow us
to move forward.
For all these reasons, we make a strategic contribution to building
popular power in the fight for housing.
We propose 6 tactics and 4 strategies
Truly democratic and binding structures.
A mass front, such as housing, must propose an effective struggle that
can serve as a tool for its class. We must seek organizational
mechanisms that practice popular democracy. Although there are
autonomous management bodies and binding working groups, this should not
be at odds with the assembly of the majority being, in the last
instance, the decision-making body.
For this democracy to be effective, it must facilitate participation and
address the complex reality of our class. Giving real space to the
participation of the most disadvantaged classes, or practicing pedagogy
and active listening, are indispensable tools of inclusion. We must be
attentive to including those who feel excluded, to accompany a group
that is usually left out in the process of entering.
The more people participate in organic life, the more democratic its
structure becomes. However horizontal or federal an organization claims
to be, if it is supported by an intellectual or bureaucratic minority,
it can give rise to unbridgeable power relations. We have to encourage
the participation of the majority, as opposed to the intellectual elite
that claims to direct the space.
The question of language.
We must be clear that one of the requirements for self-management to be
real, as we have said before, is that it is supported by a majority and
active participation of all members. If there are those who feel that
they cannot participate, we will not be able to accumulate all the
forces we need to challenge the social order. Language is one of the
main reasons why people leave a collective. An excessively complex,
abstract or intellectual language ends up alienating many people from
the movement or turning them into simple users, causing us to lose part
of the revolutionary potential of our struggle.
On these fronts, we have people with very different life situations:
some people do not cope very well in abstract debate environments, some
people have difficulty concentrating, some people have difficulty
remembering, some people do not trust that their vocabulary is up to the
ideas they want to express. We cannot encourage anyone to leave a
political space with the feeling that they are not up to the
conversation. In this system, the lives of everyone are at stake,
including those who disappear from spaces because they feel they are
hostile or too academic.
Those of us who live very comfortably in political spaces must also be
self-critical. An excessively 'political' language, with terminology
that is only known to those who are deeply involved in the latest trend
debates among activists or participants in the so-called 'political
ghetto', will have the same effect.
This language is often used when political tendencies compete for space.
This ends up excluding the strata that are most affected and in need of
these structures to function, who are also capable of reading the
conflict, but do not understand its nuances. They cannot understand them
because it is not usually done in an open or honest way. This is why we
also propose that our work in these spaces should be to avoid being
another agent of dispute of discourse within them.
Specificism should always work to ensure that internal communications
within a group are in accessible, simple and direct language. This is
the way to guarantee internal democracy without the entrenchment of
subjects who hold power relations over others.
Internal bureaucracy in such wide spaces.
Democratising a space means avoiding excessive bureaucratisation of its
internal processes. We understand that certain bureaucracy and internal
formality are tools to guarantee the organisation of a collective space,
but they can also be tools for selecting activists in order to establish
a specific trend within a space.
On a broad front we have to think of all those people who do not have a
computer, who have difficulty reading, who have a life that makes it
difficult for them to pay attention to a 17-page document. They all have
to be able to participate in the internal life of a collective without
mentoring or paternalism from others. It is also for them that these
structures exist. The review of the accessibility of all the bureaucracy
that a collective needs is our responsibility, to make sure that it does
not impede the development of the revolutionary potential of an
assembly. That forces are not lost in bureaucratic boredom.
There are those who are interested in leaving all these points of view
aside in order to establish a concrete political common sense. We have
the tools as organized anarchists to identify and challenge this when it
happens, let's use them.
We are also the subjects who have to measure the limits between internal
formality and excessive bureaucratization. Administrative rigidity can
never be an argument to leave someone's concern or proposal out or to
put an end to the spontaneity and enthusiasm of the militants. We must
ensure that there is always a space in which all ideas are collected and
where creative capacity is validated. Our mission is also in part to
make the rhythms and channels of the collective accessible. To ensure
that there are always spaces where the times and channels are explained
to everyone.
The militant-user duality has to die, also in our imaginations.
There is a maxim to keep in mind as housing activists: we are all
affected by the conception of housing as a business, and we are all in a
constant struggle to change it. We understand and have constantly heard
the criticism of the welfare system into which social movements fall.
How we end up converted into mere agencies for the social margins that
the State does not reach. We read this criticism a lot, but it is not
reviewed from where we enunciate ourselves when formulating it. How we
continue to distance ourselves from the people for whom housing
assemblies are useful, as if it were not us.
Our militant work is to make the feeling prevail in the assembly that we
do not campaign for housing only to create structures that solve the
problem of people who come pushed by need. We campaign for ourselves. A
broad "we", but a "we" in which we are a central subject. Those of us
who make up the housing collectives, as we are working class, since we
are those who need these structures that we are fighting to make strong
and effective, have to truly believe that they will be the alternative
of the future, that self-managed popular structures will govern our
lives. At no time can we allow the discourse to be repeated and
reinforced that there are those affected and those militant depending on
who has an open struggle. We all have an open struggle, there are those
who simply have a more urgent situation.
We are all affected by the conception of housing as a market good, and
it is up to us to remind our colleagues to foster the feeling of
difference in the assembly. We must also put mechanisms on the table to
mitigate this dynamic. Let us stop our colleagues' comments, let us open
spaces where we can share everyone's problems, let us openly recognize
the precarious situation in which we all find ourselves.
We must understand that this duality can only be solved in a
bidirectional way, it is not just about getting the most proletarian
classes to become potential militants and stay after seeing their
urgency resolved. We debate a lot about this concern, however there is
another one that we do not focus on as much. Also, those of us who are
militants, already convinced, have to break this framework by using the
structures that we support. The militant, many times, does not confront
his landlord through the union while advising other tenants (this is
applicable to labor unions). Sometimes he squats on his own while
helping collective occupations through the union. Therefore, it is clear
that the militants themselves do not fully believe in the structures
that we support. We have to put an end to this common feeling, the best
propaganda is our example. We cannot hesitate when it comes to achieving
vital improvements through our collective.
Make other political tendencies visible and confront them.
Many things happen in assembly that escape those who are not up to date
with political debates; making them always evident to everyone is our
militant duty.
As we have already said, different tendencies coexist on the fronts,
with which we will have to understand, confront or work together
depending on the moment. In this process, there will be many moments of
friction. To ensure that these frictions are healthy, we propose:
Be honest when we start debates. Do not hide our position or our red
lines. Follow our militant code of ethics, offer the possibility of
consulting it and always declare our intentions and origins in a
transparent manner.
Demand the same from the rest. At the same time as we do the above, we
must demand the same from the other political traditions present. In
case this does not come from them, we must be the ones to make all this
explicit for them, with respect but without fear of confrontation.
We should be especially careful when confronting institutional drifts
and solutions . With the political recomposition after the 15M-PODEMOS
cycle, it is not surprising to see certain social-democratic political
actors with institutional strategies return to mass fronts. These actors
only inhabit the fronts as a tool of legitimation, and then extinguish
their potential through institutional means. Revolutionary potential
dies when it is channeled through the margins of the capitalist state,
its bourgeois democracy and its discursive logic. Our role is to
convince (and demonstrate) the effectiveness of the political
independence of the organization as a strategy of struggle. It is
important to prevent these subjects from taking spokespersons or places
of visibility, since they may be instrumentalizing the front for their
particular interests. Guaranteeing the autonomy of a strong people
involves convincing the majority of their capacity as active agents of
change, empowering ourselves through practice.
On the other hand, it is normal for many members to consider social
services or 'related' parties as a valid strategy. It is important to
raise these debates in a transparent and horizontal manner, knowing that
ideology is not an individual enlightenment, but a much more complex
collective process of reflection. Our role is to work and intervene,
from the base, to create class consciousness. Influencing them to stop
being seen as valid options, making their uselessness evident in
improving the living conditions of the working class, not closing
ourselves off to debate.
We have to be aware that as long as we are not able to solve material
problems ourselves with our own tools, resorting to social resources
will continue to be on the table as a strategy. In the end, it is a
question of how effective we can make our struggle.
Establish direct action as a tactic, daily praxis and common sense.
In relation to the above, we have to propose daily practices that deny
intermediation with the structures of capital. This does not mean taking
it as a discourse, but rather taking it as a permanent proposal. Issues
such as mobilizations, campaigns, communiqués, social impact or housing
liberalization under a tactic of self-organization and state
delegitimization.
This does not mean, by any means, that unions should not be well advised
legally, have lawyers or propose legal strategies to create
jurisprudence or media battles. Popular institutions (in this case, the
housing union) must have sufficient credibility for the society it seeks
to influence. Therefore, spokespersons, advisors or legal defense
committees are crucial to show organizational solidity and response
capacity.
We want to build a popular program of rupture: We understand all of the
above as necessary conditions for drawing up a revolutionary strategy
within a mass front. Let us now define the qualities of this
revolutionary strategy.
Develop a strategic program from the organizations .
Just as we want to propose a concrete tactic in which we do not
recognize any intermediation beyond the organized class in the face of
capital, we must develop strategies of action, of rupture, consistent
with this praxis. It is not worth appearing discursively radical but
materially impotent, since that would be falling into the errors from
which part of our movement comes. The intervention must be proportional
to our forces, pragmatic, and our work must serve as a militant example
for other comrades.
We must work on this strategy with a short step and a long view, without
sacrificing ourselves along the way. When designing it, it is important
to take into account a range of minimums and maximums. The first stage
of the strategy involves the accumulation of forces under a common
action program. That is: the sum, both quantitative and qualitative, of
people convinced of it. This situation could provide the conditions for
the leap to other levels of the struggle.
In short, we have to create a coherent action programme and stages. This
is the responsibility of specific organisations. Having a concrete
roadmap saves us from falling into simple rhetoric and from our action
being subjugated to the inertia of the movement. Anarchist organisations
have to design concrete objectives with their pertinent stages for the
different fronts and opportunities. For example: If our objective is for
the correlation of forces to reach such a point that a rent strike is
realistic, we must think about what steps we must take. What alliances
should we promote? What concise roadmap should we bring to housing
spaces? In how many years should such an objective be set? What other
actors outside of housing should we count on?
Only under a collective action program such as the one we describe will
we ensure that struggles do not end up in the same dead ends as always.
Thinking of ourselves as capable of transforming society. Urging the
ambition of social power.
A key part of being able to think of ourselves as users of our own
structures is to understand, and to make others understand, that our
groups have the potential to change the world. Not only the individual
situation of this or that person, but that through them we can confront
social problems of housing conception with a revolutionary approach. An
example of this would be being able to stop the media offensive against
squatting by making a large group of people understand it as a
legitimate option, or to influence social permissiveness with rentism,
pointing out that it is not a valid life option.
Those of us who believe in popular power see the revolutionary capacity
of workers to permeate reality, and we must transmit this belief to the
rest of our comrades. It is true that reality is not changed only by
winning a large number of individual struggles of people who approach
the collective. We must gain social strength and cultural hegemony of
our discourse. This translates into being effective in our
organizations, but also having a broader underlying strategy that seeks
to modify consciousness and consensus within our class. One must go hand
in hand with the other.
Popular power requires the ability to transform reality. But this
ability cannot be sustained without the real empowerment of our class.
To do so, we need to challenge the established and institutionalized
imaginings. This process requires hope, ambition and courage. A
militancy that is constantly retreating is of no use. Especifismo must
function as a rearguard and base to push social movements towards higher
stages of combativity.
Propose strategic alliances to those who share political space.
As especifists, we understand the limits of autonomism. Atomized in our
local reality, it is easier to fall into movementism and immediacy. This
prevents the creation of mass structures with a deeper revolutionary
program.
Our strategy is to work in an organised front under the prism of
libertarian socialism: federal, independent and popular. This means that
we should support the federation of unions under a housing front that
opposes centralist, reformist or social democratic proposals. This
alliance should not be a mere declaration of intentions, but a programme
with well-defined common points.
On the other hand, alliances at the local level can be built towards an
integral unionism that encompasses other realities (for example,
establishing alliances with CNT, CGT or Solidaridad Obrera) in order to
generate interactions that feed back, knowledge that is exchanged and
forces that are shared. Providing advice at the same local, exchanging
training or sharing campaigns can be concrete proposals to advance
towards deeper alliances in the future.
Giving value to everyday life as an element of popular cohesion.
From the perspective of popular power, we understand that class
consciousness is formed through the experience of shared struggle,
through the accumulation of mutual trust and proletarian solidarity.
Politics requires emotional ties with what we do, the feeling of seeing
ourselves as equals in the face of the difficulty of the struggle. A
community dining room, a solidarity toy collection, a snack before a
work day in any everyday space, constituted under the prism of a larger
structure of struggle, make up the popular sociability that engenders
the world of tomorrow.
When we fall into the demand for effectiveness of our actions, the
immediate need for results or the organic narrowness of internal
bureaucracy, we generate cold structures that make the popular network
necessary for the struggle impossible. It is also our responsibility to
ensure that this network does not fail. The class is created as a shared
experience, as a vital thread that connects and intertwines us.
As a final conclusion,
We know that it is difficult to endure in these spaces, you are not
alone. We have a historic duty, to continue the struggle and the
accumulation of forces until the revolution becomes possible.
Thank you for hanging in there and pushing towards it.
Impulse
Regeneration text 'Popular power and specifist anarchism'
https://www.regeneracionlibertaria.org/2024/05/29/poder-popular-y-anarquismo-especifista/
?
https://www.regeneracionlibertaria.org/2025/01/14/construir-poder-popular-en-vivienda/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
process of reconfiguration. The political subject around which to
organise, the way to form an independent organisation, or what the main
tactics should be are still open debates. The qualitative leap that is
taking place as a result of these reflections is quite remarkable,
giving rise to housing unions as autonomous class structures. A movement
that originally came from spaces more associated with social democracy
is leaving behind platforms and institutional solutions.
Throughout this process, the housing movement has been a space disputed
by different political actors. Different tendencies have been able to
read it as the mass front that it potentially is, and they are fighting
for consensus to direct the struggle in one direction or another.
Those of us who are active in housing find that in our assemblies
coexist: social democratic tendencies that seek to look to the
institutional path, political centralism under the discipline of some
Marxist-Leninist party, vanguardists who believe themselves to be
smarter than anyone else, defenders of autonomism that runs the risk of
atomizing... In short, we know that there are always intentions to
instrumentalize the struggles for political gain by anyone.
What position do we have - or propose to have - from the perspective of
specificist anarchism in these spaces?
For many, it makes sense that we bring the strategy of popular power 1
to these fronts , which is nothing other than ensuring that in these
spaces it is possible to provide the working class with effective tools
for its own emancipation.
There is a key idea, and that is that we should not understand these
spaces as mere containers where we can launch our discourse or our
ideas. Housing assemblies are not blank canvases, nor containers without
content waiting to be politicized. We urge you not to read them as
places where a savior-militant with a strategy learned in a party
formation has to arrive to lead and show the way to anyone.
We believe in the agency of the popular classes themselves to carry out
their struggle and in the learning process of these. Popular classes of
which we are part, and as part of them we act, but we do not understand
them as the herd to be moved. Whether for housing or any other front,
what we do understand as militant responsibility is to work to enhance
the revolutionary character of the structures of political
organizations. Understanding revolutionary as independent, democratic
and self-managed .
We understand that in the collectives and spaces of the housing movement
this revolutionary potential exists and is present (in that they are
self-managed and horizontal organizations that seek their political
independence). However, sometimes these spaces can be co-opted for the
political gain of certain tendencies. That is where we can be useful to
our class. Those of us who have been militant for years in anarchist
spaces usually have - due to our militant background - more tools to
know how to read which path or decisions can compromise the independence
or the true horizontal management of the space. To guarantee that it is
not lost we must be vigilant.
In short, we will be guardians of ensuring that the political potential
of housing is not compromised by other movements.
To achieve this, we propose a decalogue of action.
DECALOGUE OF ACTION
We have thought a lot about what our position could be on such a
disputed front. It seemed important to us to develop a proposal for a
strategic decalogue that would suggest where an organized housing
anarchist militant could push towards.
This Decalogue is far from being proven infallible; in fact, we thought
it would be interesting to make it public in order to open a space for
debate on its usefulness. We want to encourage further theoretical
development, knowing that we will find infinite errors in what is
presented after a time of trying to put it into practice. We do not
believe that practice and theory are two watertight worlds, but that
they must be intertwined like a rope in order to be useful and allow us
to move forward.
For all these reasons, we make a strategic contribution to building
popular power in the fight for housing.
We propose 6 tactics and 4 strategies
Truly democratic and binding structures.
A mass front, such as housing, must propose an effective struggle that
can serve as a tool for its class. We must seek organizational
mechanisms that practice popular democracy. Although there are
autonomous management bodies and binding working groups, this should not
be at odds with the assembly of the majority being, in the last
instance, the decision-making body.
For this democracy to be effective, it must facilitate participation and
address the complex reality of our class. Giving real space to the
participation of the most disadvantaged classes, or practicing pedagogy
and active listening, are indispensable tools of inclusion. We must be
attentive to including those who feel excluded, to accompany a group
that is usually left out in the process of entering.
The more people participate in organic life, the more democratic its
structure becomes. However horizontal or federal an organization claims
to be, if it is supported by an intellectual or bureaucratic minority,
it can give rise to unbridgeable power relations. We have to encourage
the participation of the majority, as opposed to the intellectual elite
that claims to direct the space.
The question of language.
We must be clear that one of the requirements for self-management to be
real, as we have said before, is that it is supported by a majority and
active participation of all members. If there are those who feel that
they cannot participate, we will not be able to accumulate all the
forces we need to challenge the social order. Language is one of the
main reasons why people leave a collective. An excessively complex,
abstract or intellectual language ends up alienating many people from
the movement or turning them into simple users, causing us to lose part
of the revolutionary potential of our struggle.
On these fronts, we have people with very different life situations:
some people do not cope very well in abstract debate environments, some
people have difficulty concentrating, some people have difficulty
remembering, some people do not trust that their vocabulary is up to the
ideas they want to express. We cannot encourage anyone to leave a
political space with the feeling that they are not up to the
conversation. In this system, the lives of everyone are at stake,
including those who disappear from spaces because they feel they are
hostile or too academic.
Those of us who live very comfortably in political spaces must also be
self-critical. An excessively 'political' language, with terminology
that is only known to those who are deeply involved in the latest trend
debates among activists or participants in the so-called 'political
ghetto', will have the same effect.
This language is often used when political tendencies compete for space.
This ends up excluding the strata that are most affected and in need of
these structures to function, who are also capable of reading the
conflict, but do not understand its nuances. They cannot understand them
because it is not usually done in an open or honest way. This is why we
also propose that our work in these spaces should be to avoid being
another agent of dispute of discourse within them.
Specificism should always work to ensure that internal communications
within a group are in accessible, simple and direct language. This is
the way to guarantee internal democracy without the entrenchment of
subjects who hold power relations over others.
Internal bureaucracy in such wide spaces.
Democratising a space means avoiding excessive bureaucratisation of its
internal processes. We understand that certain bureaucracy and internal
formality are tools to guarantee the organisation of a collective space,
but they can also be tools for selecting activists in order to establish
a specific trend within a space.
On a broad front we have to think of all those people who do not have a
computer, who have difficulty reading, who have a life that makes it
difficult for them to pay attention to a 17-page document. They all have
to be able to participate in the internal life of a collective without
mentoring or paternalism from others. It is also for them that these
structures exist. The review of the accessibility of all the bureaucracy
that a collective needs is our responsibility, to make sure that it does
not impede the development of the revolutionary potential of an
assembly. That forces are not lost in bureaucratic boredom.
There are those who are interested in leaving all these points of view
aside in order to establish a concrete political common sense. We have
the tools as organized anarchists to identify and challenge this when it
happens, let's use them.
We are also the subjects who have to measure the limits between internal
formality and excessive bureaucratization. Administrative rigidity can
never be an argument to leave someone's concern or proposal out or to
put an end to the spontaneity and enthusiasm of the militants. We must
ensure that there is always a space in which all ideas are collected and
where creative capacity is validated. Our mission is also in part to
make the rhythms and channels of the collective accessible. To ensure
that there are always spaces where the times and channels are explained
to everyone.
The militant-user duality has to die, also in our imaginations.
There is a maxim to keep in mind as housing activists: we are all
affected by the conception of housing as a business, and we are all in a
constant struggle to change it. We understand and have constantly heard
the criticism of the welfare system into which social movements fall.
How we end up converted into mere agencies for the social margins that
the State does not reach. We read this criticism a lot, but it is not
reviewed from where we enunciate ourselves when formulating it. How we
continue to distance ourselves from the people for whom housing
assemblies are useful, as if it were not us.
Our militant work is to make the feeling prevail in the assembly that we
do not campaign for housing only to create structures that solve the
problem of people who come pushed by need. We campaign for ourselves. A
broad "we", but a "we" in which we are a central subject. Those of us
who make up the housing collectives, as we are working class, since we
are those who need these structures that we are fighting to make strong
and effective, have to truly believe that they will be the alternative
of the future, that self-managed popular structures will govern our
lives. At no time can we allow the discourse to be repeated and
reinforced that there are those affected and those militant depending on
who has an open struggle. We all have an open struggle, there are those
who simply have a more urgent situation.
We are all affected by the conception of housing as a market good, and
it is up to us to remind our colleagues to foster the feeling of
difference in the assembly. We must also put mechanisms on the table to
mitigate this dynamic. Let us stop our colleagues' comments, let us open
spaces where we can share everyone's problems, let us openly recognize
the precarious situation in which we all find ourselves.
We must understand that this duality can only be solved in a
bidirectional way, it is not just about getting the most proletarian
classes to become potential militants and stay after seeing their
urgency resolved. We debate a lot about this concern, however there is
another one that we do not focus on as much. Also, those of us who are
militants, already convinced, have to break this framework by using the
structures that we support. The militant, many times, does not confront
his landlord through the union while advising other tenants (this is
applicable to labor unions). Sometimes he squats on his own while
helping collective occupations through the union. Therefore, it is clear
that the militants themselves do not fully believe in the structures
that we support. We have to put an end to this common feeling, the best
propaganda is our example. We cannot hesitate when it comes to achieving
vital improvements through our collective.
Make other political tendencies visible and confront them.
Many things happen in assembly that escape those who are not up to date
with political debates; making them always evident to everyone is our
militant duty.
As we have already said, different tendencies coexist on the fronts,
with which we will have to understand, confront or work together
depending on the moment. In this process, there will be many moments of
friction. To ensure that these frictions are healthy, we propose:
Be honest when we start debates. Do not hide our position or our red
lines. Follow our militant code of ethics, offer the possibility of
consulting it and always declare our intentions and origins in a
transparent manner.
Demand the same from the rest. At the same time as we do the above, we
must demand the same from the other political traditions present. In
case this does not come from them, we must be the ones to make all this
explicit for them, with respect but without fear of confrontation.
We should be especially careful when confronting institutional drifts
and solutions . With the political recomposition after the 15M-PODEMOS
cycle, it is not surprising to see certain social-democratic political
actors with institutional strategies return to mass fronts. These actors
only inhabit the fronts as a tool of legitimation, and then extinguish
their potential through institutional means. Revolutionary potential
dies when it is channeled through the margins of the capitalist state,
its bourgeois democracy and its discursive logic. Our role is to
convince (and demonstrate) the effectiveness of the political
independence of the organization as a strategy of struggle. It is
important to prevent these subjects from taking spokespersons or places
of visibility, since they may be instrumentalizing the front for their
particular interests. Guaranteeing the autonomy of a strong people
involves convincing the majority of their capacity as active agents of
change, empowering ourselves through practice.
On the other hand, it is normal for many members to consider social
services or 'related' parties as a valid strategy. It is important to
raise these debates in a transparent and horizontal manner, knowing that
ideology is not an individual enlightenment, but a much more complex
collective process of reflection. Our role is to work and intervene,
from the base, to create class consciousness. Influencing them to stop
being seen as valid options, making their uselessness evident in
improving the living conditions of the working class, not closing
ourselves off to debate.
We have to be aware that as long as we are not able to solve material
problems ourselves with our own tools, resorting to social resources
will continue to be on the table as a strategy. In the end, it is a
question of how effective we can make our struggle.
Establish direct action as a tactic, daily praxis and common sense.
In relation to the above, we have to propose daily practices that deny
intermediation with the structures of capital. This does not mean taking
it as a discourse, but rather taking it as a permanent proposal. Issues
such as mobilizations, campaigns, communiqués, social impact or housing
liberalization under a tactic of self-organization and state
delegitimization.
This does not mean, by any means, that unions should not be well advised
legally, have lawyers or propose legal strategies to create
jurisprudence or media battles. Popular institutions (in this case, the
housing union) must have sufficient credibility for the society it seeks
to influence. Therefore, spokespersons, advisors or legal defense
committees are crucial to show organizational solidity and response
capacity.
We want to build a popular program of rupture: We understand all of the
above as necessary conditions for drawing up a revolutionary strategy
within a mass front. Let us now define the qualities of this
revolutionary strategy.
Develop a strategic program from the organizations .
Just as we want to propose a concrete tactic in which we do not
recognize any intermediation beyond the organized class in the face of
capital, we must develop strategies of action, of rupture, consistent
with this praxis. It is not worth appearing discursively radical but
materially impotent, since that would be falling into the errors from
which part of our movement comes. The intervention must be proportional
to our forces, pragmatic, and our work must serve as a militant example
for other comrades.
We must work on this strategy with a short step and a long view, without
sacrificing ourselves along the way. When designing it, it is important
to take into account a range of minimums and maximums. The first stage
of the strategy involves the accumulation of forces under a common
action program. That is: the sum, both quantitative and qualitative, of
people convinced of it. This situation could provide the conditions for
the leap to other levels of the struggle.
In short, we have to create a coherent action programme and stages. This
is the responsibility of specific organisations. Having a concrete
roadmap saves us from falling into simple rhetoric and from our action
being subjugated to the inertia of the movement. Anarchist organisations
have to design concrete objectives with their pertinent stages for the
different fronts and opportunities. For example: If our objective is for
the correlation of forces to reach such a point that a rent strike is
realistic, we must think about what steps we must take. What alliances
should we promote? What concise roadmap should we bring to housing
spaces? In how many years should such an objective be set? What other
actors outside of housing should we count on?
Only under a collective action program such as the one we describe will
we ensure that struggles do not end up in the same dead ends as always.
Thinking of ourselves as capable of transforming society. Urging the
ambition of social power.
A key part of being able to think of ourselves as users of our own
structures is to understand, and to make others understand, that our
groups have the potential to change the world. Not only the individual
situation of this or that person, but that through them we can confront
social problems of housing conception with a revolutionary approach. An
example of this would be being able to stop the media offensive against
squatting by making a large group of people understand it as a
legitimate option, or to influence social permissiveness with rentism,
pointing out that it is not a valid life option.
Those of us who believe in popular power see the revolutionary capacity
of workers to permeate reality, and we must transmit this belief to the
rest of our comrades. It is true that reality is not changed only by
winning a large number of individual struggles of people who approach
the collective. We must gain social strength and cultural hegemony of
our discourse. This translates into being effective in our
organizations, but also having a broader underlying strategy that seeks
to modify consciousness and consensus within our class. One must go hand
in hand with the other.
Popular power requires the ability to transform reality. But this
ability cannot be sustained without the real empowerment of our class.
To do so, we need to challenge the established and institutionalized
imaginings. This process requires hope, ambition and courage. A
militancy that is constantly retreating is of no use. Especifismo must
function as a rearguard and base to push social movements towards higher
stages of combativity.
Propose strategic alliances to those who share political space.
As especifists, we understand the limits of autonomism. Atomized in our
local reality, it is easier to fall into movementism and immediacy. This
prevents the creation of mass structures with a deeper revolutionary
program.
Our strategy is to work in an organised front under the prism of
libertarian socialism: federal, independent and popular. This means that
we should support the federation of unions under a housing front that
opposes centralist, reformist or social democratic proposals. This
alliance should not be a mere declaration of intentions, but a programme
with well-defined common points.
On the other hand, alliances at the local level can be built towards an
integral unionism that encompasses other realities (for example,
establishing alliances with CNT, CGT or Solidaridad Obrera) in order to
generate interactions that feed back, knowledge that is exchanged and
forces that are shared. Providing advice at the same local, exchanging
training or sharing campaigns can be concrete proposals to advance
towards deeper alliances in the future.
Giving value to everyday life as an element of popular cohesion.
From the perspective of popular power, we understand that class
consciousness is formed through the experience of shared struggle,
through the accumulation of mutual trust and proletarian solidarity.
Politics requires emotional ties with what we do, the feeling of seeing
ourselves as equals in the face of the difficulty of the struggle. A
community dining room, a solidarity toy collection, a snack before a
work day in any everyday space, constituted under the prism of a larger
structure of struggle, make up the popular sociability that engenders
the world of tomorrow.
When we fall into the demand for effectiveness of our actions, the
immediate need for results or the organic narrowness of internal
bureaucracy, we generate cold structures that make the popular network
necessary for the struggle impossible. It is also our responsibility to
ensure that this network does not fail. The class is created as a shared
experience, as a vital thread that connects and intertwines us.
As a final conclusion,
We know that it is difficult to endure in these spaces, you are not
alone. We have a historic duty, to continue the struggle and the
accumulation of forces until the revolution becomes possible.
Thank you for hanging in there and pushing towards it.
Impulse
Regeneration text 'Popular power and specifist anarchism'
https://www.regeneracionlibertaria.org/2024/05/29/poder-popular-y-anarquismo-especifista/
?
https://www.regeneracionlibertaria.org/2025/01/14/construir-poder-popular-en-vivienda/
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