When the Bourgeois Infiltrations Fabbri Spoke of Mire Revolutionary
Thought ---- In the spring of 2024, the Gedisa publishing house released
what, to this day, is the most defining essay on Tomás Ibáñez's
political positions: Non-foundational Anarchism. At the time, colleagues
from a well-known bookstore and publishing house in the autonomous
sector gave me a preview copy of the book with the intention of
fostering a debate with the author. That debate never took place.
From the first pages, I understood why it was considered pertinent for
me to join the discussion: few positions within the libertarian field
are as far removed from my own as those defended in this work. I read it
carefully, took notes, and organized my disagreements. Since that
exchange of ideas ultimately didn't happen, those notes remained filed
away until recently.
I did not turn them into an article then, partly because the social and
organized anarchism to which I belong had-and still has-more urgent
tasks, and also because I did not wish to contribute to spreading, even
critically, positions that I consider deeply harmful to anarchism and
the working class.
However, on October 8th of this year, Ibáñez published a text in which
he described the political tradition to which I belong as "caveman-like,
retrograde, and authoritarian anarchisms." Abandoning debate does not
imply abandoning political struggle, and it is clear that he has
preferred to wage it through other means. Although this discussion does
not appear likely to unfold on fraternal and honest ground, I will
attempt-at least-to raise the level: to offer arguments in the face of
outbursts and insults.
A theory in the air
However, before proceeding, it is worth noting what I consider an
improvement over Ibáñez's earlier works. I find it very positive that in
this text Ibáñez presents his positions directly, without hiding behind
the fiction of a supposed sector of the libertarian movement, and that
he adopts his theses in his own voice and under his own name. It was
disconcerting that in previous writings he resorted to a narrative
device that presented the development of a hypothetical "post-anarchism"
as a chronicle, a movement for which there is no evidence outside of
academic circles-as the bibliography clearly demonstrates-or the
author's own imagination.
This supposed post-anarchism is absent from evictions, neighborhood
self-organized assemblies, labor struggles, and the anti-racist or
anti-repression movements. Obviously, this observation cannot be
interpreted as an anti-theoretical stance, since the sector of anarchism
to which I belong has defended the necessity of theoretical
construction. What we intend to point out is that the gap between the
ideas defended in this essay and social and political reality is so wide
that any contact with practice is ruled out. From this separation
between praxis and reflection arise the outdated analyses upon which its
arguments are based. It is a book that was born old, completely
superseded more than a decade ago. A natural product of political isolation.
If, as he recalls quoting Proudhon, "the idea is born from action and
must return to action," this book fulfills this principle in a peculiar
way: the ideas it defends are born from the action of publishing papers
in indexed journals and return in a text detached from any militant
practice, except for philosophizing and offering lectures without the
possibility of rebuttal.
A brief overview of the text
Before engaging in debate, we need to clarify the fundamental ideas
developed by Ibáñez. The book begins by celebrating the plurality of
libertarian understandings and strategies. However, the book's stated
objective is clear: to present a "new variant" of
anarchism-"non-foundational" anarchism-and to defend its capacity to
break with the "inertia" that, in his view, immobilizes other currents,
thus preventing the reproduction in libertarian practice of the very
domination it combats.
To justify this, the author examines the formative period of anarchism
in order to identify the defining characteristics: modernity, the
Enlightenment, and the labor movement. Within this context, socialist
formulations emerged, drawing on Enlightenment values-liberty, equality,
reason, progress, emancipation-of which anarchism would be the most
radical branch, oriented toward a revolutionary, mass perspective.
Here Ibáñez begins to lay the foundation for his thesis: anarchism has
adopted values that permeated it-"overvaluation of reason," "totalizing"
universalism, "humanism," "progress"-and which, according to him,
contain an authoritarian tendency, besides being insufficient today.
Non-foundational anarchism is defended as "an antidote to the traces
that foundationalism has left on anarchisms."
But this antidote only became possible from the second half of the 20th
century onwards. What happened during this period to allow a
non-foundational anarchism to emerge? Ibáñez points to three issues: the
disappearance of the working class with post-Fordism, the
financialization of the economy and welfare societies, the consolidation
of an insurmountable capitalist system against which no transformative
action is possible, and a critique of revolutionary projects as
totalitarian and criminal.
From this point, Ibáñez announces the emergence of non-foundational
anarchism, drawing on post-structuralism and a critique of Enlightenment
values. From this, he derives several tasks: a critique of the subject
who reduces politics to exercises in deconstruction; a critique of the
Revolution for its totalizing character, which leads to the denial of
any center of power; and, in conclusion, a strategy that makes a virtue
of necessity: resistance is the only option.
In short, it proposes abandoning the strategic in favor of the tactical,
replacing the revolutionary project with a "desire for revolution"
associated with autonomist and lifestyle logics, and constructing
"spaces without domination": the much-vaunted prefigurative politics and
micropolitics centered on interpersonal relationships. This line of
thought asserts that, given the impossibility and undesirability of
transforming the world, it would suffice to transform ourselves
individually.
Non-foundational anarchism is defined as an anarchism "without
principles" or "aims." Without objectives to guide action, the need for
strategy also disappears.
Non-foundational anarchism positions itself as a theory of resistance
that, without making any assessment of the possibility, or not, of a
society devoid of power, nevertheless avoids constituting itself as a
modality of power opposed to the current power, promoting the condition
of ungovernability and voluntary servitude as hallmarks of identity.
After tracing a genealogy that runs from Stirner to Landauer, by way of
Nietzsche, and which reveals the fascination of certain figures in
Iberian anarchism with bourgeois individualist currents, the text
ultimately reaches a dead end: if on one page it argues that we live
under a "totalitarianism that closes off (...) disobedience," two pages
later it is forced to assert that this totalitarianism "has not
colonized the entire space of life." When your own argumentation
deprives you of any reason to communicate with the outside world, the
Foucauldian aphorism that "all power generates forms of resistance" is
the only thing that justifies your dedication to political theorizing
and this excessive desire for the limelight.
We now state his main theses: there is no longer exploitation and
therefore the working class does not exist, capitalism is invincible and
revolution is not possible, and even if it were, it would be undesirable
because it is a totalitarian project.
Swallowing (and propagating) the neoliberal story
Ibáñez readily accepts the arguments crafted in the think tanks of the
most uncompromising liberalism. The "end of history" has supposedly
arrived with the disappearance of class struggle, a necessary
consequence-he maintains-of the disappearance of the working class.
Thus, without batting an eye, and like a true product of his time-the
time of defeat-he equates precarious employment, the consumer and
welfare society, and the international reorganization of
capitalism-which shifts production to increasingly exploited
peripheries-with the sheer and simple elimination of the working class.
We find no further justification for his hypothesis that
financialization represents the overcoming of an economy based on the
exploitation of the working class. All the data indicate the contrary;
never in history has there been a larger, more widespread, and more
diverse working class than today. The disappearance of the working class
that Ibáñez proclaims seems to stem solely from his own lack of contact
with it.
Few statements are more ethnocentric than the one that says, "What I
can't see from my window doesn't exist." But Ibáñez seems determined to
outdo himself. Since the 2008 global crisis, marked by capitalism's
explicit inability to recover even acceptable growth rates within its
own logic-and exacerbated by the ongoing climate collapse and energy
crisis-even voices that were once enthusiastic about "eternal
capitalism" now acknowledge the error of having considered it a system
of infinite resilience, as well as the mistake of declaring the class
struggle dead. Our author, however, clings to that ship even as it
sinks. As the saying goes: the end of the line means nothing to someone
determined to follow it.
Following this same logic, Ibáñez characterizes the three international
waves of protests and insurrections of the last decade as local,
disconnected, and sporadic phenomena. Our author is incapable of even
glimpsing that capitalism is entering a phase of structural
turbulence-don't let the truth spoil a good analysis. The magnitude,
persistence, and simultaneity of these struggles-from revolts against
austerity to anti-racist, feminist, climate, and anti-oligarchic
movements-are thus reduced to mere anecdotes.
If the two central theses on which his argument rests-the end of the
class struggle and the impossibility of overcoming the current state of
affairs-could so easily collapse, one might think that the problems
would end there. But nothing could be further from the truth. We have
the clear example of a militant who went from being defeated to becoming
a defeatist, making his defeat his main political objective. From
depressed to depressing.
A parody of the revolution
Far from offering a critical and materialist reading of the history of
revolutionary struggles led by the working class, Ibáñez chooses to
reproduce without examination the postmodern slogan of the end of grand
narratives. From this premise, he assumes that any revolutionary project
is, by its very nature, totalitarian, and that every attempt at radical
transformation is doomed to degenerate into terror, bureaucracy, and the
suppression of freedom. More than an analysis, his approach is a
preemptive refusal to consider revolution outside the caricature that
the dominant order and progressive intellectuals need to legitimize
themselves.
However, for us-and for every emancipatory tradition that takes
seriously the human capacity for self-governance-revolution has nothing
to do with that bogeyman constructed to undermine it. The revolution we
defend is not a remote-controlled exercise in social engineering, but
the highest point of human development, both personal and collective:
the conscious appropriation of our lives, our needs, and our future. It
is the irruption of the working people into the governance of the
commons, not an operation of top-down command.
If Ibáñez isn't referring to this-if what he wants to emphasize is that
every revolutionary process necessarily involves imposing a new social
model on those who occupy privileged positions in this system of
exploitation and structural violence-then, of course, he's right. Every
revolution involves defeating the resistance of those who live off the
suffering of the majority. There's no trickery here: when an unjust
order is overthrown, the alternative is "imposed" on precisely those
directly responsible for the misery and pain.
The maneuver consists of concealing this asymmetry, and it is a truly
perverse one. Ibáñez speaks of "imposition" in the abstract, without
saying who is exercising it, who it is directed at, and what interests
are at stake. In contrast, our idea of revolution is clear: it is not
the homogenization of the world, nor the replacement of one elite by
another, but the government of all by all. Against whom? Against those
who seek to prevent it: the ruling classes and their accomplices, who
will defend to the last minute a system that only functions by
reproducing the suffering of others.
The abandonment of mass politics in favor of personal politics
The proposal of non-foundational anarchism inevitably ends up reduced to
a repertoire of lifestyle practices, small gestures of resistance, and,
at best, carefully self-limited micro-experiences of autonomy designed
to avoid-according to its own fear-falling into "spaces of power
reproduction." This debate is more than outdated-yet again, it's too
late. From the historic thrashing that Bookchin inflicted on lifestyle
anarchism to the conclusions drawn from decades of ghetto dynamics,
which have demonstrated not only its political insignificance but also
its profoundly endogamous nature, accessible only to those who enjoy
greater privileges within the capitalist order itself.
However, it is worth highlighting something that is often overlooked in
these positions centered on the self as the sole political subject. The
degeneration of worker autonomy into social autonomy, which inexorably
led to strategies based on the pursuit of "personal autonomy," expresses
a clear disregard for the suffering of others, an absence of solidarity
that is not accidental, but a logical consequence of their approach. Far
from constituting a challenge to the existing order, they reproduce and
deepen the individualistic logic that sustains capitalism and all forms
of oppression. At best, they substitute Christian empathy for class
solidarity.
We could say, without exaggeration, that Ibáñez's proposal represents a
functional anarchism: functional for the exploiters and oppressors
because it renounces building collective power. Functional for
maintaining the status quo because it replaces mass politics with a
therapeutic politics, an identity refuge that alters nothing beyond the
individual's own consciousness.
Amoralism is a luxury not everyone can afford.
One might wonder what life is like for someone who shows no interest
whatsoever in changing things. But simply asking that question reveals
that it's not enough. One might ask why someone would dedicate so much
effort and persistence to preventing any change, to trying to convince
others that nothing is worth changing. And even answering these two
questions, a third would remain: what kind of morality does someone
uphold when defending such a proposal against those who are literally
risking their lives for it, against whom resistance is not an aesthetic
choice but a matter of survival?
The lack of solidarity that permeates this book demonstrates that the
politics of the privileged continue to measure the world solely by the
yardstick of their own interests, and they do so with full force. They
have lost no capacity to evade, deny, or minimize the suffering of others.
While kids from the outlying neighborhoods fill the walls with graffiti
calling for a renewed belief that victory is possible, that revolution
is not only possible but necessary; while young people organize, study,
build alliances and confront the common sense that wants us unarmed in
the face of this unbearable reality, Ibáñez decides that the most urgent
task, his political task, is to proclaim that revolution is not only
impossible, but also undesirable.
While workers are imprisoned for defending their labor rights, Ibáñez
denies exploitation. While every conflict sparks spontaneous uprisings
and massive popular protests, he insists on reminding us that all the
sacrifices, all the dedication, all the battles we fight are in vain.
Here are the cavemen
The practice of withdrawing the "libertarian card" from those who don't
think like you is a classic in our movement. Ibáñez, at least, has the
decency to publicly tear up his own anarchist
accreditation-"foundational," in his vocabulary-while labeling
organized, social, and revolutionary anarchism as authoritarian,
retrograde, and caveman-like.
At this point in the article, the answer is clear: social revolution is
not only possible, but also desirable, because it is the only way to
confront a criminal system that is leading us to widespread collapse.
The contradictions of capitalism are not diminishing: they are
deepening, accelerating, and becoming globalized. We are entering a
historical phase in which the old dilemma of "revolution or barbarism"
regains its full relevance.
If, to achieve its own emancipation, the working class must overcome the
resistance of capitalists and oppressors-a necessity as evident as it is
inevitable-we will have no doubt about what to do, nor about which side
of the trench to stand on. That battle has already begun, and it demands
a forceful response to those who have become spokespeople for defeat
within the libertarian movement and the revolutionary left. Ibáñez is
today one of the most persistent of these spokespeople.
Miguel Brea, a member of Liza Madrid.
https://regeneracionlibertaria.org/2025/12/03/anarquismo-no-fundacional-anarquismo-funcional-al-capital/
_________________________________________
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
Thought ---- In the spring of 2024, the Gedisa publishing house released
what, to this day, is the most defining essay on Tomás Ibáñez's
political positions: Non-foundational Anarchism. At the time, colleagues
from a well-known bookstore and publishing house in the autonomous
sector gave me a preview copy of the book with the intention of
fostering a debate with the author. That debate never took place.
From the first pages, I understood why it was considered pertinent for
me to join the discussion: few positions within the libertarian field
are as far removed from my own as those defended in this work. I read it
carefully, took notes, and organized my disagreements. Since that
exchange of ideas ultimately didn't happen, those notes remained filed
away until recently.
I did not turn them into an article then, partly because the social and
organized anarchism to which I belong had-and still has-more urgent
tasks, and also because I did not wish to contribute to spreading, even
critically, positions that I consider deeply harmful to anarchism and
the working class.
However, on October 8th of this year, Ibáñez published a text in which
he described the political tradition to which I belong as "caveman-like,
retrograde, and authoritarian anarchisms." Abandoning debate does not
imply abandoning political struggle, and it is clear that he has
preferred to wage it through other means. Although this discussion does
not appear likely to unfold on fraternal and honest ground, I will
attempt-at least-to raise the level: to offer arguments in the face of
outbursts and insults.
A theory in the air
However, before proceeding, it is worth noting what I consider an
improvement over Ibáñez's earlier works. I find it very positive that in
this text Ibáñez presents his positions directly, without hiding behind
the fiction of a supposed sector of the libertarian movement, and that
he adopts his theses in his own voice and under his own name. It was
disconcerting that in previous writings he resorted to a narrative
device that presented the development of a hypothetical "post-anarchism"
as a chronicle, a movement for which there is no evidence outside of
academic circles-as the bibliography clearly demonstrates-or the
author's own imagination.
This supposed post-anarchism is absent from evictions, neighborhood
self-organized assemblies, labor struggles, and the anti-racist or
anti-repression movements. Obviously, this observation cannot be
interpreted as an anti-theoretical stance, since the sector of anarchism
to which I belong has defended the necessity of theoretical
construction. What we intend to point out is that the gap between the
ideas defended in this essay and social and political reality is so wide
that any contact with practice is ruled out. From this separation
between praxis and reflection arise the outdated analyses upon which its
arguments are based. It is a book that was born old, completely
superseded more than a decade ago. A natural product of political isolation.
If, as he recalls quoting Proudhon, "the idea is born from action and
must return to action," this book fulfills this principle in a peculiar
way: the ideas it defends are born from the action of publishing papers
in indexed journals and return in a text detached from any militant
practice, except for philosophizing and offering lectures without the
possibility of rebuttal.
A brief overview of the text
Before engaging in debate, we need to clarify the fundamental ideas
developed by Ibáñez. The book begins by celebrating the plurality of
libertarian understandings and strategies. However, the book's stated
objective is clear: to present a "new variant" of
anarchism-"non-foundational" anarchism-and to defend its capacity to
break with the "inertia" that, in his view, immobilizes other currents,
thus preventing the reproduction in libertarian practice of the very
domination it combats.
To justify this, the author examines the formative period of anarchism
in order to identify the defining characteristics: modernity, the
Enlightenment, and the labor movement. Within this context, socialist
formulations emerged, drawing on Enlightenment values-liberty, equality,
reason, progress, emancipation-of which anarchism would be the most
radical branch, oriented toward a revolutionary, mass perspective.
Here Ibáñez begins to lay the foundation for his thesis: anarchism has
adopted values that permeated it-"overvaluation of reason," "totalizing"
universalism, "humanism," "progress"-and which, according to him,
contain an authoritarian tendency, besides being insufficient today.
Non-foundational anarchism is defended as "an antidote to the traces
that foundationalism has left on anarchisms."
But this antidote only became possible from the second half of the 20th
century onwards. What happened during this period to allow a
non-foundational anarchism to emerge? Ibáñez points to three issues: the
disappearance of the working class with post-Fordism, the
financialization of the economy and welfare societies, the consolidation
of an insurmountable capitalist system against which no transformative
action is possible, and a critique of revolutionary projects as
totalitarian and criminal.
From this point, Ibáñez announces the emergence of non-foundational
anarchism, drawing on post-structuralism and a critique of Enlightenment
values. From this, he derives several tasks: a critique of the subject
who reduces politics to exercises in deconstruction; a critique of the
Revolution for its totalizing character, which leads to the denial of
any center of power; and, in conclusion, a strategy that makes a virtue
of necessity: resistance is the only option.
In short, it proposes abandoning the strategic in favor of the tactical,
replacing the revolutionary project with a "desire for revolution"
associated with autonomist and lifestyle logics, and constructing
"spaces without domination": the much-vaunted prefigurative politics and
micropolitics centered on interpersonal relationships. This line of
thought asserts that, given the impossibility and undesirability of
transforming the world, it would suffice to transform ourselves
individually.
Non-foundational anarchism is defined as an anarchism "without
principles" or "aims." Without objectives to guide action, the need for
strategy also disappears.
Non-foundational anarchism positions itself as a theory of resistance
that, without making any assessment of the possibility, or not, of a
society devoid of power, nevertheless avoids constituting itself as a
modality of power opposed to the current power, promoting the condition
of ungovernability and voluntary servitude as hallmarks of identity.
After tracing a genealogy that runs from Stirner to Landauer, by way of
Nietzsche, and which reveals the fascination of certain figures in
Iberian anarchism with bourgeois individualist currents, the text
ultimately reaches a dead end: if on one page it argues that we live
under a "totalitarianism that closes off (...) disobedience," two pages
later it is forced to assert that this totalitarianism "has not
colonized the entire space of life." When your own argumentation
deprives you of any reason to communicate with the outside world, the
Foucauldian aphorism that "all power generates forms of resistance" is
the only thing that justifies your dedication to political theorizing
and this excessive desire for the limelight.
We now state his main theses: there is no longer exploitation and
therefore the working class does not exist, capitalism is invincible and
revolution is not possible, and even if it were, it would be undesirable
because it is a totalitarian project.
Swallowing (and propagating) the neoliberal story
Ibáñez readily accepts the arguments crafted in the think tanks of the
most uncompromising liberalism. The "end of history" has supposedly
arrived with the disappearance of class struggle, a necessary
consequence-he maintains-of the disappearance of the working class.
Thus, without batting an eye, and like a true product of his time-the
time of defeat-he equates precarious employment, the consumer and
welfare society, and the international reorganization of
capitalism-which shifts production to increasingly exploited
peripheries-with the sheer and simple elimination of the working class.
We find no further justification for his hypothesis that
financialization represents the overcoming of an economy based on the
exploitation of the working class. All the data indicate the contrary;
never in history has there been a larger, more widespread, and more
diverse working class than today. The disappearance of the working class
that Ibáñez proclaims seems to stem solely from his own lack of contact
with it.
Few statements are more ethnocentric than the one that says, "What I
can't see from my window doesn't exist." But Ibáñez seems determined to
outdo himself. Since the 2008 global crisis, marked by capitalism's
explicit inability to recover even acceptable growth rates within its
own logic-and exacerbated by the ongoing climate collapse and energy
crisis-even voices that were once enthusiastic about "eternal
capitalism" now acknowledge the error of having considered it a system
of infinite resilience, as well as the mistake of declaring the class
struggle dead. Our author, however, clings to that ship even as it
sinks. As the saying goes: the end of the line means nothing to someone
determined to follow it.
Following this same logic, Ibáñez characterizes the three international
waves of protests and insurrections of the last decade as local,
disconnected, and sporadic phenomena. Our author is incapable of even
glimpsing that capitalism is entering a phase of structural
turbulence-don't let the truth spoil a good analysis. The magnitude,
persistence, and simultaneity of these struggles-from revolts against
austerity to anti-racist, feminist, climate, and anti-oligarchic
movements-are thus reduced to mere anecdotes.
If the two central theses on which his argument rests-the end of the
class struggle and the impossibility of overcoming the current state of
affairs-could so easily collapse, one might think that the problems
would end there. But nothing could be further from the truth. We have
the clear example of a militant who went from being defeated to becoming
a defeatist, making his defeat his main political objective. From
depressed to depressing.
A parody of the revolution
Far from offering a critical and materialist reading of the history of
revolutionary struggles led by the working class, Ibáñez chooses to
reproduce without examination the postmodern slogan of the end of grand
narratives. From this premise, he assumes that any revolutionary project
is, by its very nature, totalitarian, and that every attempt at radical
transformation is doomed to degenerate into terror, bureaucracy, and the
suppression of freedom. More than an analysis, his approach is a
preemptive refusal to consider revolution outside the caricature that
the dominant order and progressive intellectuals need to legitimize
themselves.
However, for us-and for every emancipatory tradition that takes
seriously the human capacity for self-governance-revolution has nothing
to do with that bogeyman constructed to undermine it. The revolution we
defend is not a remote-controlled exercise in social engineering, but
the highest point of human development, both personal and collective:
the conscious appropriation of our lives, our needs, and our future. It
is the irruption of the working people into the governance of the
commons, not an operation of top-down command.
If Ibáñez isn't referring to this-if what he wants to emphasize is that
every revolutionary process necessarily involves imposing a new social
model on those who occupy privileged positions in this system of
exploitation and structural violence-then, of course, he's right. Every
revolution involves defeating the resistance of those who live off the
suffering of the majority. There's no trickery here: when an unjust
order is overthrown, the alternative is "imposed" on precisely those
directly responsible for the misery and pain.
The maneuver consists of concealing this asymmetry, and it is a truly
perverse one. Ibáñez speaks of "imposition" in the abstract, without
saying who is exercising it, who it is directed at, and what interests
are at stake. In contrast, our idea of revolution is clear: it is not
the homogenization of the world, nor the replacement of one elite by
another, but the government of all by all. Against whom? Against those
who seek to prevent it: the ruling classes and their accomplices, who
will defend to the last minute a system that only functions by
reproducing the suffering of others.
The abandonment of mass politics in favor of personal politics
The proposal of non-foundational anarchism inevitably ends up reduced to
a repertoire of lifestyle practices, small gestures of resistance, and,
at best, carefully self-limited micro-experiences of autonomy designed
to avoid-according to its own fear-falling into "spaces of power
reproduction." This debate is more than outdated-yet again, it's too
late. From the historic thrashing that Bookchin inflicted on lifestyle
anarchism to the conclusions drawn from decades of ghetto dynamics,
which have demonstrated not only its political insignificance but also
its profoundly endogamous nature, accessible only to those who enjoy
greater privileges within the capitalist order itself.
However, it is worth highlighting something that is often overlooked in
these positions centered on the self as the sole political subject. The
degeneration of worker autonomy into social autonomy, which inexorably
led to strategies based on the pursuit of "personal autonomy," expresses
a clear disregard for the suffering of others, an absence of solidarity
that is not accidental, but a logical consequence of their approach. Far
from constituting a challenge to the existing order, they reproduce and
deepen the individualistic logic that sustains capitalism and all forms
of oppression. At best, they substitute Christian empathy for class
solidarity.
We could say, without exaggeration, that Ibáñez's proposal represents a
functional anarchism: functional for the exploiters and oppressors
because it renounces building collective power. Functional for
maintaining the status quo because it replaces mass politics with a
therapeutic politics, an identity refuge that alters nothing beyond the
individual's own consciousness.
Amoralism is a luxury not everyone can afford.
One might wonder what life is like for someone who shows no interest
whatsoever in changing things. But simply asking that question reveals
that it's not enough. One might ask why someone would dedicate so much
effort and persistence to preventing any change, to trying to convince
others that nothing is worth changing. And even answering these two
questions, a third would remain: what kind of morality does someone
uphold when defending such a proposal against those who are literally
risking their lives for it, against whom resistance is not an aesthetic
choice but a matter of survival?
The lack of solidarity that permeates this book demonstrates that the
politics of the privileged continue to measure the world solely by the
yardstick of their own interests, and they do so with full force. They
have lost no capacity to evade, deny, or minimize the suffering of others.
While kids from the outlying neighborhoods fill the walls with graffiti
calling for a renewed belief that victory is possible, that revolution
is not only possible but necessary; while young people organize, study,
build alliances and confront the common sense that wants us unarmed in
the face of this unbearable reality, Ibáñez decides that the most urgent
task, his political task, is to proclaim that revolution is not only
impossible, but also undesirable.
While workers are imprisoned for defending their labor rights, Ibáñez
denies exploitation. While every conflict sparks spontaneous uprisings
and massive popular protests, he insists on reminding us that all the
sacrifices, all the dedication, all the battles we fight are in vain.
Here are the cavemen
The practice of withdrawing the "libertarian card" from those who don't
think like you is a classic in our movement. Ibáñez, at least, has the
decency to publicly tear up his own anarchist
accreditation-"foundational," in his vocabulary-while labeling
organized, social, and revolutionary anarchism as authoritarian,
retrograde, and caveman-like.
At this point in the article, the answer is clear: social revolution is
not only possible, but also desirable, because it is the only way to
confront a criminal system that is leading us to widespread collapse.
The contradictions of capitalism are not diminishing: they are
deepening, accelerating, and becoming globalized. We are entering a
historical phase in which the old dilemma of "revolution or barbarism"
regains its full relevance.
If, to achieve its own emancipation, the working class must overcome the
resistance of capitalists and oppressors-a necessity as evident as it is
inevitable-we will have no doubt about what to do, nor about which side
of the trench to stand on. That battle has already begun, and it demands
a forceful response to those who have become spokespeople for defeat
within the libertarian movement and the revolutionary left. Ibáñez is
today one of the most persistent of these spokespeople.
Miguel Brea, a member of Liza Madrid.
https://regeneracionlibertaria.org/2025/12/03/anarquismo-no-fundacional-anarquismo-funcional-al-capital/
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