WORLD WORLDWIDE NEW ZEALAND - news journal UPDATE - (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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Link:  (en) NZ, Aotearoa, AWSM: Polar Blast - Freedom in Practice: The Twentieth Century and Beyond (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

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