There is a question the anarcho-communist theory of freedom tends to leave unanswered, or answers only in fragments, and it is the question that sceptics most persistently raise: how do you actually get from the world as it is to the world as you want it to be? Prefiguration tells us that the means must be consistent with the ends. Historical examples tell us that people have built free institutions under conditions of crisis and collapse. The theoretical argument tells us what a free society would require. But none of this amounts to a coherent account of transition, of how a society saturated in domination, whose institutions are designed to reproduce themselves, whose people have been formed by the conditions they live in, actually moves toward something different.
The anarchist tradition's resistance to providing such an account is not simply evasion. It is grounded in a genuine and well-founded suspicion of revolutionary blueprints. The history of the left is littered with detailed plans for the postrevolutionary society that turned out to be either irrelevant to the actual conditions of revolution or, worse, templates for new forms of domination. The Bolshevik programme was not vague, it was precise, detailed, theoretically elaborated, and it produced the Gulag. The anarchist insistence that you cannot specify inadvance how a free society will organise itself, that genuine freedom means people determining their own arrangements rather than having arrangements determined for them by revolutionary theorists, is philosophically serious and historically vindicated. However, there is a difference between refusing to blueprint the post-revolutionary society and having nothing to say about the process of transformation. And the anarchist tradition does, in fact, have things to say, they are just scattered across different thinkers and tendencies rather than assembled into a single coherent account. What follows is an attempt to draw those threads together.
The oldest and most persistent anarchist theory of revolutionary transformation is the general strike, the idea that the coordinated refusal of workers to sell their labour is both the most powerful weapon in the working class arsenal and the embryo of a new social order. Georges Sorel developed the most elaborate philosophical account of this, but the idea runs from Bakunin through the syndicalist tradition to the IWW and beyond. The general strike is not merely a tactic, it is a demonstration that production depends on workers rather than on owners, that the economy as a whole is held together by the cooperative labour of those at the bottom of the hierarchy rather than by the decisions of those at the top. A successful general strike does not just win concessions, it reveals the actual structure of social power and prefigures, in its organisation, the kind of voluntary coordination that could replace the coercive coordination of the market and the state.
Alongside the general strike, the anarchist tradition has theorised what might be called the insurrectionary commune, the moment of revolutionary rupture in which existing institutions collapse and new ones are built in their place. The Paris Commune of 1871 is the paradigmatic example:, an improvised experiment in direct democracy, workers' self-governance, and the dismantling of the bourgeois state apparatus that lasted seventy-two days before being drowned in blood by the French army. Kropotkin drew extensively on the Commune as a model, and the Spanish collectivisations of 1936 can be understood as its most developed realisation. The insurrectionary commune is not planned in advance, it emerges from the collapse of existing authority and the spontaneous self-organisation of people who find themselves, suddenly, without masters. Its strength is its organic connection to real conditions, its weakness is its dependence on a crisis that creates the space for it and its vulnerability to the organised violence of counter-revolution.
A third strand of anarchist thought about transition, one that has become more prominent in recent decades, partly in response to the defeats of the classical revolutionary moment, is the accumulation of what some have called dual power: the building, within existing society, of institutions that meet real needs and prefigure the kind of collective self-governance that a free society requires, gradually expanding their scope and legitimacy until they are capable of replacing rather than merely supplementing the existing order. This is not reformism, it does not accept the legitimacy of the existing order or seek to improve it from within. It is the patient, difficult work of building the infrastructure of a different world alongside the infrastructure of this one - workers' cooperatives, mutual aid networks, community land trusts, free schools, housing cooperatives, solidarity economies. Each of these is imperfect and partial, none of them resolves the fundamental contradictions of capitalism, but collectively and over time they develop the capacities, relationships, and institutions that a free society requires, and they do so in ways that are immediately useful rather than deferred to a revolutionary future that may never arrive.
These three approaches, the general strike, the insurrectionary commune, and the accumulation of dual power, are not mutually exclusive, and the most sophisticated anarchist thinking about transition has always understood them as complementary rather than competing. The dual power institutions provide the social infrastructure that makes a general strike viable and gives the insurrectionary moment something to build on rather than starting from scratch. The general strike tests and develops the capacities for collective self-organisation that dual power institutions have been cultivating. The insurrectionary moment, when it comes, is more likely to produce lasting free institutions if it emerges from a social fabric already partially organised on free principles than if it erupts in a vacuum.
What all three approaches share is a refusal of the Leninist model of transition, the seizure of state power by a vanguard party that then directs the construction of socialism from above. The anarcho-communist objection to this model is not simply that it has historically produced authoritarianism, though it has. It is that the model is structurally incompatible with the goal of freedom. A revolution that passes through the seizure and exercise of state power cannot produce a stateless society, because the exercise of state power develops precisely those habits of command, hierarchy, and institutional self-perpetuation that the stateless society requires to be abolished. You cannot abolish the state by using it. You can only build, practice, and defend the free institutions that make it unnecessary, and then, when the moment of rupture comes, extend those institutions rather than capturing the machinery of the old order.
This account of transition is less satisfying than the Leninist one in certain respects. It does not promise a decisive moment of revolutionary victory after which the hard work is over. It does not offer a clear organisational form, the party, the vanguard, the disciplined cadre, that can serve as the instrument of liberation. It requires the acceptance of a long and uncertain process, full of setbacks and partial victories, in which the outcome is never guaranteed. But these features are not bugs in the anarcho-communist theory of transition, they are the honest acknowledgement of what social transformation actually involves. History does not offer shortcuts. The freedom worth having is not delivered, it is built, slowly and collectively, by people who have decided to refuse the terms on offer and organise their lives on different principles, now, in the present, in whatever conditions they actually face.
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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