Introduction - The difference between Miquel Amorós and myself does not lie in one of us desiring revolution while the other rejects it, nor in one defending autonomy while the other does not. We both start from a radical critique of capitalist society and the conviction that emancipation cannot be the work of institutions separate from those who are struggling. We both reject the integration of struggles into State institutions and are deeply suspicious of any organization that seeks to substitute itself for the direct action of workers. However, when we attempt to define precisely what that autonomy means, what relationship it should maintain with the transformation of society, and-above all-who can carry that transformation through to its ultimate consequences, a fundamental difference emerges between us.
I would say that this difference can be formulated in this way: Amorós emphasizes the concrete reconstruction of autonomous forms of life, while I consider it necessary to ask about the social subject capable of transforming these necessarily partial experiences into a general transformation of capitalist relations. It is not a matter of denying the value of autonomous experiences, nor of postponing emancipation to an indefinite future. It is a matter of determining what social force can make what today appears as a limited experience become a general way of organizing life. This question necessarily leads to the proletariat, and therein lies, in my view, the essential difference between our respective positions.
Amorós begins with a historical observation that cannot be ignored. The traditional forms of the labor movement have been profoundly weakened by the evolution of capitalism. Political representation, union integration, the fragmentation of labor, and the transformation of living standards have destroyed many of the conditions that allowed the proletariat, at certain historical moments, to constitute itself as a visible, organized revolutionary force capable of directly intervening in society. Given this situation, passively awaiting a future revolutionary resurgence would be a form of impotence. If emancipation has any real substance, it must begin in the present.
Hence the importance that autonomy, community, and concrete utopia acquire in Amorós's work. Revolution cannot be a promise that indefinitely justifies the acceptance of a subjugated life. We must reclaim now the capacities that capitalism has taken from us: to decide collectively, to produce and reproduce life without delegating it, to rebuild community ties, to recover knowledge, and to create spaces where human relations are not entirely determined by commodities and the state. The "concrete utopia" precisely expresses this will not to postpone freedom until an uncertain future.
This demand strikes me as profoundly revolutionary. A revolution that doesn't transform life would be a purely political revolution and, therefore, insufficient. We don't want to change those who govern only to continue living under social relations we don't control. We want the production, reproduction, and organization of our existence to cease appearing to us as external powers. Emancipation cannot be reduced to modifying the administration of a society that remains essentially the same.
But precisely for that reason I consider it necessary to raise a question that cannot be resolved by appealing solely to autonomy: what happens when an autonomous experience, even if real and transformative for those who participate in it, continues to develop within a capitalist society whose general relations remain intact?
An autonomous experience can profoundly transform the lives of those who participate in it and yet continue to exist within the market. It can create cooperative relationships and still require money; it can function without internal hierarchies and still have to buy goods produced by other workers; it can collectively organize a space and still remain subject to the property relations that govern society as a whole. It can even explicitly reject the logic of profit and still depend, for its reproduction, on an economy that remains dominated by that logic.
This does not prove that autonomous experiments are false or useless. It demonstrates something far more important: that an experiment can begin to negate capitalism without yet having acquired the necessary strength to abolish it.
Herein lies what I consider the crucial question. Autonomy is indispensable, but how can it cease to be a particular experience? How can it extend beyond a community, a territory, or a specific network of affinities? How can it confront a system that is not organized communally, but rather through general economic relations imposed on all its members, even against their will?
In other words, the fundamental question is not only how to begin to live differently, but what force can turn that possibility into a general transformation of society .
My answer to this question is the proletariat, because it is a class antagonistic to capital.
Hence, the question of revolution cannot be separated from a fundamental slogan: the self-organization of the proletariat . It is not simply a matter of asserting that workers must emancipate themselves, but rather of arguing that they must organize their own struggle, their own decisions, and their own capacity to transform society. Autonomy then ceases to be a mere individual experience and acquires a class dimension: the proletariat must self-organize in order to cease being a force subordinate to capital and become a force capable of abolishing it .
Class struggle as a way of being in the world
There is also a difference in political and intellectual background that helps to better understand our divergences. Miquel Amorós does not come from anarcho-syndicalism, although his thinking has frequently engaged with the history and experiences of the anarchist movement, but rather from Situationism and the various intellectual currents that followed the crisis and dissolution of that movement. His fundamental starting point lies in the critique of everyday life, alienation, technology, urbanism, and modern forms of domination, and from there he has developed a radical critique of industrial and capitalist society. In this evolution, the revolutionary centrality of the class struggle tends to be displaced in favor of other categories: community, territory, autonomy, the defense of certain ways of life, and resistance against the multiple manifestations of domination.
My trajectory and my way of being in the world are different. Born in 1950 into a family of textile workers, the class struggle is not for me a choice or an intellectual preoccupation, nor an inherited theoretical category that can be replaced by another as ideological or cultural fashions change. It is a lived reality, a way of understanding society and knowing the place each of us occupies within it. My priority has been, and continues to be, the class struggle and the emancipation of workers by the workers themselves. Not emancipation granted from above by the State, directed by a party, or administered by a bureaucracy, but the conscious self-emancipation of the proletariat through its own struggle and its own organization. Elitist free islands, whether libertarian, liberal, or libertine, neither interest me nor are they part of my horizon.
And this is not workerism. I don't idealize the worker, nor do I believe that being born into a working-class family confers any moral, political, or revolutionary superiority. Nor do I identify the proletariat with a specific working-class culture, the traditional factory, or an inherited identity. The centrality I grant to the proletariat doesn't stem from nostalgia for the old working-class world or from defending a sociological identity. It arises from the recognition of a fundamental social reality: we live in a class-divided society, and as long as there are those who own the means of production and those who, in order to live, must sell their labor power, class antagonism will persist.
My way of being in the world is shaped by this awareness. Not because workers are better than others, nor because they possess a moral superiority or an innate revolutionary virtue, but because their position in capitalist society places them in a specific relationship with capital. They are the ones who, through their activity, reproduce the existing society daily and, precisely for this reason, are the ones who have the possibility of ceasing to reproduce it and reorganizing it on other foundations.
The class struggle is therefore not, for me, a theoretical preference among other possibilities, nor a category that can be abandoned when new forms of domination or new political sensibilities emerge. Capitalism has profoundly transformed the composition of the proletariat, dispersed its workplaces, fragmented its experiences, and multiplied the forms of exploitation and precarity. But it has not eliminated the fundamental separation between those who possess the material conditions of existence and those who must sell their labor power in order to live.
Perhaps this is one of the most profound differences between Amorós and me. While his thinking, stemming from Situationism and its subsequent intellectual developments, tends to seek the possibilities of emancipation in the autonomy of ways of life, in community, in territory, and in resistance against the multiple manifestations of domination, I continue to believe that the core of all revolutionary possibility lies in the class struggle and in the emancipation of workers by the workers themselves.
Autonomy, community, and concrete experiences of liberation are indispensable. But they cannot replace the need for those who live by their labor to recognize themselves as a social force capable of transforming the entirety of existing relationships. Defending this centrality does not mean worshipping the worker, but rather rejecting any emancipation granted from above and affirming that the liberation of the exploited can only be the conscious work of the exploited themselves.
It is not, therefore, a question of identity, nostalgia, or working-class identity. It is a way of being and existing in the world: understanding that freedom cannot be granted, represented, or administered by others, and that the emancipation of the workers will be the work of the workers themselves, or it will not be at all.
The proletariat is not an identity, but a social relation
To understand this, it is necessary to move beyond an overly narrow view of the proletariat, such as Amorós's. The proletariat is not simply the industrial worker in the large factory, nor a particular working-class culture, nor a political identity inherited from the labor movement of the 19th or 20th centuries. It is a class defined by a social relation : that of those who, being separated from the means necessary to autonomously produce their own existence, must sell their labor power to capital in order to live.
This definition is crucial because it allows us to understand why the proletariat occupies a position that no other social category can replace. The worker does not simply stand before capital as a victim of an external power. Their own labor power constitutes one of the conditions for the reproduction of capital. Capital buys this labor power because it needs to use it in the production process and obtain from it a value greater than what it has paid. Without wage labor, there is no valorization of capital; and without valorization, there is no reproduction of capital as a social relation.
The relationship between capital and the proletariat thus contains a contradiction that cannot be resolved through reforms or the mere creation of alternative spaces. Capital needs the proletariat to reproduce itself, while the proletariat can only emancipate itself by ceasing to reproduce capital. This contradiction explains the revolutionary centrality of the proletariat in a far more compelling way than any moral, historical, or identity-based consideration.
The proletariat is not the protagonist of the revolution because it is "the poorest," nor because it possesses a supposed ethical superiority, nor because a political tradition has decided to assign it that role. It is the protagonist because it occupies a unique material position within the capitalist structure: it produces that which allows capital to valorize itself and, precisely for that reason, it can interrupt the valorization process and begin to destroy the relationship that sustains it .
Herein lies the fundamental difference. A community can resist capital, but it does not, in itself, constitute the relationship that allows capital to reproduce itself. A territory can defend itself against capital, but it does not necessarily contain the antagonism capable of abolishing the wage relationship. A cooperative can organize an economic activity differently and still continue to operate within the market. A self-managed experiment can demonstrate that it is possible to collectively organize certain tasks and, at the same time, be forced to reproduce economic relations that exist outside of it.
The proletariat, on the other hand, is at the very heart of the valorization process. Therefore, its actions can have a consequence that no isolated experience can produce: the disruption of the social reproduction of capital.
The revolution is not about managing capital differently
This question also helps us understand what proletarian emancipation truly means. The proletariat is not called upon to seize power in order to administer capitalist society from a new position. A revolution that replaced private owners with a state or bureaucratic administration would have changed the form of ownership without necessarily abolishing the social relations that make capital possible.
Proletarian emancipation is more radical. The proletariat cannot liberate itself simply by becoming the collective owners of businesses, because that would preserve fundamental forms of separation between producers and the social conditions of production. Nor can it limit itself to improving the conditions of wage labor, because wages themselves presuppose the separation that constitutes the worker as a proletarian.
The revolutionary goal, therefore, is not for the proletariat to find a better place within capitalist society. Its goal is for it to cease to exist as a proletariat through the abolition of the social relations that constitute it as such.
This is why proletarian protagonism does not lead to a new class society, but rather to the possibility of abolishing classes altogether. The working class does not emancipate itself to become the ruling class. It emancipates itself by destroying the conditions that make the existence of ruling and dominated classes possible. Therein lies the universal character of its struggle.
Transformation of the proletariat does not mean its disappearance
It might be objected that all this pertains to a class composition that no longer exists. It is true that the contemporary proletariat does not present the same forms it had in other eras. But to confuse the historical transformation of the proletariat with its disappearance would mean accepting precisely the superficial definition that should be rejected.
Capitalism has fragmented labor, shifted production to a global scale, multiplied forms of employment, and spread precariousness. Contemporary workers can be found in factories, hospitals, hotels, logistics warehouses, digital platforms, offices, farms, or in the care sector. The traditional boundaries between production and reproduction have become far more complex.
But none of these transformations eliminates the fundamental relationship of those who need to sell their labor power to reproduce their existence. The class has changed its composition because capitalism has changed; it has not disappeared because its composition has changed.
Precisely because capitalism has dispersed the proletariat, the political question lies in rebuilding its unity based on what it has in common, not in replacing it with a vaguer category. This is especially important in an era when the fragmentation of social experiences can give the impression that there is no longer a subject capable of acting upon the whole.
The revolutionary problem of our time is not to find a new identity to replace the proletariat. It is to find the proletariat where capitalism has scattered it .
The community cannot take the place of the class
The community can be an extraordinarily important space of resistance. It can protect needs that the market destroys, rebuild bonds that competition dissolves, and produce concrete experiences of cooperation. It can even become fertile ground for revolutionary organization.
But community and class are not equivalent concepts.
A territorial community can bring together people subject to different social relations. It can include workers and owners, wage earners and rentiers, exploited people and people who benefit from certain forms of ownership. They can unite against a specific enemy and yet separate when the question of ownership or the appropriation of wealth arises.
Therefore, territorial struggles can be contemporary expressions of class struggle without territory becoming the new universal subject. The problem is not denying these struggles, but understanding when and how they express class antagonism and how they can be integrated into a struggle capable of challenging capitalist relations as a whole.
The same applies to ecology, housing, care work, and territorial defense. Capitalism permeates all these dimensions of existence, and for that very reason, they are fundamental arenas for contemporary proletarian struggle. But they remain intertwined with class. The issue is not finding a new subject to replace the proletariat, but rather recognizing the proletariat wherever capitalism has extended and transformed its forms of exploitation.
Autonomy needs a force capable of generalizing it
This is where the question of the proletariat becomes truly significant. Autonomy is not the problem; the problem lies in its limitations when it remains isolated.
If an autonomous experience remains isolated, capitalism can surround it, condition it, absorb it, or simply wait for its exhaustion. If it manages to spread, the question of its coordination and its confrontation with general social relations immediately arises. At that point, it is no longer enough to speak of community: the need arises for a force capable of intervening in social reproduction.
The revolution cannot consist of endlessly multiplying small exceptions to capitalism. It must transform these exceptions into a new and general form of life's reproduction. To do this, it is necessary to seize what is currently organized by capital: workplaces, the means of production, distribution networks, infrastructure, urban spaces, and, ultimately, the material conditions of existence.
This appropriation cannot be carried out by an isolated community. It can only be carried out by a class that, by virtue of its position in the production process, has the capacity to paralyze and reorganize that process. At this point, autonomy ceases to be merely a mode of organization and becomes a question of social power: who has the effective capacity to halt the functioning of capitalist society and set in motion another form of life reproduction? The answer remains the proletariat.
The question of parliamentarism
Parliamentarism plays a much smaller role in this difference than is sometimes claimed. We are both anti-parliamentarian, but we don't understand exactly what needs to be overcome when parliamentarism is rejected: Amorós insists more on the incompatibility between emancipation and institutional representation, while I link that critique to a broader issue: the autonomy of the proletarian movement from any form of separate power and the need for decisions to remain in the hands of those directly involved in the struggle.
Therefore, the problem is not simply refusing to participate in Parliament. The problem is preventing the separation from recurring between those who struggle and those who speak on their behalf. And this question only acquires its full meaning when linked to the central issue: which class should retain the power to decide on its struggle and on the transformation of society.
1936: When autonomy ceased to be an idea
The Spanish revolutionary experience allows us to understand this issue concretely. In 1936, the workers did not wait for any institution to recognize their right to transform society. They created their own organizations, occupied factories and land, organized militias and collectives, and effectively altered power relations. This was much more than a communal experience: it was a proletarian uprising capable of profoundly altering the existing social order.
But that experience also revealed a crucial difficulty: as long as state structures capable of regaining authority existed, and as long as revolutionary organizations could not impose autonomous social coordination against them, the gains could be contained and ultimately defeated. The events of May 1937 constituted a brutal expression of this contradiction.
The lesson is not to claim that collectives were a mistake. It is to understand that they were insufficient because their social force did not become widespread enough to destroy the relationships that could return power to the State and capital.
This is a fundamental difference. Revolutionary autonomy does not fail because it is too autonomous; it fails when it cannot become a sufficiently broad social force to prevent the reconstruction of what it seeks to abolish. And this problem brings us back to the proletariat.
Here, therefore, appears the slogan that summarizes the fundamental political problem: the self-organization of the proletariat . If capitalism has fragmented the workers, dispersed their experiences, and weakened their traditional forms of organization, the task is not to wait for an institution to once again represent their unity. Nor is it to replace the proletariat with a sum of particular communities, movements, or identities. The task is for the proletarians themselves to rebuild their capacity to recognize, deliberate, decide, and act collectively.
Self-organization means precisely that the organization of the struggle cannot be separated from those who are fighting. It means that decisions remain in the hands of the workers and that no external leadership can appropriate their power, speak permanently on their behalf, or replace their initiative. But it also means something more: that organization is not an external instrument simply intended to achieve reforms, but the process by which the proletariat begins to recognize itself as a common social force, capable of halting the reproduction of capital and reorganizing life on other foundations.
Therefore, the slogan cannot simply be "autonomy," but rather the self-organization of the proletariat . Autonomy signifies the need for independence from the state, political parties, integrated trade unions, and all forms of separate power; self-organization indicates who should exercise this autonomy and how it can become an effective historical force. The crucial issue is that those who produce and reproduce capitalist society must learn to organize themselves in order to cease reproducing it.
Autonomy as a form of proletarian revolution
From this perspective, defending the proletariat does not mean abandoning autonomy, but rather giving it concrete social content. Autonomy means that the class organizes itself and that no external institution, party, union, or leadership can replace it. It does not mean building a sphere separate from capitalism, but rather acquiring the capacity to confront it and transform the relations that organize society.
That's why it doesn't mean living indefinitely in small, alternative spaces. It means beginning to build, from concrete struggles, a different form of social reproduction. And it doesn't mean replacing the State with an organization that governs in the name of the workers, but rather preventing the separation between those who decide and those who obey from ever existing again.
The proletariat becomes the protagonist of the revolution precisely when it ceases to be understood as a passive sociological category and begins to act as a social force conscious of its position. It is a class that produces, transports, cares for, builds, cleans, cultivates, distributes, and maintains the infrastructure and services upon which society depends. It does so, however, under conditions determined by capital. This position constitutes its weakness as long as it remains subordinate, but it is also its historical strength, because those who participate decisively in the material reproduction of society possess the power to disrupt and reorganize it.
The bourgeoisie possesses capital and the state has coercion, but neither can replace the activity of the proletariat. When that activity ceases to be subordinated to capital, the material foundation of existing society begins to disappear.
Revolutionary optimism
Defending proletarian leadership today should not be a defensive stance, a nostalgic exercise, or a ritualistic repetition of old formulas. On the contrary, it is a profoundly optimistic affirmation. It means recognizing that capitalism is not an invulnerable whole and that society is not condemned to reproduce itself eternally under the same relations. It means understanding that the force that keeps this society functioning is also the force that can stop it.
We don't need to invent the subject of revolution from the outside. That subject already exists. It exists wherever someone has to sell their labor power to live; it exists wherever an activity necessary for society is subordinated to the production of value; it exists in the factory and the hospital, in the hotel and the logistics warehouse, in the countryside, in transportation, on the digital platform, and in care work. It exists wherever capital needs labor to reproduce itself.
What is still lacking to the necessary degree is the awareness of that force, its autonomous organization, and its capacity to recognize itself as a common force. That is the fundamental political problem of our time.
The issue, therefore, is not abandoning concrete utopia, but preventing concrete utopia from becoming a substitute for revolution. It is not a matter of choosing between living now and transforming the world, but of transforming the world so that what we can only experience today as an exception can become the common condition for all.
The proletariat and the possibility of revolution
This, ultimately, is why I defend the proletarian leading role in the revolution. Not because all other struggles are unimportant, nor because the entire working class automatically acts in a revolutionary manner, nor because the proletariat possesses an innate revolutionary consciousness, and certainly not because one must uphold a promise out of fidelity to tradition. I defend it because its position within capitalism contains a possibility that no other social position contains in the same way: the possibility of abolishing the relationship upon which the reproduction of capital depends .
Capital has done everything possible to fragment the proletariat, to individualize it, to make it precarious, to pit it against itself, and to convince each worker that they exist solely as an individual competing with others for survival. But this fragmentation has not destroyed the social relationship that binds them together. Wherever there is wage labor, wherever life depends on selling labor power, wherever capital needs to appropriate the labor of others to increase its value, antagonism still exists.
The revolutionary task is not to invent something new, but to replace what already exists. It is to make conscious, organized, and effective the force that already exists. Therefore, the revolutionary horizon is not a community that has managed to escape the world, but a world from which escape is no longer necessary. We do not want to conquer a corner of freedom while the rest of society remains subjugated. We want freedom to cease being the privilege of those who have managed to build a protected space and to become the material condition of everyone.
We don't wait for a historical savior to appear. We don't wait for a vanguard to think for us. We don't wait for the State to grant us freedom. The force capable of radically transforming the world already exists within it: it is the force of those who, working every day to reproduce capitalist society, can one day decide to stop reproducing it.
The revolution begins when the proletariat understands that it is not condemned to be the labor force of capital, but that it can become the social force capable of abolishing it. Then the struggle ceases to be a desperate defense against advancing barbarism and becomes a conscious offensive for human emancipation. It is no longer about conquering a more dignified place within a world that condemns us to exploitation, but about ending the social relations that make exploitation possible; it is no longer about preserving a few spaces of freedom within existing society, but about making freedom the foundation of all society.
Because this is, ultimately, the question before us: either capital leads humanity into ever deeper barbarism, or the proletariat finds in its own strength the capacity to stop it and pave the way for a world without classes, without exploitation and without domination, without police, without armies, without borders, without states.
The revolution will not be the administration of an inherited world, but its conscious abolition to make another possible. The slogan that emerges from all of the above is, therefore, simple and at the same time decisive: the self-organization of the proletariat . We do not expect anyone to organize from the outside the force capable of emancipating us. We do not expect an institution to represent us, a vanguard to think for us, or a State to transform existing social relations from above.
Revolutionary organization can only arise from struggle itself, from the capacity of the exploited to recognize themselves as a common force and to take into their own hands the decisions that affect their existence. Self-organization does not mean confining oneself to a working-class identity or building an organization separate from society; it means collectively organizing the strength of those who live by their labor to abolish the social relations that make them proletarians.
Therefore, in the face of fragmentation, representation, and delegation, the slogan remains: self-organization of the proletariat . Not as an empty formula, but as the concrete process through which the class that today reproduces the world of capital can begin to organize its abolition.
And this time we will not fight to conquer the future: we will fight so that, at last, the future ceases to belong to capital and belongs to emancipated humanity.
Free islands or self-organization of the proletariat?
Agustín Guillamón
Altafulla, day of the eclipse
https://regeneracionlibertaria.org/2026/09/22/guillamon-y-amoros-el-proletariado-y-la-posibilidad-de-la-revolucion/
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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