Feb 15, 2025
From Abolition Media by Dimitris Chatzivasileiadis
First part, introductory: 12th of February 2012
On 12 February 2012 the last big battle of the anti-austerity movement (in the Greek territory) took place. Other open battles followed in the following years, but after that day, when the movement realized that it had reached the limits of its power, it did not revive. The objective of this longstanding insurrectionary movement, which was to cancel the parliament during the passing of the controversial laws or even to occupy it, was lost for good during the popular attempt on 12/2/2012. It was the biggest militant gathering since 1973. Half a million people, once again, but for what would be the last time, surrounded the central institution of the regime and after being repelled by chemical bombardment, we made persistent efforts to reach the target again. The state’s military machine, without resorting to the use of standard weapons of warfare, overpowered a huge yet unarmed mass of people.
The turning point of the anti-austerity movement became a critical juncture for various poles of the anti-authoritarian movement that led them to prioritize the question of the revolutionary program and the question of organization. We all recognized the impasse of one-dimensional insurrectionism, that is, of the deferral of all questions to the dynamics of the insurgent mass and to the moment of insurrection. However, the road to overcoming all the culminated weaknesses remained blurred. The program and the political organization became the new points of deferral for all critical issues, while denouncing insurrectionary practice. On the other hand, for the political poles who denied the necessity of organizational unity, it was enough to distort the experience and the project of the insurrection into an ephemeral experience or into an expression of the prevalence of alternativist experimentation. The advocates of the need for organization of the popular power were few and weak within the political balances in the movement; they were voices that stemmed from armed practice and were therefore capable of being conscious of the material conditions of the current class-political conflict. Both those who replaced insurrectionism with organizationalism and those who removed the subversive substance of insurrection, underestimated the revolutionary qualities of the struggling mass. It is enough to make an observation from the depths of Bolshevik social democracy a century ago, not famous for its insurrectionism, in order to leave behind these conservative positions as the prehistory of bourgeois philosophy. Antonio Gramsci: “The use of the word spontaneous is elitist because it refers to a scholastic and academic conception that identifies as true and worthy of consideration only those insurrectionary movements that are 100% conscious, meaning movements that are guided by premeditation to the last detail or placed along an abstract theoretical line”1. Structurelessness [tn: otherwise known as informalismo] and alternativism fall under the same critique invertedly, because they also separate social spontaneity from revolutionary orientation and the capacity for readiness, so as to identify as genuine, spontaneous and authentic only those movements that seem to favor the validation of such a separation. A recent example is the separation of the 1st Palestinian Intifada from the organized armed resistance, in the service of the repudiation of the October 7 revolutionary initiative.
The reintroduction of the issues about program and organization also reactivated the questions of the relations between political and class or social organization, the question about competency over drafting the program and about its class basis. Within the course of the dialogue on the issue of organization in the past five years locally (Athens), collective proposals and personal theoretical positions have been formed with references to the Platform of Dielo Truda. Since 2020, from the state of exile and from prison, I have taken a position on these key issues in a number of analytical texts. The evolution of the class-political struggle on a global scale, the state of the anarchist movement internationally and the directions that the use of platformist ideas in the Greek movement have taken, require the articulation of a precise proposal on the union of anarchists today; a proposal for the renewal and not the distortion and burial of our revolutionary history. Many of us have participated in the struggle for organization over the last decade. Also many study history and the active dialogue. Judging that currently in the Greek movement there is no declared project of revolutionary anarchist organization, and from the state of being incarcerated, I aim to address directly (and therefore simultaneously) the whole of the anarchist movement locally and internationally. The very logic of my proposal, which I consider to emanate from the historical lessons of revolutionary anarchism, requires that it be communicated over the maximum geographical range without delay. As a prisoner of the revolutionary people’s war, who unwaveringly advocates subversive action and organization, I ought to give this political proposal the character of a call.
My text will come in segments, so that it may be easily understood. It will be published in sequences, and in order to save time I will avoid repeating the arguments I have already presented in previous texts. I am addressing the comrades who want to understand. I will briefly discuss the basics, the conclusions and the coherent train of thought. In the part where I describe the theoretical model and the general organizational path of the anarchist union, I will be particularly specific and accompany the text with diagrams.
With the invaluable solidarity of a few comrades, the text can initially be published in both Greek and English. Its republication and translation into other languages will be an indicator of its recognition or rejection as a fruitful proposal.
The first question that needs to be answered before I proceed is the productive order of the questions posed. First comes the program or the organization? First the political or the class/social organization? Past, present and future of practical theory, in what order? There are six different arrangements of time points and each gives a reading of the universe from a different starting point. Which is most appropriate for developing a proposal for revolutionary organization? I will directly note the general order and in the course the sequence of specific themes will become clear. The discussion about organizational questions presupposes that we determine the goal. The general revolutionary program comes first. Therefore, we begin with what follows and what is to come, in accordance with the revolutionary purpose and revolutionary practice as preconditions. Then we go through the history of our purpose, its practice and its organization, so that we can discuss on the current context bearing the knowledge of our history. Revolutionary practice is a restoration of the optimum of the evolutionary path of the human species and a rupture from the historical chains of our class-political weaknesses. This brings us to the topical program of struggle and after that particularly to the organizational program. Although the general revolutionary program, which refers to the whole of the revolutionary social subject, precedes the discussion on the matter of political organization, the questions about the general organization of the social/class movement and of the social revolution appear downsized and distorted when the revolutionary vision is actively absent. Thus, while the social movement is the matrix and not a mechanical extension of political organizations, it is misleading to discuss its development if we have not defined our basic commitments as comrades and interlocutors on the subject. The questions on social self-direction and classless reconstruction are the last to be dealt with, but we must certainly deal with them, although the last word is always with bodies much broader than political organizations.
Second part: A basic coherent program of class liberation and social self-management.
For ten years now, since the preliminary work for the formation of an anarchist political organization in the Greek movement, there has been much talk about the “revolutionary program”. The program is signified as the expected new testament that will solve the riddles of history. All the investments in the program, which is always postponed, focus on the revolutionary social transformation after the overthrow of state and capitalist power. Do we really need such a program? If so, why was the international revolutionary proletarian movement of the last two centuries incapable of drawing it up, but we, the modern Greek philosophers of anarchy are capable?
Yes, a defined revolutionary cause is required for the revolutionary struggle. Revolution is a total social transformation, since, even if it does not immediately change everything, it puts everything under trial under unified criteria. A general program of social transformation is necessary for the orientation of the revolutionary struggle.
The evolution of social intelligence in general and the struggles of the exploited classes during the centuries of domination of the capitalist mode of production in particular, made the drafting of an anti-capitalist revolutionary program necessary and feasible. We have had this program for centuries now, at least ever since Babeuf, or rather since the Münster Commune and beyond. Liberation of the producers from the domination of capital and social self-management through the producers’ associations and the communities [tn: otherwise, the demos]… As long as we are still within capitalism, the idea remains radical, but anyone who presents it as new is rather self-satisfied
Those convinced of the absence of the revolutionary program will object that the above statement is a truism of zero value in terms of the need they point out, because the general historical program is too abstract. We agree, but the discussion must begin with the recognition that we have the general program in many variations and with plenty of experiences of its imperfect application. Nor is there any lack of specificity. In the anarchist movement alone, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, the revolution in Ukraine, Dielo Truda, the CNT, other libertarian revolutionary projects (Korea, China), etc., have formulated and/or implemented concrete programs. Were they all incomplete? There are two ways to answer the question, an idealist-elitist one and a materialist-prudent one. One version: they lacked a consistent concretization of the ideal. Who defines the criteria of consistency with the ideal? The concretization of the ideal and the determination of the criteria of consistency are a tautology. Only a new concretization can become a criterion of inconsistency. But then, since the judgment is applied retrospectively, it is authoritarian, claiming ownership of “authenticity”. Moreover, such judgments are ahistorical. So we go to the other version. Each program expresses a historically finite subjectivity. Therefore, the topical reformulation of the general program is constantly necessary. Let’s be cautious here. We are dealing with two dimensions of change: on the one hand, the general conditions of the class-political struggle and the material conditions evolve, and on the other hand, the subjects who through their struggle reassess, reformulate, etc. are renewed. An important evolutionary social contribution of the anarchist movement is the political cultivation of openly composing collective thought. The reformulation of historical reference data by every subject of revolutionary struggle brings history and writings to life. Each new reformulation is a piece that was inevitably missing due to historical dialectics and will become a new testament, but it cannot be “The Program”. This exists only in the most abstract political-social purpose, always within historical limits and has been formulated long before. Openness to reformulations is not of interest to us as a matter of epistemological relativism, although it is inherent as a natural parameter – it is of interest to us from the point of view of the needs, relations and possibilities of each struggling subject and, fundamentally, of the active and therefore primarily living subjects. In the movement of social self-direction, of liberation from all class domination and incidentally from heteronomous political management, each participating subject specifies and revises all programs. No political subject can specify a revolutionary program in the absence of the subjects who will implement it. What is called a program can only be common as a process of practical transformation through successive formulations of collective judgments and new proposals. Save this observation for later.
We go to the reflective dimension of change, to the historical objectivity of class-political conditions. Revolution is an antagonistic process. The time framework for the proposed program does not begin when the class-political enemy is eliminated, it begins every day anew, having as its horizon that catalytic moment. The separation of a stage of class-political antagonism from the stage of social transformation is mechanistic, socially unnatural and a figment of the crudest bourgeois mentality. To say from a materialist and not an idealist position that the end is determined by the means is to say that the process of conflict and the process of social transformation are a single process with two aspects at once, its relation to the class-historical establishment and its relation to the freedom it brings about. The general leaps are made thanks to the development of the unity of the two aspects; they do not confirm the postponement of social transformation and the reduction of the conflict to a mediating stage, a “necessary evil” in contradiction to the ideal end. The answer to “how do we get there?” is the practical “this is how we apply the purpose here and now”. The “grand program” is concretized in the set of current programs of immediate subversive action and social reconstruction, programs whose implementation began centuries ago and is still a long way off.
The real pivotal issue in any program is not the concretization of the ideal, but the concretization of the ways of struggle in the present evolutionary phase of the ongoing historical antagonism between revolution and counter-revolution and its forthcoming phases. The anti-austerity movement failed to block the bourgeois parliament, not because it did not know what to do next, but because it was not suitably and sufficiently organized class-wise, socially and politico-militarily to overpower the counterinsurgency at the contested point that would objectively open up the prospect of revolutionary directions, if there existed political subjects ready for that. Every program is determined through the day-to-day specific terms of the conflict between revolution and counter-revolution, and the program must be basic in terms of the temporally immediate correlation of ends and means and coherent in terms of the temporally immediate requirements of revolutionary unity. Great revolutionary ideas take concrete radical forms through these two practical immediacies (of becoming and totality).
Historically there is one ideal program common to all those who desire the abolition of exploitation. Even the liberal left agrees that the form of polity that has historically been called anarchy is the ideal. Political programs differ along the way. Marxists place stages in the program for overcoming bourgeois civilization, especially Leninists mediate evolution with the political party state, liberals do not recognize any way outside the gradual transformation of the present state, i.e. they are reformists in the narrow sense, while liberal anti-authoritarians hope for changes to occur in ideas and morals that will overpower and paralyze the power of the state. Historically, we have not been called anarchists in general those of us who value the anarchist vision – I know right-wingers who embrace it – but those who fight for the direct overthrow of capitalism and the state. The different programs may converge in the different partial albeit necessary struggles, even in projects of overthrowing political regimes. For example, I note only the collaboration of Italian anarchists and republicans in the Spanish anti-fascist front2 . However, different political programs define different and antagonistic intermediate goals and to varying degrees different practices and types of organization. Precisely because the points of conflict run through the general struggle and there come moments when non-anarchist co-fighters assume pro-regime positions and cross over to the enemy side or become the new counter-revolution, the distinct anarchist program demands an autonomous political base (drastically, productively/organizationally, programmatically/ideologically) to withstand the alternations of the counter-revolution and move forward stronger in its perspective. Thus the crucial concretization of the anarchist revolutionary program does not involve the theoretically specific questions of post-revolutionary social organization, but the immediate class-political conditions of foundation and coherence. The ways in which we struggle, before defining exactly the imaginary vision of the society we want, first define our determination to actually get there.
The political anarchist organization, that is, the united direct and programmatic action of people who are practically committed to the struggle for anarchy, is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the implementation of an anarchist program of revolutionary struggle. A mass workers’ or broader social/proletarian movement in general does not suffice either. Revolutionary struggle does not move forward without the organizational correlation of its political purpose and its social/class basis. It requires the organization of the social/class struggle in politically autonomous terms (ideological, programmatic, material and practical). The development of class and social organizations of direct struggle in fundamental political terms is a basic condition for the unfolding of a revolutionary anarchist program. Based on its class-political, class-social and socio-political organic unity, the revolutionary anarchist movement can and does become coherent in direct struggle, co-forming conditions of politically broader co-organization and front-line struggles. In terms of its syntax, every class or even social organization has a political identity. Also the characteristics of social/class fronts express political relations. The revolutionary anarchist organization and its programmatic proposals do not intervene in what is falsely regarded as neutral organizational social spaces, instead they organize social space in libertarian revolutionary terms and thus intervene in the class-political struggle and position themselves within the popular world. The socio-political bases of the evolving anarchist program are furthermore the defining foundations for the revolutionary transformations that can be made after a defeat of the counter-revolution. The constants of the direct struggle on the class field concretize the ‘grand program’.
I think it’s clear that I entered the subject of so-called organizational dualism. I will come back to it later, analyzing the issues of revolutionary anarchist organization and program in their topicality. For now, however, take it for granted that, in this political proposal, duality (or trinity, by distinguishing community-based self-organization in class-political oppression and exploitation and the territorial self-organization of the free community) does not distinguish social/class identities from political ones and does not imply the recognition of an apolitical universal class organizational field. For which class organizations does it make sense to be based on the synthesis of different political identities? Those formations that can be open to the cooperation of existing class-political and socio-political organizations and their counterpart at the most elementary scale of organization, such as labour unions of a particular company or business and local popular assemblies. A grassroots sectoral union, a Nth grade federation or a social structure and a supra-local organ of social self-management are always created with a specific political vision, which is inscribed in their aims, in their modes of struggle and in their modes of internal functioning. Logically, the subordination of class or social organizations to the political organization puts a stranglehold on mass participation or grassroots autonomy. However, the anarchist revolutionary organization has a duty and need to take initiatives to build up and engage participation in grassroots organizations consistent with its program.
What distinguishes the anarchist revolutionary program from any other political program? I noted earlier that all other paths invest in stages contradictory to the ultimate goal. They do not simply anticipate that the struggle must cross successive antagonistic states, as any political subject would logically think, but more fundamentally they concentrate their forces on contradictory intermediate goals. All other currents characterize anarchism as utopian. Their discrediting claim against the anarchist struggle is based solely on the utopian character that their own programs ascribe to the ultimate cause. The liberal and Marxist left’s investment in intermediate stages, which bear elements of statism and capitalism, presents libertarian communism as utopian.3
So, it is true to say that anarchist practice predominantly focuses on the consistency of ends and means. But this observation only applies to the ultimate end that other programs characterize as utopian. Statist political organizations are for the most part consistent with the most direct of their intermediate ends. It is important to understand this in order to be aware of the strengths and difficulties of the anarchist struggle. We turn to the question. The anarchist revolutionary program is not characterized by its consistency to the immediate, intermediate or ultimate goal, but by the immediacy of the ultimate goal. The anarchist program denies the denunciatory utopianism of bourgeois socialist theories.
The power of our programmatic proposals is the immediate implementation of the conditions of the stated purpose. Immediacy in time: Now! Immediacy of subject: Us, here, the oppressed popular body. Here and now.
Immediate implementation of the conditions that the Revolutionary Self-Defense Organization4 had summarized in the three basic directions for the contemporary international revolutionary movement that will abolish the domination of state and capital:
Α. The immediate aim is the overthrow of the political-military and financial regime, the overthrow of state institutions and the uprooting of mechanisms of authority. Β. The immediate aim is the socialization of all wealth through armed communes that should and must be established today by the revolutionary action of labor and community assemblies and the formation of open federal structures in an universal framework. Self-organization of the confrontation must aim at pushing back exploitation and control, it must also reinforce the self-defense of the social movement and of all its advances. Fighters have the socio-political duty to transfuse class and social resistances with the paradigm of direct counterattack against the political-military and economic regime and with the experience which conveys that we can crush terrorism and its domination. C. Mass revolutionary self-organization, social self-direction here and now.
Of course, if immediacy is not applied to the proposition itself, i.e. if the proposition is not manifested in practice, then the term of immediacy is false and the proposition loses its validity. The anarchist program does not wait for elections, some definitive insurrection or a universal ecumenical assembly and consensus to be implemented. It is from their immediate revolutionary deed that anarchist proposals derive their crystal clear and unparalleled truth and, incidentally, their social force.
The particularly great difficulties and the heavy tasks of the anarchist struggle derive from the same point. To fight today, cutting all bridges with the old world. This is what consistency to immediacy means. For a century and a half now the anarchist movement has built a legacy of paradigms of self-sacrificing immediacy. Its history and its truth have brought it to the strongest position of influence among the currents of resistance within the capitalist metropolis in the last half century.
Nevertheless, the rejection of intermediate stages in which established political conditions prevail, rejection which implies allowing for the direct responsibilities to be determined and scrutinized by the struggling subjects, is open to interpretations that are blatantly contradictory to the duty of immediacy and to the determination of any common criterion of consistency. Undoubtedly, the commitment to the immediacy of the social purpose makes the responsibilities vis a vis the objective conditions of domination, exploitation, extermination, etc., heavier and more radical; far from being relativistic or fragmentary and negligible. The ideology of “freedom of choice” between fields and forms of struggle is a cover for a self-serving conservatism, which, being uncommitted to any immediate duty with regards to the class-political conditions, tends to attribute a minimum of radicalism or even reactionary stances in its association with the class or political frontier (e.g. in relation to the Palestinian resistance). Where bourgeois conventions do not apply, there it becomes apparent whether the refusal of intermediate conventional goals is an expression of direct struggle and a commitment to march to the completion of the struggle or an idealistic evasion.
The ideology of “freedom of choice” is also projected deceptively with seemingly serious political terms by collective subjects who present themselves as advocates of robust organization: practical and programmatic commitments that are fundamental in the aforementioned terms of immediacy are respectively called tactics and strategies that are optional according to circumstances. This ideological modesty manifests itself precisely where circumstances are the product of conservative fixation on underlying weaknesses.
The culmination of this deconstructive relativism is the common use of the natural consequence of the consistency between ends and means (renamed as an anarchist ‘principle’), in order to claim inaction due to the condition about not violating the ‘principles’. Like the hypocrisy of the religious zealots, it doesn’t matter if you do what is necessary or you do nothing against the savagery of authority and the tragedy of the times, as long as you do nothing that falls into or resembles the political practices of the politically intermediate stages. In this normative context the ideologically safest option is to do nothing.
The evasions from the heavy tasks of immediacy confirm the reactionary denunciation of anarchism as a utopian political current. In the historical flow of the struggle, however, it is subversive acts, not unarmed declarations, that count more.From the book by Raúl Zibechi, Dispersing Powers: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces (AK Press, 2010)
Umberto Tomazini, The Anarchist Blacksmith, ed. Eutopia, Athens 2024
The platformist organizations UNIPA and OPAR in their project have analyzed the historical reversal of the
accusation about utopianism and the opportunist motive of Marxist utopianism.
(https://uniaoanarquista.wordpress.com/documentos/documentos-internacion…)
https://athens.indymedia.org/post/1592926/
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From Abolition Media by Dimitris Chatzivasileiadis
First part, introductory: 12th of February 2012
On 12 February 2012 the last big battle of the anti-austerity movement (in the Greek territory) took place. Other open battles followed in the following years, but after that day, when the movement realized that it had reached the limits of its power, it did not revive. The objective of this longstanding insurrectionary movement, which was to cancel the parliament during the passing of the controversial laws or even to occupy it, was lost for good during the popular attempt on 12/2/2012. It was the biggest militant gathering since 1973. Half a million people, once again, but for what would be the last time, surrounded the central institution of the regime and after being repelled by chemical bombardment, we made persistent efforts to reach the target again. The state’s military machine, without resorting to the use of standard weapons of warfare, overpowered a huge yet unarmed mass of people.
The turning point of the anti-austerity movement became a critical juncture for various poles of the anti-authoritarian movement that led them to prioritize the question of the revolutionary program and the question of organization. We all recognized the impasse of one-dimensional insurrectionism, that is, of the deferral of all questions to the dynamics of the insurgent mass and to the moment of insurrection. However, the road to overcoming all the culminated weaknesses remained blurred. The program and the political organization became the new points of deferral for all critical issues, while denouncing insurrectionary practice. On the other hand, for the political poles who denied the necessity of organizational unity, it was enough to distort the experience and the project of the insurrection into an ephemeral experience or into an expression of the prevalence of alternativist experimentation. The advocates of the need for organization of the popular power were few and weak within the political balances in the movement; they were voices that stemmed from armed practice and were therefore capable of being conscious of the material conditions of the current class-political conflict. Both those who replaced insurrectionism with organizationalism and those who removed the subversive substance of insurrection, underestimated the revolutionary qualities of the struggling mass. It is enough to make an observation from the depths of Bolshevik social democracy a century ago, not famous for its insurrectionism, in order to leave behind these conservative positions as the prehistory of bourgeois philosophy. Antonio Gramsci: “The use of the word spontaneous is elitist because it refers to a scholastic and academic conception that identifies as true and worthy of consideration only those insurrectionary movements that are 100% conscious, meaning movements that are guided by premeditation to the last detail or placed along an abstract theoretical line”1. Structurelessness [tn: otherwise known as informalismo] and alternativism fall under the same critique invertedly, because they also separate social spontaneity from revolutionary orientation and the capacity for readiness, so as to identify as genuine, spontaneous and authentic only those movements that seem to favor the validation of such a separation. A recent example is the separation of the 1st Palestinian Intifada from the organized armed resistance, in the service of the repudiation of the October 7 revolutionary initiative.
The reintroduction of the issues about program and organization also reactivated the questions of the relations between political and class or social organization, the question about competency over drafting the program and about its class basis. Within the course of the dialogue on the issue of organization in the past five years locally (Athens), collective proposals and personal theoretical positions have been formed with references to the Platform of Dielo Truda. Since 2020, from the state of exile and from prison, I have taken a position on these key issues in a number of analytical texts. The evolution of the class-political struggle on a global scale, the state of the anarchist movement internationally and the directions that the use of platformist ideas in the Greek movement have taken, require the articulation of a precise proposal on the union of anarchists today; a proposal for the renewal and not the distortion and burial of our revolutionary history. Many of us have participated in the struggle for organization over the last decade. Also many study history and the active dialogue. Judging that currently in the Greek movement there is no declared project of revolutionary anarchist organization, and from the state of being incarcerated, I aim to address directly (and therefore simultaneously) the whole of the anarchist movement locally and internationally. The very logic of my proposal, which I consider to emanate from the historical lessons of revolutionary anarchism, requires that it be communicated over the maximum geographical range without delay. As a prisoner of the revolutionary people’s war, who unwaveringly advocates subversive action and organization, I ought to give this political proposal the character of a call.
My text will come in segments, so that it may be easily understood. It will be published in sequences, and in order to save time I will avoid repeating the arguments I have already presented in previous texts. I am addressing the comrades who want to understand. I will briefly discuss the basics, the conclusions and the coherent train of thought. In the part where I describe the theoretical model and the general organizational path of the anarchist union, I will be particularly specific and accompany the text with diagrams.
With the invaluable solidarity of a few comrades, the text can initially be published in both Greek and English. Its republication and translation into other languages will be an indicator of its recognition or rejection as a fruitful proposal.
The first question that needs to be answered before I proceed is the productive order of the questions posed. First comes the program or the organization? First the political or the class/social organization? Past, present and future of practical theory, in what order? There are six different arrangements of time points and each gives a reading of the universe from a different starting point. Which is most appropriate for developing a proposal for revolutionary organization? I will directly note the general order and in the course the sequence of specific themes will become clear. The discussion about organizational questions presupposes that we determine the goal. The general revolutionary program comes first. Therefore, we begin with what follows and what is to come, in accordance with the revolutionary purpose and revolutionary practice as preconditions. Then we go through the history of our purpose, its practice and its organization, so that we can discuss on the current context bearing the knowledge of our history. Revolutionary practice is a restoration of the optimum of the evolutionary path of the human species and a rupture from the historical chains of our class-political weaknesses. This brings us to the topical program of struggle and after that particularly to the organizational program. Although the general revolutionary program, which refers to the whole of the revolutionary social subject, precedes the discussion on the matter of political organization, the questions about the general organization of the social/class movement and of the social revolution appear downsized and distorted when the revolutionary vision is actively absent. Thus, while the social movement is the matrix and not a mechanical extension of political organizations, it is misleading to discuss its development if we have not defined our basic commitments as comrades and interlocutors on the subject. The questions on social self-direction and classless reconstruction are the last to be dealt with, but we must certainly deal with them, although the last word is always with bodies much broader than political organizations.
Second part: A basic coherent program of class liberation and social self-management.
For ten years now, since the preliminary work for the formation of an anarchist political organization in the Greek movement, there has been much talk about the “revolutionary program”. The program is signified as the expected new testament that will solve the riddles of history. All the investments in the program, which is always postponed, focus on the revolutionary social transformation after the overthrow of state and capitalist power. Do we really need such a program? If so, why was the international revolutionary proletarian movement of the last two centuries incapable of drawing it up, but we, the modern Greek philosophers of anarchy are capable?
Yes, a defined revolutionary cause is required for the revolutionary struggle. Revolution is a total social transformation, since, even if it does not immediately change everything, it puts everything under trial under unified criteria. A general program of social transformation is necessary for the orientation of the revolutionary struggle.
The evolution of social intelligence in general and the struggles of the exploited classes during the centuries of domination of the capitalist mode of production in particular, made the drafting of an anti-capitalist revolutionary program necessary and feasible. We have had this program for centuries now, at least ever since Babeuf, or rather since the Münster Commune and beyond. Liberation of the producers from the domination of capital and social self-management through the producers’ associations and the communities [tn: otherwise, the demos]… As long as we are still within capitalism, the idea remains radical, but anyone who presents it as new is rather self-satisfied
Those convinced of the absence of the revolutionary program will object that the above statement is a truism of zero value in terms of the need they point out, because the general historical program is too abstract. We agree, but the discussion must begin with the recognition that we have the general program in many variations and with plenty of experiences of its imperfect application. Nor is there any lack of specificity. In the anarchist movement alone, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, the revolution in Ukraine, Dielo Truda, the CNT, other libertarian revolutionary projects (Korea, China), etc., have formulated and/or implemented concrete programs. Were they all incomplete? There are two ways to answer the question, an idealist-elitist one and a materialist-prudent one. One version: they lacked a consistent concretization of the ideal. Who defines the criteria of consistency with the ideal? The concretization of the ideal and the determination of the criteria of consistency are a tautology. Only a new concretization can become a criterion of inconsistency. But then, since the judgment is applied retrospectively, it is authoritarian, claiming ownership of “authenticity”. Moreover, such judgments are ahistorical. So we go to the other version. Each program expresses a historically finite subjectivity. Therefore, the topical reformulation of the general program is constantly necessary. Let’s be cautious here. We are dealing with two dimensions of change: on the one hand, the general conditions of the class-political struggle and the material conditions evolve, and on the other hand, the subjects who through their struggle reassess, reformulate, etc. are renewed. An important evolutionary social contribution of the anarchist movement is the political cultivation of openly composing collective thought. The reformulation of historical reference data by every subject of revolutionary struggle brings history and writings to life. Each new reformulation is a piece that was inevitably missing due to historical dialectics and will become a new testament, but it cannot be “The Program”. This exists only in the most abstract political-social purpose, always within historical limits and has been formulated long before. Openness to reformulations is not of interest to us as a matter of epistemological relativism, although it is inherent as a natural parameter – it is of interest to us from the point of view of the needs, relations and possibilities of each struggling subject and, fundamentally, of the active and therefore primarily living subjects. In the movement of social self-direction, of liberation from all class domination and incidentally from heteronomous political management, each participating subject specifies and revises all programs. No political subject can specify a revolutionary program in the absence of the subjects who will implement it. What is called a program can only be common as a process of practical transformation through successive formulations of collective judgments and new proposals. Save this observation for later.
We go to the reflective dimension of change, to the historical objectivity of class-political conditions. Revolution is an antagonistic process. The time framework for the proposed program does not begin when the class-political enemy is eliminated, it begins every day anew, having as its horizon that catalytic moment. The separation of a stage of class-political antagonism from the stage of social transformation is mechanistic, socially unnatural and a figment of the crudest bourgeois mentality. To say from a materialist and not an idealist position that the end is determined by the means is to say that the process of conflict and the process of social transformation are a single process with two aspects at once, its relation to the class-historical establishment and its relation to the freedom it brings about. The general leaps are made thanks to the development of the unity of the two aspects; they do not confirm the postponement of social transformation and the reduction of the conflict to a mediating stage, a “necessary evil” in contradiction to the ideal end. The answer to “how do we get there?” is the practical “this is how we apply the purpose here and now”. The “grand program” is concretized in the set of current programs of immediate subversive action and social reconstruction, programs whose implementation began centuries ago and is still a long way off.
The real pivotal issue in any program is not the concretization of the ideal, but the concretization of the ways of struggle in the present evolutionary phase of the ongoing historical antagonism between revolution and counter-revolution and its forthcoming phases. The anti-austerity movement failed to block the bourgeois parliament, not because it did not know what to do next, but because it was not suitably and sufficiently organized class-wise, socially and politico-militarily to overpower the counterinsurgency at the contested point that would objectively open up the prospect of revolutionary directions, if there existed political subjects ready for that. Every program is determined through the day-to-day specific terms of the conflict between revolution and counter-revolution, and the program must be basic in terms of the temporally immediate correlation of ends and means and coherent in terms of the temporally immediate requirements of revolutionary unity. Great revolutionary ideas take concrete radical forms through these two practical immediacies (of becoming and totality).
Historically there is one ideal program common to all those who desire the abolition of exploitation. Even the liberal left agrees that the form of polity that has historically been called anarchy is the ideal. Political programs differ along the way. Marxists place stages in the program for overcoming bourgeois civilization, especially Leninists mediate evolution with the political party state, liberals do not recognize any way outside the gradual transformation of the present state, i.e. they are reformists in the narrow sense, while liberal anti-authoritarians hope for changes to occur in ideas and morals that will overpower and paralyze the power of the state. Historically, we have not been called anarchists in general those of us who value the anarchist vision – I know right-wingers who embrace it – but those who fight for the direct overthrow of capitalism and the state. The different programs may converge in the different partial albeit necessary struggles, even in projects of overthrowing political regimes. For example, I note only the collaboration of Italian anarchists and republicans in the Spanish anti-fascist front2 . However, different political programs define different and antagonistic intermediate goals and to varying degrees different practices and types of organization. Precisely because the points of conflict run through the general struggle and there come moments when non-anarchist co-fighters assume pro-regime positions and cross over to the enemy side or become the new counter-revolution, the distinct anarchist program demands an autonomous political base (drastically, productively/organizationally, programmatically/ideologically) to withstand the alternations of the counter-revolution and move forward stronger in its perspective. Thus the crucial concretization of the anarchist revolutionary program does not involve the theoretically specific questions of post-revolutionary social organization, but the immediate class-political conditions of foundation and coherence. The ways in which we struggle, before defining exactly the imaginary vision of the society we want, first define our determination to actually get there.
The political anarchist organization, that is, the united direct and programmatic action of people who are practically committed to the struggle for anarchy, is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the implementation of an anarchist program of revolutionary struggle. A mass workers’ or broader social/proletarian movement in general does not suffice either. Revolutionary struggle does not move forward without the organizational correlation of its political purpose and its social/class basis. It requires the organization of the social/class struggle in politically autonomous terms (ideological, programmatic, material and practical). The development of class and social organizations of direct struggle in fundamental political terms is a basic condition for the unfolding of a revolutionary anarchist program. Based on its class-political, class-social and socio-political organic unity, the revolutionary anarchist movement can and does become coherent in direct struggle, co-forming conditions of politically broader co-organization and front-line struggles. In terms of its syntax, every class or even social organization has a political identity. Also the characteristics of social/class fronts express political relations. The revolutionary anarchist organization and its programmatic proposals do not intervene in what is falsely regarded as neutral organizational social spaces, instead they organize social space in libertarian revolutionary terms and thus intervene in the class-political struggle and position themselves within the popular world. The socio-political bases of the evolving anarchist program are furthermore the defining foundations for the revolutionary transformations that can be made after a defeat of the counter-revolution. The constants of the direct struggle on the class field concretize the ‘grand program’.
I think it’s clear that I entered the subject of so-called organizational dualism. I will come back to it later, analyzing the issues of revolutionary anarchist organization and program in their topicality. For now, however, take it for granted that, in this political proposal, duality (or trinity, by distinguishing community-based self-organization in class-political oppression and exploitation and the territorial self-organization of the free community) does not distinguish social/class identities from political ones and does not imply the recognition of an apolitical universal class organizational field. For which class organizations does it make sense to be based on the synthesis of different political identities? Those formations that can be open to the cooperation of existing class-political and socio-political organizations and their counterpart at the most elementary scale of organization, such as labour unions of a particular company or business and local popular assemblies. A grassroots sectoral union, a Nth grade federation or a social structure and a supra-local organ of social self-management are always created with a specific political vision, which is inscribed in their aims, in their modes of struggle and in their modes of internal functioning. Logically, the subordination of class or social organizations to the political organization puts a stranglehold on mass participation or grassroots autonomy. However, the anarchist revolutionary organization has a duty and need to take initiatives to build up and engage participation in grassroots organizations consistent with its program.
What distinguishes the anarchist revolutionary program from any other political program? I noted earlier that all other paths invest in stages contradictory to the ultimate goal. They do not simply anticipate that the struggle must cross successive antagonistic states, as any political subject would logically think, but more fundamentally they concentrate their forces on contradictory intermediate goals. All other currents characterize anarchism as utopian. Their discrediting claim against the anarchist struggle is based solely on the utopian character that their own programs ascribe to the ultimate cause. The liberal and Marxist left’s investment in intermediate stages, which bear elements of statism and capitalism, presents libertarian communism as utopian.3
So, it is true to say that anarchist practice predominantly focuses on the consistency of ends and means. But this observation only applies to the ultimate end that other programs characterize as utopian. Statist political organizations are for the most part consistent with the most direct of their intermediate ends. It is important to understand this in order to be aware of the strengths and difficulties of the anarchist struggle. We turn to the question. The anarchist revolutionary program is not characterized by its consistency to the immediate, intermediate or ultimate goal, but by the immediacy of the ultimate goal. The anarchist program denies the denunciatory utopianism of bourgeois socialist theories.
The power of our programmatic proposals is the immediate implementation of the conditions of the stated purpose. Immediacy in time: Now! Immediacy of subject: Us, here, the oppressed popular body. Here and now.
Immediate implementation of the conditions that the Revolutionary Self-Defense Organization4 had summarized in the three basic directions for the contemporary international revolutionary movement that will abolish the domination of state and capital:
Α. The immediate aim is the overthrow of the political-military and financial regime, the overthrow of state institutions and the uprooting of mechanisms of authority. Β. The immediate aim is the socialization of all wealth through armed communes that should and must be established today by the revolutionary action of labor and community assemblies and the formation of open federal structures in an universal framework. Self-organization of the confrontation must aim at pushing back exploitation and control, it must also reinforce the self-defense of the social movement and of all its advances. Fighters have the socio-political duty to transfuse class and social resistances with the paradigm of direct counterattack against the political-military and economic regime and with the experience which conveys that we can crush terrorism and its domination. C. Mass revolutionary self-organization, social self-direction here and now.
Of course, if immediacy is not applied to the proposition itself, i.e. if the proposition is not manifested in practice, then the term of immediacy is false and the proposition loses its validity. The anarchist program does not wait for elections, some definitive insurrection or a universal ecumenical assembly and consensus to be implemented. It is from their immediate revolutionary deed that anarchist proposals derive their crystal clear and unparalleled truth and, incidentally, their social force.
The particularly great difficulties and the heavy tasks of the anarchist struggle derive from the same point. To fight today, cutting all bridges with the old world. This is what consistency to immediacy means. For a century and a half now the anarchist movement has built a legacy of paradigms of self-sacrificing immediacy. Its history and its truth have brought it to the strongest position of influence among the currents of resistance within the capitalist metropolis in the last half century.
Nevertheless, the rejection of intermediate stages in which established political conditions prevail, rejection which implies allowing for the direct responsibilities to be determined and scrutinized by the struggling subjects, is open to interpretations that are blatantly contradictory to the duty of immediacy and to the determination of any common criterion of consistency. Undoubtedly, the commitment to the immediacy of the social purpose makes the responsibilities vis a vis the objective conditions of domination, exploitation, extermination, etc., heavier and more radical; far from being relativistic or fragmentary and negligible. The ideology of “freedom of choice” between fields and forms of struggle is a cover for a self-serving conservatism, which, being uncommitted to any immediate duty with regards to the class-political conditions, tends to attribute a minimum of radicalism or even reactionary stances in its association with the class or political frontier (e.g. in relation to the Palestinian resistance). Where bourgeois conventions do not apply, there it becomes apparent whether the refusal of intermediate conventional goals is an expression of direct struggle and a commitment to march to the completion of the struggle or an idealistic evasion.
The ideology of “freedom of choice” is also projected deceptively with seemingly serious political terms by collective subjects who present themselves as advocates of robust organization: practical and programmatic commitments that are fundamental in the aforementioned terms of immediacy are respectively called tactics and strategies that are optional according to circumstances. This ideological modesty manifests itself precisely where circumstances are the product of conservative fixation on underlying weaknesses.
The culmination of this deconstructive relativism is the common use of the natural consequence of the consistency between ends and means (renamed as an anarchist ‘principle’), in order to claim inaction due to the condition about not violating the ‘principles’. Like the hypocrisy of the religious zealots, it doesn’t matter if you do what is necessary or you do nothing against the savagery of authority and the tragedy of the times, as long as you do nothing that falls into or resembles the political practices of the politically intermediate stages. In this normative context the ideologically safest option is to do nothing.
The evasions from the heavy tasks of immediacy confirm the reactionary denunciation of anarchism as a utopian political current. In the historical flow of the struggle, however, it is subversive acts, not unarmed declarations, that count more.From the book by Raúl Zibechi, Dispersing Powers: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces (AK Press, 2010)
Umberto Tomazini, The Anarchist Blacksmith, ed. Eutopia, Athens 2024
The platformist organizations UNIPA and OPAR in their project have analyzed the historical reversal of the
accusation about utopianism and the opportunist motive of Marxist utopianism.
(https://uniaoanarquista.wordpress.com/documentos/documentos-internacion…)
https://athens.indymedia.org/post/1592926/
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