Remembering Cornelius Castoriadis, the only French Intellectual with Humor

The Cornelius Castoriadis I met: humor, kindness, intellect of many carats

by Dimitris Eleas / July 11th, 2025

Cornelius Castoriadis reflected on man. And he decided that the role of each person in the social-historical is so important. Philosopher with an intellect of many carats.

Castoriadis was in awe of the ideas. And ideas are what in time brought about his faith in man. He is a Greek (—French) who honors our ancestors. Where was Castoriadis’ house in Athens? How did he spend his childhood? Behind what shadow was he growing?

Castoriadis therefore lived in three cities: Constantinople (Istanbul today), Athens, and Paris. He was born in the first in 1922, grew up in Athens and, he left for France at the age of 23. In the latter city he was educated and died in 1997.

Castoriadis competed from a young age and read a lot. In Athens, he studied law and philosophy. Cornelius’ house – as the author Mimika Kranaki, a friend of his youth, informs us – was located behind the Metropolis (main Cathedral) of Athens, 5 Hypatias Street. The volume of the temple will become a forerunner, years later, of his thinking against God and all religions. So, Cornelius grew up ‘in the shadow of God.’ In this house, at the age of only six, he “attempted to kill himself”, grabbing an electricity cable with wet hands… From a young age, Cornelius was interested in many areas of thought. He himself began to read early and learned how to promote thought. It was inspired by Max Weber’s work on bureaucracy. Karl Marx’s texts were read by him inside this house.

This is where he returned after school and later after the lectures of the neo-Kantian philosopher K. Despotopoulos at the university. He was also a brave young man. At the age of just 13 he lost all his hair, and his mother, Sophia Castoriadis, went insane and died a few months later. His father, Caesar Castoriadis, who made sure that he did not miss anything – there was also a phonograph in the house – is a Voltairean, who because he did not allow his son to stay up all night to complete the written punishment that the school had imposed on him, almost caused Cornelius to grab the wet cable as mentioned above.

At the same time, the loss of hair gave him strength at a very tender age. His friends now call him “globos” [“light bulb”]. In his first steps, he also sees the power that “small circles or small groups” have in the evolution of History and ideas.

The Odyssey of Castoriadis

The journey – the Odyssey… – of 1945 will be of a colossal importance! Paris with its libraries, its students, the groups that write history and the ‘biggest A’ in the world… He also read a lot. In Paris, in 1948, Castoriadis with co-founder Claude Lefort, and together with other friends/partners, created the group and the magazine, Socialism or Barbarism (1949-65 the magazine, until ΄66 the group) for the battle of ideas – the Iliad…– and in this magazine, under various pseudonyms, Castoriadis published many theoretical texts.

At the same time, Cornelius Castoriadis also started working as a professional economist at the OECD and his writings were another reason to be written under various pseudonyms, such as Paul Gardan, etc. Through each line ‘that he composes like a musician’, Paris is the city that strengthens his thinking. In Paris, Sigmund Freud will influence him decisively. Reading Freud, he saw clearly what it was missing from Marx. That was, the human subject… His work is a continuous critique, to which it can be given a critical interpretation. The two pillars of the Castoriadian creation, are: “the imaginary institution of society” and “autonomy”. Castoriadis contributed to many areas of thought.

The personal acquaintance

 Here, let me just add that I knew him in person, we had exchanged a few letters, and I had spoken to him on the phone. I sent him the first letter when I was 18 years old, and he replied. And above all his kindness! He was extremely polite in our meetings, in his office or, when we went for a swim the other day. He radiated a light and had a sophisticated sense of humor.

With him, there was no chance not to smile or laugh at something he would say or, at a remark he would make. He was an active man, who did a lot of stuff in a single day. I saw him swimming in the Greek sea, he could easily swim from island to island in the Aegean Sea. I have never forgotten the image of him swimming… He was also moving his hands a lot, not in the water, but mostly out of it. His thought has an experiential depth/ethos that I saw with my own eyes.

 Castoriadis, who has always been exuberant in expression and strong in spirit, is constantly evolving. On a personal level: Women, gambling, cigars, whiskey, the stock market and songs with a sad theme (moirologia, traditional Greek laments for the dead]) also play their crucial part. He had a very strong personality, and because of this, his path was lonely and outside the intellectual fashions of Paris. He stood out.

Cornelius Castoriadis had a love for dialogue and for every new thought that entered his mind. He liked ideas, and he told me when we met in his office, “when a new idea comes to my mind I feel a great surprise.” Awe for ideas, and from this awe, he started and reflected on the uniqueness that every human being deserves / every human being has. The uniqueness, let’s say, of the militant Nikitaras (Greek War of Independence hero, 1821), who was shouting to the Turks, “Persians, let’s fight”! The ‘only theory’ left behind by Cornelius Castoriadis is his imprint as a Human. An imprint that marked those who mostly knew him up close.

 Exuberant and powerful spirit

When asked how he knows that the cow appearing before them is wild, he answers in a lively voice, “but it has an expression on its face.” (It was, apparently, the peculiar breed of cow of the Greek island of Tinos.) Thus, he impresses the listener, and imparts knowledge hand in hand with humor. How did I find myself in the car driven by Castoriadis himself in 1996? This is the “Personal testimony” that I developed in the humble book of 2014. The rare gift of humor that the ‘atheist Castoriadis’ had is like the strong stings you receive when you read him. He had a sense of humor and like a person as I said. And the ‘bites of humor’ make you say, “the West/Hellenism gave birth to a genius”.

The legacy of Cornelius Castoriadis is priceless. And although we are separated from ancient Greece by 130,000 weeks, Castoriadis was, “an ancient Greek in Paris” as I often say. Man dies at some point, but his ideas remain standing. I think, he will continue to inspire… just like the Parthenon.

In conclusion, the above thoughts/‘pictures’ published here, in a highly summarized form, are those delivered in a humble lecture in the Greek language (it’s the first forty minutes) that took place on Sunday, October 13, 2024 (Institute of Research and Study Thucydides, President Mr. Dimitris Trapeziotis). An ‘early manuscript’ of this speech was read by the excellent expatriate intellectual and professor, Mr. Vrasidas Karalis, in Sydney, Australia, and this fact, as well as his apt observations, honor him in particular.

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Dimitris Eleas is a political scientist, writer and researcher living in New York. You can contact him at: dimitris.eleas@gmail.com. Read other articles by Dimitris.

Workers' councils and the economics of self-managed society - Cornelius Castoriadis




Cornelius Castoriadis/Paul Cardan's proposals for the workings of a society based on the principle of self-management by workers' councils, originally published in English by Solidarity in 1972. We have significant disagreements with it as it retains the key features of capitalism, but we reproduce it for reference.

Submitted by Steven. on August 20, 2013

Taken from http://www.lust-for-life.org/Lust-For-Life/WorkersCouncilsAndEconomics/WorkersCouncilsAndEconomics.htm

workers-councils-Cornelius-Castoriadis.pdf (4.02 MB)
workers-councils-Cornelius-Castoriadis.mobi (5.09 MB)
workers-councils-Cornelius-Castoriadis.epub (6.32 MB)

FASCIMILE PDF https://archive.org/details/sparrowsnest-3740/mode/2up

Spikymike

9 years ago

In reply to Welcome by libcom.org


So here is an extract from a short book review I wrote way back in 1972:

''This...is an honest and well thought out attempt at dealing with the problems of transition from capitalist to communist society (a phrase misleadingly described as 'socialism'). it's main objective is to disprove the arguments against communism which state that people cannot freely and democractically run their own social affairs, and that it is impossible to carry on production without a specially trained section of workers whose main task is to organise the rest along authoritarian lines.
Whilst dealing with the technical and organisational tasks in a realistic fashion avoiding the faults of both anarchism and bolshevism (if not of the De-Leonist SLP) they show an amazing ignoranceof capitalist economics. They warn that a certain group of readers will react emotionally to the use of terms such as money and wages in relation to 'socialism' and we must surely be amongst that group. But our response isn't just emotional - at first site it appears that these terms are used to describe something similar to Marx's non-circulating labour vouchers, one method Marx suggested might be used to deal with shortages at the beginning of communism. Their discussion of 'value' however shows that this is not just a terminological dispute. Solidarity seem to have taken Marx's model of 'pure' capitalism in volume 1 of CAPITAL and wish to apply it in practice. For instance Marx states that the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of socially necessary labour time embododied in it. Price on the other hand fluctuates about this point and with monoply conditions (and the averaging of the rate of profit) may stay permanently above or below its value. Solidarity seem to want to rationalise this system so that prices always equal value rather than abolish commodity production alltogether.....''

Looking back at this I was too generous in my interpretation of Castoriadis approach which was still stuck in a rather trotskyist understanding of 'socialism' as a distinct society from communism and omitted a more fundamental critique of it's democratic fetish. Unfortunately a longer more critical article we published shortly after this does not appear on-line but it went into more detail on the changes made by (an embarassed?) Brinton/Palace in his translation of the original which certainly came accross as a form of democratic 'market socialism' - actually a form of capitalism. In other ways this pamplets model has some of the same faults as other more modern abstract models for a claimed alternative society such as 'Parecon' and 'Inclusive Democracy' which are criticsed elswhere on libcom.

A slightly one-sided critique (by a party with it's own democratic fetish), which non-the-less still contains some valid points, can be found here:

http://worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1960s/1969/no-774-february-1969/%E2%80%98solidarity%E2%80%99-group-not-so-solid

and another relevant one here:

http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2000s/2005/no-1210-june-2005/solidarity-twenty-five-years.

Other discussions on this site relating to Council Communism and 'labour-time vouchers' are also relevent.

In relation to Castoriadis and Solidarity's lack of understanding of Marx's critique of the 'Value Form' it's also worth looking at David Brown's text 'The illusion of 'Solidarity' ' in the library here:
https://libcom.org/library/illusion-solidarity-david-brown

After Montreal A View From the Past

The Montreal Climate Change Conference is over. In a certain sense it is the completion of a cycle that began in Montreal over a decade ago. The Original Rio Conference on the Environment which led to the Kyoto Accord, and this Kyoto 2 conference was the brain child of Canadian Maurice Strong.

He was and is a significant mover and shaker in both Montreal and Ottawa, Strong was head of the Power Corporation, and he was the original conference chair for Rio. It was appropriate that it ended in Mr. Strongs home province from whence it began. Mr. Strong pushed the environmental issue for business purposes, his is the environmentalism of the Hydro business, which includes the promotion of clean energy from nuclear power. And as a former head of Power Corp he was well connected with the Liberal Party. One of the reasons that Kyoto has been pushed by the Liberals is Strong.

It was also appropriate that given the current situation of crisis in the UN, that Mr. Strong was absent from the conference since he has been linked to the UN Food for Oil scandal in Iraq.

Mr. Strong's many accomplishments as a member of the Canadian ruling class are too detailed to go into here now, but he represents the rising ruling class of Trudeau Liberals in Quebec who foreswore seperatism for integration in the corridors of power, and in so doing strengthened both the Quebec and Canadian State in the 20th Century.

But the Climate Conference in Montreal, led to nothing new, Kyoto 2 is business as usual. The US didn't asign on, no big deal, they are still developing their own asymetrical approach to climate change. Capitalism can adjust to increased production and sharing of green credits, of carbon sinks, of new adapatable technologies, of capitalist business offering alternative green energy like wind power, (the wind power associations of Canada say No Government hand outs Please, we are businessmen).

Has the revolutionary potential of the ecology movement come and gone, despite the stuffed bears, and dancing flowers in the mass protests in the streets of Montreal outside the confernce, the tear gas did not choke or gag these protestors. Theirs was the quiet concern of millions of us, about our future. They were well behaved as were the police and the State. It was all very serious. Very scientific, very political.

But what has changed since Rio, since Kyoto 1? Capitalism has adapted. Has it come to the self recognition that its continued existance threatens our very home world? I think not.

For capitalism is us, and we have yet to put the wrench in the wheels that drive the marketplace. And this goes beyond the liberal ideology that we need to consume less. The very fact is that the contradiction of advanced capitalism is that it now is holding back a technology and productive capacity to provide abundance for all, because it is chanelling production into profit.

And in doing so it has failed to recognize the use value of recycling, reusing, and reduction. Instead we are producing more and more throw away items. The revolutionary idea of ecology so prevelant in the 1970's is not the Green Party or green conciousness, never was, never will be. Join the Audboun Society if you want that.

Nope as Murray Bookchin has pointed out Radical Ecology is part and parcel of the Anarchist understanding of the crisis of advanced capitalism. His works on Social Ecology and the Limits of the City were breakthrough works that have yet to be matched by many modern writers, for their far flung critique.

Several other European Leftists such as Andre Gorz also noted the signifigance and importance of an ecological critique of political economy for the Left. His most poular essay online is; Social Ideology of the Motorcar

But one of the Leftists to predate both Gorz and Bookchin was Pierre Cardin, one of many psuedonyms for Cornelius Castoriadis one of founders of the French ultra-left groups Socialism or Barbarism, which in England was known as Solidarity. They have published numerous works during the sixties that were staples for Left Wing Anarchist reading.

Notes From the Underground

Mr. Castoriadis's life combined high intellectual seriousness with intense political infighting. When he arrived in France from Greece in 1945, at the age of 23, he had already translated the work of Max Weber into Greek. He was also a veteran of the Trotskyist movement, which both the fascists and the communists were seeking to "liquidate," to use their polite term for "exterminate."

In 1948 Mr. Castoriadis found work at what would later become known as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, while also leading a small post-Trotskyist group called "Socialism or Barbarism," which published a journal by the same name. (Thus, Mr. Castoriadis was conducting statistical analyses of capitalism while preparing at night and on weekends to overthrow it.) "S. ou B.," as its comrades called it, never had more than a hundred members. It published a newspaper, Workers' Power, that circulated in some factories, but much of the group's energy was devoted to theoretical debates. As Mr. Castoriadis grew critical of Marxism itself, for example, he was opposed within the organization by a young philosophy professor named Jean-François Lyotard. (Ironically, Mr. Lyotard would later become prominent as a postmodernist who rejected Marx's "grand narrative" of history.)

The group's impact on radical students and activists around the world was disproportionate to its size. And its influence continued to grow even after S. ou B. dissolved in 1965. In the late 1970s, it became fashionable in some circles to claim to have once been a member. It was a development that amused Mr. Castoriadis. "If all these people had been with us at the time," he said, "we would have taken power in France sometime around 1957."

Emerging from the political underground, Mr. Castoriadis became a psychoanalyst, and also began teaching a seminar on philosophy at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, in Paris. He published numerous books reflecting an encyclopedic range of interests and an unblinking skepticism toward the "generalized conformism" of contemporary society. After decades of denouncing the Soviet Union as a monstrosity, he never became enthusiastic about the existing Western order. At a 1997 conference organized in Prague by President Václav Havel of the Czech Republic and the writer Elie Wiesel, Mr. Castoriadis described capitalism's "expectation of an unlimited expansion of material so-called well-being" as "obviously the most absurd of all Utopias ever formulated by the most sanguine Utopians." He also urged the adoption of a "new type of human life ... a frugal life, as the only means to avoid ecological catastrophe and a definitive zombification of human beings, endlessly masturbating in front of their television screens."

When he died at the end of that same year, Mr. Castoriadis left an apartment filled with manuscripts, including an enormous mass of lectures from his seminars on philosophical and psychoanalytic topics -- material indispensable to understanding his thinking on the question of human creativity. He left a widow, two daughters, and a network of comrades and admirers around the world.

Castoradis work included the following interview. It comes from a massive if somewhat controversial work online, THE RISING TIDE OF INSIGNIFICANCY

I originally had looked at copying some quotes from it as I felt that it was as relevant today, as when it was done back in 1993, perhaps moreso in light of the failure or success of the Montreal Conference, depending of course if you think anything actually occured there.

Instead I beleive it is time for us to reassess the NGO/Green/Animal Rights/ movements that claim to be anarchist, because they engage in Direct Action to meet their reformist ends. Castoradis makes many a cogent point especially about Green Politics, which looked far more radical then than now, in light of the Red Tory's that run Canada's Green Party.

One point I believe he is incorrect on, but that has been a common misinterpretation, is that Marx and Engels were anti-environmental pro productionist apologists. This I believe has been significantly challenged of late by John Bellamy Foster in the pages of Monthly Review and has been the focus of one of his recent books. While Castoradis denounced the expansive production of capitalism, I believe that Bookchin hit on the head when he announced the politics of post scarcity anarchism. But that is another debate for another time, as Homes said to Watson about the Giant Rat of Sumatra.

So here is some food for thought, and as usual I look forward to a spirited debate and your comments. Footnotes are at the end. Because of its length I have posted off site here:

THE REVOLUTIONARY FORCE OF ECOLOGY.doc
Interview With Cornelius Castoradis (Pierre Cardin)

Illusion and Fetishism in Critical Theory: A Study of Nietzsche, Benjamin, Castoriadis, and the Situationists

Vasilis Grollios

Routledge, New York and London, 2024. 206 pp., £130 hb
ISBN 9781032556772

Reviewed by Dimitri Vouros
About the reviewer
Dimitri Vouros is a scholar interested in theories of democracy and sovereignty


The connection between Marxism and critical theory has always been fraught. Hiding this connection may have served a political purpose for the first generation of Frankfurt School thinkers. There is evidence that Walter Benjamin’s writings were edited by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer to tone down his overtly Marxist language, presumably so the school, while in exile, could maintain its social standing in Western academia. For later generations such self-censorship was no longer necessary. Yet, something of this censorship continues in certain strains of critical theory, especially those that focus on everything except what Marx spent most of his energies pursuing – political economy. Have critical philosophers forgotten that bourgeois economists hold the theory of money and exchange to be a thoroughly natural one, the economy as ‘second nature’ to use a formulation of Georg Lukács?

Vasilis Grollios’ Illusion and Fetishism in Critical Theory presents an alternative view of society and the economy to that pursued by many recent critical theorists. He describes the view of Open Marxism, of capitalism as a mode of production in which illusion and fetishism dominate human life. Grollios’ book investigates the ideological trappings of capitalist society and its inversion of human values into economic ones. It formulates a theory of why ‘traditional’ viewpoints in political philosophy and economics end up promoting unfreedom and alienation in everyday life. To this end, Grollios emphasises the Marxist underpinnings of critical theory properly understood and presents the contours of a non-dogmatic dialectical philosophy.

Continuing themes from his last work Negativity and Democracy: Marxism and the Critical Theory Tradition, Grollios pursues detailed reinterpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, Cornelius Castoriadis and the Situationists Raoul Vaneigem and Guy Debord. Grollios places these authors in conversation Marx. He presents a view of Marxian epistemology often overlooked by recent scholarship. He underscores Marx’s methodological endeavours that point to the ‘real abstractions’ of the capitalist mode of production and the reduction of labour-power and labour-time to the totalising valuations of the market.

One aim of Grollios’ book is to place the ideology of pecuniary individualism under suspicion. Since capitalism reduces material and social relations to exchange value, bourgeois notions of subjectivity invariably lead to alienation and various limitations on human flourishing. In essence, what we take to be everyday life is informed and driven by the imperatives of the market. This view is first found in Marx, in his 1844 Paris Manuscripts, the Grundrisse manuscripts of 1857-58 and the first section of the first volume of Capital. The Marxist tradition, which wished to join theory to practice, often sidestepped these insights or found them politically inexpedient. It was largely critical theory that retrieved them from possible oblivion. Yet similar insights into monopoly and late capitalism, not only its external mechanisms, but also the way its reifications informed society more generally, were downplayed by later critical theorists. Arguably it was Jürgen Habermas’ influential theory of communicative action that began this forgetting of the social significance of abstractive economic categories. The turn to ‘recognition’ in third-wave Frankfurt School critical theory has only deepened this nescience.

Like Alfred Sohn-Rethel and Moishe Postone before him, Grollios has retrieved the significance of Marx’s thought on fetishism and the real abstractions of the market for philosophy and political theory. He proves that what Max Horkheimer called ‘traditional theory’ reproduces a topsy-turvy understanding of the relation between capital and capitalism’s subjects. Indeed, Grollios pursues a ‘corporeal materialism’, and asks why workers are still being cajoled into navigating the various fetishes of commodity capitalism and subjected to its deleterious effects in their daily life. Grollios also shows how critical theory has not spent its interpretative energies, that much can still be gleaned from twentieth-century thinkers like those dealt with in his book. The relationship between the illusive totality of capitalism and the alienated worker is still relevant, against trends in different theoretical directions, including Foucauldian discourses of power and biopolitics and Lacanian/Post-Marxist theories of symbolic power. In fact, Grollios argues that theory needs to return to the concrete social consequences of capital accumulation, to an understanding of how workers’ free time is expropriated by capitalism’s unceasing search for surplus value. For Grollios, fetishism is ‘a general phenomenon in which, while people attempt to earn a living in a society where “time is money” rules, they end up creating social forms, such as value as money, or the state, or the bourgeois form of democracy that they cannot control and towards which they feel alienated’ (47).

In the first chapter, Grollios reads Nietzsche, unusually, as an ally of critical theory. It is true Nietzsche had a substantial influence on the Frankfurt School and its understanding of capitalist society. Yet most recent thinkers in the Continental tradition have focussed on the cultural and aesthetic aspects of Nietzsche’s critique of modernity and nihilism. They have certainly not reckoned with all his insights into politics and society. What Grollios offers is not a Marxist critique of Nietzsche – à la Georg Lukács’ Destruction of Reason – but an assessment of what is still valuable in his criticism of life and work under capitalism. Just like the first generation of the Frankfurt School, Nietzsche ‘holds a dialectic between appearance/fetishized form and content/essence/alienation in everyday life’ (24). What is especially relevant for Grollios is Nietzsche’s insight into how the creative and liberating aspects of labour and the everyday are rendered superfluous by the market logic of capitalism.

The next chapter refreshingly passes over much of the scholarly literature that has been written about Walter Benjamin the ‘cultural critic’. Such commentaries largely miss the point of Benjamin’s critique of capitalism. Grollios argues that Benjamin ‘belongs to the first generation of Critical Theory and that his ideas take place in the frame of Marx’s Capital’ (61). Using concepts such as ‘determinate negation’, ‘corporeal materialism’, ‘the spellbound, topsy-turvy character of capitalist society’, ‘negative dialectics’ and ‘non-identity-thinking’, Grollios presents Benjamin’s striking characterisations of social production and reproduction and shows what they mean for the inner life of the worker (61). Grollios homes in on commodity fetishism, especially the reification of consciousness and the eternalisation of technical production, a hellish dream Benjamin calls a ‘capitalist phantasmagoria’ (63-64). The ‘corporeal materialism’ of Benjamin comes out in his description of unsavoury aspects of the industrial lifeworld. Benjamin’s perspectives on art and literature are important, but mainly because they alert the reader to fetishized aspects of industrial and post-industrial society. Key for Benjamin is the ‘eternal return’ of commodity capitalism and the way it alienates subjects both from the products they make and from a flourishing human existence. It is for this reason that the motifs of myth, boredom, death and fashion recur in Benjamin’s works, above all his unfinished Arcades Project. The mediation accomplished by capital between things and people can be described in terms of ‘reification’ which, in one essay, Benjamin says not only ‘clouds relations between human beings, but the real subjects of these relations also remain clouded’. This leads ineluctably to the ‘deformation’ of various bureaucratic vocations (93).

Grollios also emphasises the importance of Benjamin’s revolutionary theory of history. For Benjamin, ‘messianic time’ can override idols like the state and the individual. Indeed, as Grollios states, ‘[t]he leap of past events out of history into the present is likened by Benjamin to “the dialectical leap Marx understood as revolution”’ (99). Grollios reads Benjamin as an anarchist and as standing against orthodox (and Leninist) historical materialism. He uncovers an Adornian ‘negative dialectics’ in Benjamin’s methodology. (Adorno’s ‘negative dialectics’ is something of a leitmotif in this book.) One-dimensional, identity thinking, the kind that naturalises the material and social relations under universal exchange society needs to be subjected to dialectical critique. Given that bourgeois epistemologies and logics sacrifice all to the economy and to its limiting temporalities, dialectical thinking must seek to deconstruct, dereify, and demystify them. For Grollios and other exponents of left-communism, historical instances of ‘actually existing socialism’ merely reproduce these logics in a new guise, a ‘state capitalist’ one (192-193).

The brunt of Grollios’ critique is aimed at those views that seek to compromise on the promise, the one implicit in Western philosophy, of a disalienated existence and work life. Read with such an emancipatory end in mind, Marx is shown to argue that communist freedom is possible only if workers are no longer treated as wage slaves, if they are freed from all economic constraints. As Grollios points out, this entails a completely new relationship to things, to commodities, to time and to labour. Finding such renewed social relations is impossible through party politicking, and unlikely to follow a general revolutionary upheaval. Class warfare does not guarantee the emancipation of the proletariat. One needs to interrupt capitalism where it really matters, by finding ‘cracks’ in its imposing edifice and changing workers’ very relationship to labour. This is the true form of protest for our time according to Grollios and other Open Marxists like John Holloway: ‘Cracks open, and revolution takes place when we deny the mask displaying ourselves as “personifications of economic categories” and revolt against the rule of money, against capital’ (55).

In chapter three, Grollios finds in Castoriadis’ philosophy a stepping stone to a new kind of political thinking about autonomy. But Castoriadis comes under fire for not having correctly understood Marx’s position on labour and alienation; in fact, he is ‘essentially much closer to traditional theory and bourgeois philosophy than has been believed’ (119). During his lifetime, Castoriadis was struggling against the consequences of Leninism, the failure of the dictatorship of the proletariat to effect real change and indeed other problems with articulating a class struggle under a constantly morphing social structure: ‘In Castoriadis’ theory, classes are not formed from below, from people’s productive activity, they are not a perverted form of our doing […] They are formed from above. However, this is a nonmaterialist, undialectical and therefore uncritical theorizing of class’ (126). While Open Marxism is anticipated by Castoriadis in some places, he nevertheless fails to pose fundamental questions about our daily life that lead to political action in the present. Grollios argues that when we succumb to the view that abstractive bourgeois logics do not exist in any meaningful sense, as Castoriadis does, one is (falsely) liberated to pursue political philosophy for its own sake. Additionally, Castoriadis theorizes the state ‘as a separate and relative autonomous instance’ and further ‘accuses Marx of ignoring this fact’ (139). A similar criticism can be made of Hannah Arendt’s mature political philosophy. Like Castoriadis, she fails to read Marx as formulating a critique, as opposed to offering a predictive description, of political economy, turning instead to superficial readings of Marx’s materialist interpretation of labour. Both Arendt and Castoriadis ultimately return to Aristotle and the ancient polis to settle accounts with capitalism and its illusions. Castoriadis ‘does not identify the concept of the double character of the labour which lies hidden in the commodity, and neither does he recognize the fact that contradiction and struggle are ingrained in the essence of our existence in capitalism’ (129). Nevertheless, Grollios appreciates Castoriadis’ formulation of the social imaginary and the need to reimagine the modern polity, to find a completely new and different footing for current society (146-147).

The last chapter is a distillation of the French Situationists’ critique of capitalism and ‘commodified time’ (154). Raoul Vaneigem and Guy Debord write eloquently about the subjection of citizens to a barrage of images, about the mediatization of consciousness: ‘Capital in Debord and the Situationists is not the amount of money accumulated waiting to be thrown again into production for profit to be produced but a social relation made up of fetishized social forms-images that originate in alienated-objectified labour’ (155). Capitalism hopes to endear people to the illusion of the totality. The modern ‘spectacle’ and its effects leads to the naturalisation of commodity exchange, to various false notions about what constitutes value in life and to a new form of temporality. Debord holds that ‘spectacular time is the illusorily lived time’ (166), that the ‘spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the non-living’ (174). The Situationists, as Grollios presents them, do not pursue a reduction to the economic in the last instance, but rather a way of alerting us to the compromised epistemological foundation ­of the modern subject, relying as it does on the inversion of the value-form. Since fetishism is ingrained in all life under capitalism, where consumers are unwittingly beholden to the illusions of the market. The key idea here is that ‘fetishization [is] a process whereby people are turned into zombies of capital/spectacle’. The main consequence of this is that ‘class struggle is not only on the streets […] but also runs through ourselves, our bodies and souls’ (179). The only possibility for freedom is finding a way beyond such illusions. For Grollios, this means being attentive to the cracks that open in capitalism, by capitalising on the moments of what Adorno called the ‘utopian images’ in the everyday against capital’s myths, and by finding fresh opportunities to disrupt the status quo.

1 March 2024


URL: https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/21422_illusion-and-fetishism-in-critical-theory-a-study-of-nietzsche-benjamin-castoriadis-and-the-situationists-by-vasilis-grollios-reviewed-by-dimitri-vouros/

 

Clean Energy Alone Can’t Save Us

From green consumerism to degrowth and radical systemic change

By Yavor Tarinski

November 18, 2024

Source: Freedom News

Illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker

“How far can the ‘right’ (the legally and collectively assured effective possibility) of each individual, of each group, of each commune, of each nation to act as it wants, extend once we know – and we have always known it, but the ecology movement forcefully reminds us of it – that we are all embarked on the same planetary boat and that what each one of us does can have repercussions on everyone else?”[1]

~Cornelius Castoriadis

It is a good thing that there is increasingly more talk about the looming catastrophe that threatens our societies, as a result of climate change and deepening ecological crises. There is, one can suggest, an improvement in this respect in comparison to previous years, when such issues were either overlooked and kept out of the spotlight. And it’s not only citizens and social movements that emphasize on the urgency – governments and corporations try to give the impression that they too are concerned about the environment, despite the fact that they are the chiefly responsible for the current mess.

But there is a major problem with the way the issue is being examined in the mainstream, due to the dominant systemic parameters. Deeply submerged within the imaginary of top-down management and constant economic growth, it completely misses the root-causes of the ecological crises we currently face.

One stark example is the question of energy production and distribution. Mainstream environmentalists and politicians increasingly advocate in favor of the replacement of dirty fossil fuels with renewables. And while one such transition is, of course, crucial for combating climate change and environmental degradation, it is by no means the only prerequisite, since the issue is not a technical one, but a matter of paradigm.

People who tend to focus solely on the transition towards clean renewable energy accept for granted, even as ‘natural’, the current capitalist pattern of perpetual economic growth. This logic doesn’t question the parameters of the dominant system, but only seek ways of ‘greening’ them so that business as usual can continue. In its essence, this way of thinking doesn’t really strive towards resolving the forthcoming ecological catastrophe, but to only prolong the time we have left until then.

It is most certain that the energy of a democratic and ecological society will derive from renewable sources, rather than from the extraction and burning of finite resources. This is among the prerequisite for sustainability, but most certainly not the only one. In regards to this Cornelius Castoriadis has been warning social movements at least since the 1980s that projects that deal with renewable energy resources can, in part be co-opted towards ends that could not even be labelled reformist – that is, toward the end of plugging up the holes in the existing system.[2]

It is the idea that our societies can continue down the same path of perpetual growth that must be tackled. There is simply no ecological way of satisfying the ever-increasing energy needs of an increasingly wasteful way of life. In this line of thought contemporary degrowth advocate Jason Hickel calls on us to face the issue:

Even if this wasn’t a problem, we must ask ourselves: once we have 100% clean energy, what are we going to do with this? Unless we change how our economy works, we’ll keep doing exactly what we are doing with fossil fuels: we’ll use it to power continued extraction and production at an ever-increasing rate, placing ever-increasing pressure on the living world, because that’s what capitalism requires. Clean energy might help deal with emissions, but it does nothing to reverse deforestation, overfishing, soil depletion and mass extinction. A growth-obsessed economy powered by clean energy will still tip us into ecological disaster.[3]

The continuous increase of our energy use will demand the constant expansion of renewables, whose production in itself is not without its own environmental and social cost.[4] Wind turbines, solar panels, etc. are all made by rare minerals and materials that have to be extracted from the earth, with considerable ecological imprint. For a society based on extreme consumerist lifestyles there will never be enough energy, there will always be need for more.

A more holistic way to approach the issue will be to advocate simultaneously for renewables replacing dirty fossil fuels, while also resisting the dominant capitalist paradigm and advance an alternative project that seeks to degrow the economy, reduce unnecessary consumption, etc. It is only in this way that we can avert the looming ecological catastrophe.

This will imply the usage also of low-tech technologies that do not leave environmental impact, while still allowing us to live dignified life. By departing from the imaginary of perpetual economic growth we can realize that the resolvement of our daily problems can come not only from high-tech solutions, which are preferred by the current capitalist standards as more marketable and more prone to planned obsolescence, but also by simpler, older methods and techniques that may prove invaluable in dealing with the looming climate crisis, while also paving the way for an ecological society. As Hickel suggests:

Our understanding of what counts as technology should not be limited to complex machinery. Sometimes simpler technologies are more effective, more efficient, and more democratic: bicycles, for instance, are an incredibly powerful technology for helping to decarbonize urban transport, and agroecological methods are vital to restoring soil fertility.

An example for such a non-energy intensive technology can be found in the city of Yazd, located in contemporary Iran. Built between two deserts, it experiences its fair share of extreme high temperature. But since ancient times its inhabitants have developed an ingenious way of cooling and ventilation, where with a little clay they have devised an extraordinary technology that in a perpetual, natural and truly renewable way does the work of an expensive air conditioner with a heavy ecological footprint. 

We are talking about the so-called “wind catchers”, chimney-like towers that draw in a pleasant cool breeze and direct it into the house of the residents for better, natural air conditioning that is non-electrically intensive, carbon-free, and with a very low maintenance cost.

In fact, many wind towers were made to connect to underground water pipes so that they could drive the cold air below ground so that the running water can also be cooled.

By this process the internal temperature of houses can drop by 8C to 12C in such a hot place.

Public transport is another approach that uses much less energy than the dominant means of transportation that has taken over most cities around the world – the automobile. Urban environments are mercilessly dominated by cars, a domination that results from a lifestyle pushed by a powerful industry and the capitalist time-is-money pace. And the dominance of the automobile contributes significantly to pollution.

The response of mainstream environmentalism has been to advance the electric car as “the ecological alternative” to the one that runs on fossil fuels. But this view tends to overlook the environmental and social cost that the production of electric cars has. What this so-called alternative actually tries to achieve is to sustain intact the consumerist lifestyle associated with automobiles, while “greening it”.

A much more ecological approach would be to shift urban mobility away from private cars and towards public transport, which is much more sustainable, with significantly smaller environmental impact and much less energy intensive. As ecosocialist Simon Pirani suggests, cities with more public transport and fewer cars are not only more socially equal, more healthy and less polluted. They also emit far fewer greenhouse gases.

Such approaches to energy may seem unprofitable in a growth-obsessed capitalist framework, where planned obsolescence is embedded into technologies so as to coerce individuals and communities into replacing, rather than repairing and sustaining what they already have. But in a democratic and ecological post-capitalist setting, self-managed by the grassroots, rather than run by profit-driven markets and elites, it seems as self-evident.

According to Richard Heinberg, author and Senior Fellow at the Post-Carbon Institute, we need a realistic plan for energy descent, rather than insisting on foolish dreams of eternal consumer abundance by means other than fossil fuels. Currently, politically rooted insistence on continued economic growth is discouraging truth-telling and serious planning for how to live well with less.

One such paradigm cannot be implemented in a top-down manner, because hierarchies always prioritize the interests of the ruling class – the higher your position in the social ladder, the greater your interest is in maintaining the basic systemic parameters that got you in that privileged position in the first place. Such approach can only produce shallow reforms that can lead to no meaningful change.

Instead, it must be built from the ground-up so as to reflect the needs and desires of all members of society, rather than those of tiny business and political elites. A direct-democratic society where decision-making processes are open, inclusive, and transparent, enables a shift away from the profit-driven, growth-oriented global economy towards more sustainable, and equitable alternatives that allows for greater community control over local economies and natural resources. The potentials of energy production and distribution within one such framework is highlighted by Pirani:

decentralized renewable power generation has great potential: it is well-suited to municipal and local development, and to forms of common ownership, and is compatible with more effective, and lower, levels of final use of electricity.

In a stateless post-capitalist setting, where power is equally shared by everyone collectively, we have every right to believe that the priorities and ways of doing things will be radically altered, posing questions that today may appear unthinkable, like ‘energy – why and for whom?’. Following this reasoning, Castoriadis suggests that:

another society, an autonomous society, does not imply only self-management, self-government, self-institution. It implies another culture, in the most profound sense of this term. It implies another way of life, other needs, other orientations for human life. [5]

In conclusion, it can be suggested that it’s becoming increasingly clear to a growing amount of people that no serious solution can come from the dominant systemic framework in response to ecological breakdown. Regardless of who is in position of power, it is the capitalist obsession of growth and competition that won’t allow for any substantial change to take place, but only minor reforms that mostly have to do with greening of consumerist patterns. What is urgently needed is a radical alteration of the societal organization. Only by shifting decision-making power away from bureaucratic institutions (like parliaments) and mechanisms (like the profit-driven capitalist market) towards grassroots participatory organs (such as popular assemblies and councils of delegates) that a new, much more sustainable, ecological, and democratic future can emerge.

---

[1] David Ames Curtis (ed.): The Castoriadis Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p251.

[2] David Ames Curtis (ed.): The Castoriadis Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p248.

[3] Jason Hickel: Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save The World (London: Penguin Books.), p21.

[4] Sophie Theresia Huber & Karl W. Steininger: ‘Critical sustainability issues in the production of wind and solar electricity generation as well as storage facilities and possible solutions’ in Journal of Cleaner Production, Volume 339 (2022)

[5] David Ames Curtis (ed.): The Castoriadis Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p250.

Escaping the Trap of ‘Realism’ and ‘Utopianism’: Towards Programmatic Synthesis

By Yavor Tarinski

February 10, 2025

Source: Resilience

Practicing direct democracy – voting on Nuit Debout, Place de la République, Paris. By Elekes Andor – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48974357

[T]he strongest and most efficient of megamachines can be overthrown[…] The collapse of the Pyramid Age proved that the megamachine exists on a basis of human beliefs, which may crumble, of human decisions, which may prove fallible, and human consent, which, when the magic becomes discredited, may be withheld. The human parts that composed the megamachine were by nature mechanically imperfect: never wholly reliable.[1]~Lewis Mumford

There is one thing that the status quo manages to do well – to convince us that achieving radical social change is an unreachable utopia. It presents itself as pragmatic and realistic, as a pillar of stability. Furthermore, it also claims a hegemony on the social imaginary level, as the only imaginable system. This is what Mark Fisher has termed Capitalist Realism – the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.[2]

By exercising domination over every aspect of our lives – from economics to culture etc. – it proceeds into setting the parameters along which we evaluate. Thus, we learn from a very young age to perceive authority, efficiency, rapidity, and growth as the main variables to use when measuring events and experiences. For example, one is being encouraged to view the animal world not as a complex cyclical system of mutual aid, diversity and interdependence, but as a “kingdom” determined by a food chain that positions species, on the basis of their physical strength and domination, at the top or the bottom of a hierarchical scheme.

‘Stalinist realism’ and ‘escapist utopianism’

Occurrences and potential alternatives are viewed through such lens by the dominant imaginary, and when they don’t abide by the parameters of the status quo, they are simply omitted from the horizon, or at best, described as naive utopias that are best suited for naive dreamers, not for pragmatic individuals.

Even when collective activity manages to establish a rupture with the dominant order, giving space to a different set of values, it still continues to be framed by the forces of domination along their own criteria, so that their ideological hegemony remains unchallenged. An example of this can be found in the way the Haitian Revolution, one of the most significant revolutionary events to date, was perceived during its time. As Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot explains:

administrators, politicians, or ideologues found explanations that forced the rebellion within their worldview, shoving the facts into the proper order of discourse… [T]he insurrection became an unfortunate repercussion of planters’ miscalculations…[or] It was the unforseen consequence of various conspiracies connived by non-slaves[…][3]

The events that shook up Saint-Domingue from 1791 to 1804 constituted a sequence for which not even the extreme political left in France or in England had a conceptual frame of reference.[4]

This process continues to this day with varying degrees of success throughout the years. Despite the fact that increasing amounts of people believe less and less in the contemporary representative top-down model of social organization, as can be seen from the rising levels of abstention from electoral processes around the world[5], nonetheless there still is a persistent tendency among self-proclaimed revolutionaries that find it unimaginable to go beyond bureaucracy. Psychoanalyst Ian Parker has coined the term ‘Stalinist realism’ to best describe this persisting trend. According to him:

Capitalism, and the kind of ‘capitalist realism’ that tells you that there is no alternative, was mirrored by Stalinism and a ‘stalinist realism’ that tells you that the only alternative is oppressive and controlling.[…] As an ideological force stalinist realism insisted that the only reality was either capitalism or bureaucratic control, that these two systems should peacefully coexist, and not interfere with the functioning of each ‘camp’ or part of the world. If you took sides, you were told, it is one side or the other, either with capitalism or with the bureaucracy.[6]

For these-so called “realists” a social change that abolishes domination and hierarchy altogether is nothing but utopia for naive dreamers, or even as ideological cover for “agents” that want to undermine the Revolution. They don’t shy away from presenting analytical programs for today, without taking into consideration any long-term, maximum goals. Because of this, their programmatic proposals are deeply submerged into reformism of what currently exists. By being unable to think beyond top-down structures, such tendencies are destined to reproduce the oppressive ways of the current system. It is not by chance that actually existing socialism has provided us with nothing but anti-examples.

On the flip-side of the political “realists” are the so called “utopian escapists”. In a way, they too have accepted that a revolutionary alternative to the status quo is a utopia – an event so distant in the future that is practically unreachable. As a result of this understanding, they more often than not engage in lifestyle endeavors, directed at making their individual experiences “feel” somewhat alternative to the mainstream, without really challenging the Capital-Nation-State complex. As Murray Bookchin suggests, such tendencies:

seek to transform society by creating so-called alternative economic and living situations [so as] to gently edge social development away from privately owned enterprises—banks, corporations, supermarkets, factories, and industrial systems of agriculture—and the lifeways to which they give rise, into collectively owned enterprises and values. It does not seek to create a power center that will overthrow capitalism; it seeks rather to outbid it, outprice it, or outlast it, often by presenting a moral obstacle to the greed and evil that many find in a bourgeois economy.[7]

By keeping their visions for a better society in the unforeseeable future, they run the risk of descending into ideological purity. Thus, a vision of this sort begins being seen as something that needs to be kept “clean” from what currently exists. This is a kind of activist elitism that doesn’t seek the broadest possible involvement of common people, but rather to limit its reach to those who “already know” and who will not “stain” it with the ills of society-as-it-is. Jonathan Matthew Smucker aptly points at the limitations of such approaches:

There are perfectly legitimate and understandable reasons why many of us gravitate toward spaces where we feel more understood and choose the path of least resistance in the other spheres of our lives. But when we do not contest the cultures, beliefs, symbols, narratives, etc. of the existing institutions and social networks that we are part of, we also walk away from the resources and power embedded within them. In exchange for a shabby little activist clubhouse, we give away the whole farm. We let our opponents have everything.[8]

As can be seen from the above, both categories leave the current system unchallenged: they either struggle for minor reforms without challenging domination, or they attempt at creating their own elitist spaces where there is as little involvement with the broad society. They play along with the dominant narrative that wants us to believe that what currently exists is the only way (Thatchers’ famous ‘There Is No Alternative’ mantra). For a project to be truly revolutionary then, it must aim at challenging the dominant ideology of TINA and offer an alternative path to what currently exists. As Fisher suggests:

emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.[9]

A programmatic synthesis

Stripping the status quo of its inevitability means departing from the realms of both ‘stalinist realism’ and ‘escapist utopianism’. Instead, the calls for autonomy, direct democracy, and social ecology should be perceived not as visions of utopia, but as a political project that has existed to a different degree in certain historic moments, or that is currently being fought for by grassroots movements around the world. As Cornelius Castoriadis emphasizes:

Utopia is something that has not and cannot take place. What I call the revolutionary project, the project of individual as well as collective autonomy (the two being indissociable), is not a utopia but, rather, a social-historical project that can be achieved; nothing shows that it would be impossible. Its realization depends only upon the lucid activity of individuals and peoples, upon their understanding, their will, their imagination.[10]

For this democratic and ecological project to be made into living reality, social movements and grassroots collectives must not be afraid of charting their own agendas, road maps, and programs. For too long has such strategic thinking been claimed solely by the so called ‘political realists’, while refuted in one way or another by the ‘utopians’. But in fact, setting our own agenda democratically and from below does not mean bending to the self-serving will of bureaucracy. It means synthesizing our theoretical visions with political praxis in the here and now.

One such programmatic approach should have a set of maximum demands, such as the total replacement of State and capitalism by a coherent and multilayered system of direct democracy where all get an equal share in exercising power, reflected simultaneously by a set of minimum demands that bear the spirit of the former and can prove as stepping stones toward our desired destination, such as revocability of officials, inclusion of town hall meetings as a legitimate and recognized source of power in local self-governance, initiation of citizen initiative from below, participatory budgeting, appointment by lot of office-holders, and any other proposal that seeks to empower society at large. In this way immediate and long-term goals are in direct connection with each other, reflecting a popular strive for autonomy.

Scandinavian social ecologists Eirik Eiglad suggests:

Communalist organizations must develop programs and thereby bring their philosophical approach from the realm of social analysis and theory to the realm of political activism. Programmatic demands can present radical municipalist ideas in a clear and concise manner. More specifically, those demands must range from our ideal of a future society to our most immediate concerns. In revolutionary theory this escalation has been properly designated as maximum demands and minimum demands, as well as the necessary transitional demands. 

These programs have to be flexible and adapted to local situations, addressing the pressing needs of the time by offering radical solutions to immediate problems. But although the minimum demands must be applied locally and regionally, certain maximum demands are required if the program is to remain communalist, such as the abolition of all forms of hierarchy and domination, the establishment of municipal confederations, and the implementation of a new system of moral economics.[11] 

The question of local context is crucial for avoiding dogmatism. Such a programmatic approach must be an endeavor of social movements and communities in struggle, and not of experts and ideologues. There cannot be one-fit-all blueprint, since this would mean to fall into the trap of bureaucratic thinking. It is up to local communities, through grassroots participatory processes, to determine what are the immediate steps, most suitable to their local context, that can get them on a path toward the establishment of a truly democratic and ecological society.

One such approach also asks us to reconsider the way we approach time as regarding social change. The dream of an overnight spontaneous revolution must be abandoned – every revolutionary event we know of has been predated by long periods of patient and passionate organizational work done by individuals and collectives who dared to challenge the order of the day and advance a political alternative. Because of this we cannot but agree with Jean-Jacques Rousseau that the citizen should arm himself with strength and steadfastness[12], as well as with Castoriadis when saying that everything must be remade at the cost of a long and patient labor[13].

A programmatic approach is also an indispensable tool for public intervention, as it offers movements and initiatives a coherent message with specific proposals and a sense of long-term direction that can convey to common people a conviction in a possible alternative and a motivation for praxis. Without such intervention into the public sphere nothing can be achieved, as social change in the direction of direct democracy requires large segments of society to begin mobilizing and organizing toward that end, rather than than small sects conspiring in secrecy. Being well aware of this, Bookchin insists that for one movement to become truly public it needs to formulate a politics that opens it to social intervention, that bring it into the public sphere as an organized movement that can grow, think rationally, mobilize people, and actively seek to change the world.[14] He further suggests that:

[W]e must ask ourselves what mode of entry into the public sphere is consistent with our vision of empowerment. If our ideal is the Commune of communes, then I submit that the only means of entry and social fulfillment is a Communalist politics with a libertarian municipalist praxis; that is, a movement and program that finally emerges on the local political scene as the uncompromising advocate of popular neighborhood and town assemblies and the development of a municipalized economy. I know of no other alternative to capitulation to the existing society.[15]

One practical example of this approach can be found in the Slovenian city Maribor. For over 10 years there has been functioning the so-called Initiative for Citywide Assembly (Iniciativa mestni zbor – IMZ).[16] It is focused on organizing and sustaining non-partisan, self-organized municipal assemblies in the city. So far, the initiative has around 10 assemblies in different neighborhoods that meet regularly and are attended by common citizens. It pushes for these grassroots institutions to be accepted and recognized by authorities as a standard form of communication and collaboration amongst people, giving them a voice on matters that affect their locality, as well as the right to exercise participatory budgeting. What they aim at is the real-life reclamation of power by local communities. This goal represents a synthesis of the long-term striving for direct democracy, where institutions of the people replace the bureaucratic state, with the more immediate one of empowering citizens in the here and now, by setting up the proper tools with which to begin having some input on local decision-making processes.

In conclusion, being a political ‘realist’ or seeking for a ‘perfect end-state’ both limit the scope of action. Either case leaves dominant parameters intact, seemingly unalterable. Recommencing the revolutionary project, i.e. setting direct democracy as a horizon, means abandoning the aforementioned logics, embracing instead the complexity and messiness of trying to implement it in the here and now. Organizing our communities horizontally and managing to draft collectively our own programmatic agendas helps us break the supposed juxtaposition between political visions of a better society and what is politically feasible in the meantime. It is through one such process that we can really challenge the status quo. As Aki Orr suggests,

Opposing oppression and exploitation without proposing alternative political system leaves the ruling system intact. The system acts, the opposition reacts. Those who struggle against evils of a political system but do not offer an alternative to that system are politically impotent.[17]

[1] Lewis Mumford: The Myth of the Machine: Technics and the Human Development (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc., 1967), p230.

[2] Mark Fisher (2010): Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books, 2010), p2.

[3] Michel-Rolph Trouillot:  Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), pp91-92.

[4] Michel-Rolph Trouillot: Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), p82.

[5] https://www.essex.ac.uk/news/2021/09/22/voter-turnout-is-declining-around-the-world

[6] Ian Parker: ‘Stalinist Realism Part 1’ in Anticapitalist Resistance [available online at https://anticapitalistresistance.org/stalinist-realism-part-1/]

[7] Murray Bookchin: Thoughts on Libertarian Municipalism in Institute for Social Ecology [available online at https://social-ecology.org/wp/1999/08/thoughts-on-libertarian-municipalism/]

[8] Jonathan Matthew Smucker: ‘What’s wrong with activism?’ in Beyond the Choir [available online at https://jonathansmucker.org/2012/07/23/whats-wrong-with-activism/]

[9] Mark Fisher (2010): Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books, 2010), p17

[10] Cornelius Castoriadis: A Society Adrift: More Interviews and Discussions on The Rising Tide of Insignificancy, Including Revolutionary Perspectives Today (unauthorized translation), p5. [available online at http://www.notbored.org/ASA.pdf]

[11] Eirik Eiglad: ‘Bases for Communalist Programs’ in Communalism Vol. 6 (March 2005) [available online at https://ecotopianetwork.wordpress.com/2010/07/29/bases-for-communalist-programs-eirik-eiglad/]

[12] Jean Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1998). P68

[13] Cornelius Castoriadis: Political and Social Writings, Vol.3 (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press), p48.

[14] Murray Bookchin: The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies & The Promise of Direct Democracy (London: Verso, 2015), p63.

[15] Ibid

[16] Alexandria Shaner: ‘IMZ: 10 Years of Citizens Assemblies’ in Znet [available online at https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/imz-10-years-of-citizens-assemblies/]

[17] Aki Orr: Autonarchy – Direct Democracy For the 21st Century (self-published, 1996) [available online at https://web.archive.org/web/20190517032506/http://www.autonarchy.org.il/]