The current international political climate clearly shows us how limiting the path can be when trying to bring about social change through institutional routes.
On the one hand, the new left-wing political experiences in Latin America have had little impact on actual political life in the countries where they have had a chance to govern. There is a particularly great challenge in sustaining long-term processes, given the dependence these parties have on the electoral processes where corporate lobbies and private media have the upper hand and their goal is toward achieving everything but fairness. Instead, these processes are used to topple governments. A good example of this is what happened in Brazil a few weeks ago.
In contrast, if you’d like to see how to get the government is not to get the power, have a look at the Greek government as of last year. This case is discussed in more detail in the following article: https://fair.coop/neither-in-nor-out-towards-a-socio-economic-community-of-european-peoples/ Meanwhile, within the Spanish state, election after election has accomplished very little. At least it serves as proof that in order to create parliamentary majorities, one cannot simply rely on social media networks.
When the 15M movement began occupying Spanish squares in 2011, it took just 30 days to turn the political view of several generations completely upside-down. The expected aftermath of this however, hasn’t been able to create a social-democratic policy program, in more than two years. In Spain, during the first year of the so-called cities of change, we have seen that the discourse and mood have improved significantly. Despite this however, where key decisions are concerned, due to our dependence on capitalistic systems and state hierarchies, we haven’t been able to create humanitarian measures against increased evictions or welcoming refugees. Let’s stop talking about structural measures.
In exchange for these minimal reforms, an entire generation of experienced and well known activists left the streets and have been immersed in an institutional dynamic which seriously limits their capacity to disobediently break away from established practices.
This reality is therefore very far removed from Murray Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism. When gaining municipal power, Bookchin proposed dissolving it and calling for a popular assembly. The 15M’s so-called heirs are instead sacrificing their compromise of disobedience in order to constrain themselves within bureaucracies and hierarchies within government institutions. It is a very tied up system.
Large-scale disobedience movements have not yet developed their profound capacity for action after leaving the 15M behind. A good example of what can be possible has been the impact of the PAH squats and occupations within the Spanish state.
The current international political climate clearly shows us how limiting the path can be when trying to bring about social change through institutional routes.
On the one hand, the new left-wing political experiences in Latin America have had little impact on actual political life in the countries where they have had a chance to govern. There is a particularly great challenge in sustaining long-term processes, given the dependence these parties have on the electoral processes where corporate lobbies and private media have the upper hand and their goal is toward achieving everything but fairness. Instead, these processes are used to topple governments. A good example of this is what happened in Brazil last times.
In contrast, if you’d like to see how a government could function without an authoritarian rule, have a look at the Greek government as of last year. This case is discussed in more detail in the following article: https://fair.coop/neither-in-nor-out-towards-a-socio-economic-community-of-european-peoples/
Meanwhile, within the Spanish state, election after election has accomplished very little. At least it serves as proof that in order to create parliamentary majorities, one cannot simply rely on social media networks.
Here are two strategic questions I’d like to leave hanging. Firstly, what is more feasible? To get more than half of the population voting for parties that questions the established order but never do anything significant? Or to focus on the 5% of people who question this order and can organize autonomously and disobediently, showing in practice just how to make change happen?
Secondly, how do we gain real power to change things? Can we attempt to reform an economy where the government itself doesn’t have wealth creation powers (thanks to the Lisbon treaty)? Or is it by trying to create a different economy, with new banking and monetary sovereignties?
Adding other perspectives, we can analyze how basic processes in different parts of the world can help a grassroots movement attain democratic autonomy. Zapatistas in Chiapas, and the Kurds of Rojava and Bakur are examples of groups that remain strong and determined, despite the fierce and violent opposition they face from the state forces year after year.
It is important to note that the most radical and inspiring social changes usually stem from external grassroots movements. In Europe, millions of anti-capitalists prefer to bang their heads repeatedly against the state parliamentary system, without getting what they want, and losing a huge part of their concerns and values along the way. A better use of their time would be to support the creation of self-organized initiatives that utilize real strength to transcend and elevate societies from the bottom.
The resistance movements against the system of neoliberal globalization started strong at the beginning of the century. Continued efforts have shown us that a better world is possible, and so during the second decade of the 21st century, we will construct this world.
Even in Europe, these self run initiatives, opposed to existing states, have not only triumphed, despite a huge parliamentary hierarchy in the latest years, but we also continue advancing and finding new challenges to focus on.
The Catalan integral cooperative for example, is a consolidated reality after 6 years, more than 700 projects with many thousands of participants. Other integral cooperatives and similar projects have been expanding especially to various regions in the south of Europe. Movements like community supported agriculture, worker run factories, and the experiences of community based economies, which create practices in which the exchange and the gift are more dominant than market forces.
These prefigurative realities, although incipient, are strengthened through online networking and making local contacts between projects mainstream.
There are thousands of social currencies used in practice, consumer groups, self-managed social centers, free and autonomous schools, refugee or paperless people’s solidarity groups, that defy the capitalist model and the dominant role of state law. It is a fertile ground for the extension of a movement that breaks away from the establishment, and is disobedient towards States, in order to build a new collective sovereignty based on self-determination and self-organization of communities of free human beings.
FairCoop was created to enhance the spaces of international collaboration (or to be more precise, inter autonomous and inter-communal). It is a global and multi-local ecosystem that contributes to the process of building another economy for another society. It shares principles of integral revolution, such as the assembly run nature, open participation, the non-recognition of states as legitimate subjects and therefore integral disobedience to that can empower the construction of other forms of cohabitation and self-government.
Faircoop recovers the principles of integral revolution as processes of radical transformation at the margins of the current system, across all aspects of life, and builds a coherent ecosystem of projects, resources and tools. It has the objective of facilitating the process of integral revolution in any part of the world, i.e processes where self-organization and democratic autonomy can be built at a local, regional and global scale.
Among these tools, Faircoin is a p2p based social currency that seeks to fund these self-managed processes, and to connect initiatives from alternative economies (from solidary economies to communal economies), reinforcing the work that movements are actually doing that usually happens at the local level. They are using and promoting social currencies. In addition Faircoin intends to update the technologies used in these alternative monetary systems, to make them stronger and more resilient from hypothetical institutional attacks.
It is time to make Galeano’s conjecture real: “Many small people, in small places, doing small things, can change the world” and apply it to some larger things, such as generating tools for the articulation of all those little things and apply methodologies that have proven successful to respect the diversity of all participants as the democratic confederalism that being an old form of political organization in places like the Iberian peninsula, now the Kurds are popularizing.
After so many efforts dedicated to the institutional way, what if we give a very big push to the path of self-management? You know what? Answering yes to this question you will go much farther than a vote. It means saying you want to make your life an example of the world you carry inside, ie mixing theory with practice. To answer yes to this question, is to enter a dimension in which we no longer depend on whether they are more than we are in order to succeed; whether we are thousands or if we become millions, we will rely on ourselves and how far we are willing to go to make our dreams reality. Do you dare?