Postleftism, metamodern communalism, and our departure from the inherited left

1) The Work of Liberation:

We want a liberatory society in which people govern the conditions of their lives, hold productive resources in common, and receive what they need to live with dignity. Freedom should reach into the workplace, the home, and the institutions through which communities make decisions. People should be able to challenge an administrator without losing access to a service, or disagree with a majority while retaining their rights and the means to change its decision. These are the commitments through which we judge our politics.

They also give us grounds for criticizing movements that promise liberation while reproducing domination. Revolutionary language doesn’t establish democratic power, and an anticapitalist identity doesn’t transfer ownership. A community can speak constantly about care while making belonging depend on obedience to its most influential members. The contradiction matters because people have to live with what the movement produces. Its reputation cannot protect them from an institution they have no power to challenge.

Our frustration comes from seeing political energy repeatedly absorbed by the preservation of an identity. Personal consumption becomes a measure of revolutionary worth. Public denunciation becomes evidence of commitment, cruelty a sign of seriousness, and an exciting fragment of news proof that history is finally taking our side. People learn to defend their standing within a group while the relationships governing their lives remain intact. The work of liberation requires them to acquire the resources and authority to change those relationships.

We need institutions that maintain homes, provide care, coordinate production, and protect people from harm. These responsibilities continue through disagreement and after an old authority falls. Leaving them unanswered leaves the future to whoever arrives prepared to take them over. We begin from the worth of beings and the responsibilities created by our relationships: the care, knowledge, labor, and living world on which our lives depend. Our sacred regard for those relationships takes political form through equal dignity, freedom from domination, and common stewardship. Civic standing belongs equally to those whose convictions differ from ours. Communalism gives these commitments a political form, while postleftism and metamodernism shape how we pursue and develop it.

2) Postleftism and Political Independence:

The inherited left contains incompatible projects. A democratic communalist, a Marxist-Leninist, and an anarchist who rejects binding public decisions disagree about who should govern and what freedom requires. Opposition to capitalism doesn’t resolve those disagreements. A shared label tells us little about whether people control their economy, whether minorities can defend their rights, or whether a governing body can be removed. Treating these as secondary disputes within one political family obscures the society each position would create.

Our postleftism breaks with that obligation of belonging. We judge commitments through their reasons and consequences, giving social ownership, popular self-government, ecological responsibility, and protected dignity priority over the preservation of a coalition called the left. We won’t surrender democratic authority to a party for revolutionary unity, abandon public government to a theory that treats every binding decision as domination, or excuse cruelty because its perpetrator possesses socialist credentials.

We remain anticapitalist because people should control the productive resources that shape their lives. Capitalism gives owners authority over investment and production while others must accommodate their purposes to obtain a livelihood. A considerate owner still occupies that governing position. Our socialism changes the relationship through democratic control and dependable provision according to need. Moving beyond the left frees us to reject domination even when it appears under socialist names.

We carry useful knowledge from earlier traditions into an independent project. Class analysis helps explain exploitation and economic dependence. Anarchist criticism exposes coercion and informal power. Communal histories teach reciprocal obligation and shared stewardship. We assess these inheritances through what they help people understand and build. No founder or authoritative text acquires a claim over our judgment because we have learned from it.

This also separates our postleftism from post-left anarchist approaches that favor autonomous networks over the lasting public institutions we seek. People need to meet common obligations, make binding democratic decisions, and protect dissent. Their authority over shared conditions must continue beyond the life of a temporary association.

Political independence gives cooperation clear terms. People can pursue a legitimate common purpose while disagreeing on wider questions, negotiating the scope of a campaign or the order of its demands. Their equal standing, bodily autonomy, and organizational independence remain secure. An alliance that requires silence about abuse or submission to an unaccountable leadership contradicts the freedom it claims to advance. Communalism states the political form we defend; postleftism gives us the independence to defend it without subordinating it to inherited loyalties.

3) Metamodernism and the Duty to Build:

We affirm that people can understand reality and improve shared life through reasoned, organized action. We also examine the power and exclusion concealed within claims of progress. Metamodernism joins these commitments in the work of building a better society and making it answerable to evidence, criticism, and correction. Commitment gives inquiry a purpose, while inquiry keeps commitment responsive to the world in which it acts.

Modern faith in progress becomes dangerous when an institution presents its preferred future as history’s necessary destination. A party claims to understand the course of development and dismisses opposition as backwardness. A planner announces an improvement while disregarding those required to bear its costs. We reject this authority to sacrifice living people to historical necessity. Progress must be demonstrated through improvements in freedom, care, and the conditions of life, with its direction open to public judgment and bounded by rights.

Postmodern criticism helps uncover the speaker’s standpoint, the limits of apparently universal accounts, and the power hidden within accepted categories. We use those insights to improve what we build. An institution claiming to welcome everyone still needs to ask who can reach its meetings, understand its language, and challenge its decisions. Discovering an exclusion creates a responsibility to change the arrangement. Criticism should carry us into reconstruction.

We reject postmodernism as a sufficient foundation for liberation because deconstruction cannot fulfill that responsibility. People still need housing after we expose the politics of housing, care after we criticize a medical institution, and protection against persecution after we examine the misuse of universal claims. Permanent detachment leaves these needs to existing powers. Criticism becomes politically disabling when it repeatedly dissolves the grounds for action without accepting responsibility for what people must live with afterward.

Equal dignity gives us a universal commitment; attention to people’s circumstances shows how to realize it. A meeting becomes more democratic when disabled residents can enter, caregivers can participate, and language ceases to exclude. We make the principle effective by changing the conditions through which people exercise it. Its imperfect application gives us a reason to repair that application.

The same discipline governs our pursuit of truth. A contaminated water supply remains contaminated when officials deny it, and an accusation remains false when a community repeats it enthusiastically. Political allegiance cannot supply the evidence connecting a claim to reality. We examine what was observed, why it supports the conclusion, and which alternative explanations deserve attention. This matters especially when a claim satisfies our hopes. Its emotional usefulness adds nothing to its evidence.

Experience and expertise deepen inquiry when people can examine the claims made through them. Someone living with exclusion often sees barriers others overlook; a specialist can explain constraints an assembly needs to understand. Their contributions should enlarge our collective judgment. Public education, accessible records, protected dissent, and independent review give that judgment institutional support. People need the means to investigate a failure and obtain a response. A majority determines legitimate public priorities, but it cannot make a factual claim true by voting for it. Knowledge informs what is possible; democratic authority determines our purposes within those possibilities.

4) Political Seriousness, Lifestylism, Performativism, Purity Culture, Anti-Cruelty, and Sensationalism:

Political seriousness means taking responsibility for the connection between what we advocate and what our actions produce. We examine who is affected, what resources are required, and which obligations success creates. A campaign should leave people better able to act together, and a public institution should fulfill the responsibility entrusted to it. A movement needs to explain how its methods develop the freedom it seeks.

Seriousness appears in patient teaching, reliable care, and the maintenance of common resources. It needs neither a severe personality nor an audience. A joyful gathering can help a community endure difficult work, art can make an experience intelligible, and friendship can sustain the trust cooperation requires. These relationships deserve support alongside the most visible confrontation.

Responsibility follows capacity, and care follows need. Illness, disability, exhaustion, and care obligations shape what people can contribute. We organize around those conditions while preserving everyone’s political standing. Continuous attendance cannot become a hidden qualification for citizenship. People unable to organize retain their right to protection and a voice in decisions affecting their lives. Sharing necessary work, training replacements, and investigating failures makes an institution stronger than relying indefinitely on one person’s sacrifice. An organizer contributes to liberation by making others capable of continuing the work and governing it themselves.

Lifestylism abandons this question of shared power when it treats personal consumption, identity, or withdrawal as a sufficient response to domination. Political achievement becomes something demonstrated through an individual’s way of life, while the people controlling common conditions keep their authority.

Moving from one privately controlled communication system to another illustrates the problem. The rules users encounter may change, but someone still owns or administers the infrastructure, controls its funds, retains its information, and decides who can be excluded. Democratic control requires users to acquire rights and procedures through which to govern those decisions. Changing where authority is exercised doesn’t transfer it to those subject to it.

Consumption presents the same difficulty. Someone can buy a less harmful product while remaining dependent on a supply chain they cannot govern. Someone else may lack that option because of cost, health, or location. Ranking their political worth through their purchases turns unequal access into a moral hierarchy. We should change what people can obtain and who controls its production, making less harmful provision part of ordinary life rather than a distinction purchased by those with sufficient resources.

Organized refusal gains force through what it can change. A boycott needs demands, coordination, and a credible connection between pressure and a result. Withdrawal from abuse has a protective purpose. A cooperative or workshop develops collective capacity when participants gain dependable resources and a meaningful role in governing them. We assess the action through that connection, which the language of separation cannot supply.

This gives prefiguration its value. We practice democratic stewardship through the way we organize now. A neighborhood kitchen can develop cooperation while revealing the property, funding, and labor arrangements needed to sustain it. Connecting such projects to wider organization allows people to rely on them beyond a small chosen circle. Communalism carries that responsibility toward a change in ownership and public authority, so the resources people need survive changes in fashion, enthusiasm, and individual availability.

Performativism carries the substitution into public expression. The appearance of commitment becomes its apparent fulfillment. A movement rewards the declaration, denunciation, or correct phrase while neglecting the organization needed to make its demand effective. Participants learn the signs of belonging and how to defend their standing. A forceful display receives recognition, while questions about resources, access, or continuity can look insufficiently radical. The movement preserves its revolutionary identity while becoming increasingly resistant to change in its own life.

We want speech to help people understand an injustice and act on it. Rhetoric earns its force by making the argument intelligible to its audience, including people who need convincing. Applause from an already persuaded circle tells us little about whether that work has been done. Recognition must also reach those maintaining services, keeping records, preparing accessible meetings, and teaching others to take responsibility. These contributions need material support and a fair distribution of their burdens.

Political expression gains substance when it commits people to something they can examine: an undertaking, the resources to carry it through, and an increased ability to decide or maintain something together. Repeating the declaration without accepting those responsibilities lets people experience commitment while avoiding its demands.

Purity culture reinforces this pattern by treating an uncontaminated identity as the highest political achievement. It judges whether someone has remained visibly separate from everything associated with harm, often ignoring what made that separation possible. People compete over the compromises others display while concealing the dependencies they retain. Reputation becomes the center of political morality.

We inherit a society in which employment, housing, medicine, and communication are entangled with institutions we intend to change. Responsibility begins by identifying what people can do within those conditions. Available alternatives, actual control, and preventable consequences matter because a constrained necessity differs from an avoidable harmful choice. Our demands should reach the people and institutions able to fulfill them, while our organizing expands that ability for everyone else.

We join harm reduction to structural transformation. We reduce avoidable suffering, make better alternatives available, and change the arrangements that make harmful dependence routine. Responsibility grows with capacity, so those who have the means to reduce suffering should use them. Understanding a complicated system should help us identify what can be changed and who has the power to change it.

Food ethics makes this practical. Animals have interests our convenience cannot erase, and we seek to reduce preventable suffering in their lives. People’s health, disabilities, and food access also shape what they can eat. We support achievable reductions, make nourishing alternatives available, and transform the institutions controlling production. An ethical commitment becomes more effective as people gain the means to fulfill it.

Purity culture obstructs that work by making difficulty dangerous to admit. People become afraid to disclose a need, request an accommodation, or acknowledge a mistake. The community loses information essential to care and correction. We want people to describe their circumstances honestly and undertake the changes those circumstances allow; public humiliation encourages them to hide.

Our standards address conduct and protect people. Harassment, coercive abuse, and discrimination require a fair response, with boundaries whose purpose is clear and whose use can be challenged. Those protections make cooperation possible and justify refusing an alliance that would subordinate the organization, excuse abuse, or sacrifice someone’s rights. A principled boundary follows from the freedom we are building. A purity test follows from the identity someone wishes to preserve.

Anti-cruelty applies this commitment to the way we exercise power. We oppose unnecessary suffering and its enjoyment as a political reward. Cruelty turns another being’s vulnerability into a source of satisfaction or control, and a revolutionary label changes nothing about that relationship. Our methods must develop the ability to end domination without reproducing it.

The desire to punish enemies can become an absorbing fantasy of reversed power while the work of providing care, governing production, and protecting rights remains undone. The former victim becomes the imagined master. We reject that destination. Overcoming an owning class means ending its control of the resources and decisions on which others depend. We don’t need to murder rich people to establish common ownership. We need to remove the economic and political arrangements through which their wealth governs other people’s lives.

We pursue nonviolent mass organization and democratic institution-building while preserving the ability to stop harm, remove an abusive official, or protect someone facing an immediate threat. Protective action must remain necessary and proportionate to its purpose, and its justification ends when that necessity ends. Organized defensive capacities stay under civilian democratic control, with independent review and effective remedies for abuse.

These limits matter because power trains its users. Normalizing humiliation and unrestricted retaliation teaches people to treat suffering as proof of victory. Practicing accountable restraint develops a different capacity. The unity of means and ends concerns the habits and relationships through which a future society is made. We cannot train people in unrestricted command and expect their acquired power to become harmless after victory.

Anger belongs within this ethical commitment. People whose rights are attacked have reason to speak forcefully and reject demands that their defense remain comfortable for others. We can name wrongdoing bluntly, confront an evasion, and insist on a boundary while preserving the humanity of those confronted. The protection of those harmed stays central. A victim owes neither soothing language nor compulsory reconciliation.

The same standard binds our loyalties. A government receives no immunity because it opposes another government we condemn, and an organizer’s contributions do not excuse mistreatment. We judge power through its conduct and the rights of those subject to it. Anti-campism follows from this consistency: we can oppose imperial domination and the repression carried out by a government targeted by it. The population’s freedom remains our purpose in both judgments.

Sensationalism damages the understanding that responsible action requires. It magnifies an event’s emotional force while obscuring the context needed to explain it. A dramatic number lacks a useful comparison, a recording omits the circumstances around an action, or a real failure becomes supposed proof that an entire system is collapsing. A true fragment encourages a conclusion the presentation has never established.

We examine the connection between the evidence and the claim. An observation needs reasons before it becomes an explanation, and a prediction needs evidence about the mechanisms that would produce the expected result. Political hopes cannot supply either. A report embarrassing a corporation or an authoritarian government deserves the same scrutiny as one challenging our position.

The debate about artificial intelligence illustrates the problem. Falling technology stocks establish that prices fell over a specified period, and a severe decline can reflect a serious reassessment. A screenshot alone cannot establish that a bubble has fully burst or that the technology will disappear. Usefulness, company profitability, and financial valuation need separate examination. A useful technology can attract excessive investment, and a crash can leave its infrastructure and capabilities in place. Democratic ownership still has to be organized. Rising prices or a celebrated collapse cannot accomplish that task.

Our response should give workers authority over deployment, communities control over infrastructure and ecological burdens, and people shared access to useful resources. The same standard applies across technologies and industries: investigate what is happening and organize around what people need the power to change. A favorable or hostile image of a technology cannot make those decisions for us.

Sensationalism also makes quiet achievements harder to recognize. Reliable maintenance prevents failures, fair complaints procedures protect people, and political education develops understanding before it produces an impressive event. We need to value those results and describe conditions honestly. A movement that accepts convenient exaggeration prepares for the world it prefers to describe. We intend to change the one people actually inhabit.

5) Communalism as a Distinct Movement, Our Separation from Anarchism and Marxism-Leninism:

Communalism joins popular self-government to social ownership, protected rights, and ecological stewardship. People should control the purposes of the institutions shaping their lives and possess the means to correct their administration. This requires a public order able to decide and act while keeping governing power among the population.

Murray Bookchin made the separation explicit in The Communalist Project, describing communalism as “a distinct ideology with a revolutionary tradition that has yet to be explored.” He centered popular assemblies, confederation, and majority decision-making. These commitments need a movement of their own because different answers to how people govern create different social relationships. Communalism cannot remain subordinate to traditions that reject its political form.

Government is the work of deciding and carrying out shared affairs. We use state to describe a separate ruling apparatus standing above the population. Bookchin’s distinction between popular government and a state gives us a starting point: place the necessary powers of government within institutions people can authorize, understand, and change. Public responsibility must remain the public’s to govern.

A commune is a political community rooted in a shared place. Residents possess equal standing while differing in religion, private interests, family arrangements, and cultural commitments. Their assembly belongs to the population, including those who never joined the movement that established it. Public jurisdiction requires a public mandate, bounded by rights protecting conscience, privacy, bodily autonomy, and dissent. Winning a vote gives a majority no ownership of people’s intimate lives.

Shared opposition to domination doesn’t resolve the question of that authority. Water, land, infrastructure, and ecological systems connect people beyond the associations they choose. Decisions about them affect residents who never volunteered to join the organization making them. Voluntary association alone therefore cannot provide a sufficient basis for governing their consequences. Common obligations must remain effective through disagreement.

An upstream enterprise that pollutes a river imposes consequences on downstream communities. Giving its operators an unrestricted right to reject every common rule gives them power over everyone else’s protection. Those affected need democratically constituted authority to restrict the activity and require a remedy, within a justified purpose and procedures open to review. Refusing to organize that authority leaves the power to impose harm in existing hands.

Our separation from anarchist positions rejecting binding public government follows from this need. Freedom includes the ability to protect shared conditions. Individual refusal cannot dissolve every obligation created by the consequences of individual conduct. People need a political form through which they can decide and act together.

We defend majority rule after fair deliberation, within individual and minority rights. Participants need notice, accessible information, and the opportunity to propose alternatives. When disagreement remains, a decision allows common work to proceed while the minority retains its freedom to criticize, organize, and seek revision. An unrestricted veto also exercises power: it makes inaction compulsory, including when others urgently need a decision. Seeking agreement belongs within deliberation; requiring unanimity gives one person’s refusal authority over everyone else’s responsibilities.

Malatesta was right to defend organization and expose the confusion of rejecting organizational names while retaining their functions. The question is how those functions become legitimate public responsibilities. Communalism answers through resident assemblies, defined mandates, protected rights, and confederation. Making these relationships explicit allows people to govern them. A group without official leaders can still leave its information, money, and agenda in the hands of a small circle. Written responsibilities and effective replacement procedures give participants a means of challenging that power without depending on personal access or goodwill.

Marxism-Leninism answers the question of authority through a party claiming to represent the working class’s historical interests. That claim cannot establish that workers or residents govern. An organization becomes a ruling apparatus when the population lacks an independent capacity to direct it, challenge its decisions, and remove those controlling common resources. Lenin described this relationship in Left-Wing Communism: important questions in state institutions were decided under the guidance of the party’s Central Committee. The party directs public life. Our socialism requires the people to retain that authority themselves.

Social ownership means democratic control of productive resources, investment, administration, and surplus. A factory does not belong to its workers in this sense when they cannot organize independently or challenge its direction. An economy does not belong to its population when a ruling apparatus determines its purposes beyond public correction. State title can replace a private owner while preserving the relationship in which people work beneath decisions they cannot effectively change.

Housing, education, and healthcare are public responsibilities to be fulfilled according to need. Providing them purchases no entitlement to rule. People retain their right to govern and criticize the institutions serving them. Nor does the promise of later democracy resolve present domination. When a leadership decides whether people are ready for freedom and controls every means of challenging that judgment, its transition has no independently enforceable end. Democratic capacity develops through its exercise now, and emergency responsibilities need limits the public can require their holders to respect.

Command and dependence train people to receive direction. Public reasoning, transferable responsibilities, and accountable mandates develop their ability to govern. We need skilled organizers who help others acquire that ability and make institutions less dependent on their continued presence. A contribution deserves recognition without becoming a permanent claim over public authority.

Libertarian socialism names a broad emancipatory inheritance; communalism specifies the institutions through which we pursue it. Worker control belongs alongside the authority of residents affected by production. Children, elders, caregivers, disabled people, and those outside employment have political standing independent of workplace membership. The economy must answer to the community while respecting workers’ knowledge, conditions, and authority over appropriate operations.

Cooperatives develop useful capacities, but competition still pressures isolated enterprises. Common provision and democratic planning give them a wider foundation. Reforms secure immediate protections; social ownership changes who directs the economy. We connect useful gains to a transfer of resources and authority that makes people increasingly able to govern their shared life.

6) Building the Liberatory Society:

These principles become concrete through institutions people can rely on. A movement should leave stronger relationships, common resources, and a greater ability to act. Its projects need a connection to public power, and that power must answer to the lives it serves. Communities gain meaningful freedom as people acquire authority over conditions they previously encountered as someone else’s decisions.

Libertarian municipalism develops this authority where people live. The municipality is a territorial political home; the assembly is where residents deliberate and determine policy. Democratic confederalism connects communities to fulfill responsibilities extending beyond their boundaries. Shared agreements establish which decisions belong locally and which require wider participation. Delegates carry defined, revocable mandates, and administrators remain answerable for carrying out an authorized purpose.

This authority must reach the economy. Workers and residents need control over public purposes, access, and investment. Decommodifying essentials removes their provision from dependence on purchasing power or an employer’s willingness to keep someone profitable. We organize the labor, materials, and maintenance needed to make food, housing, healthcare, and other necessities dependable, while protecting personal possessions, secure homes, and privacy.

A housing institution makes the work visible. Residents need secure homes, a fair way to report problems, and authority over consequential decisions. Workers need safe conditions and a voice in their work. Buildings require maintenance, budgets require scrutiny, and scarce resources need fair allocation. We have to organize and fund these capacities, with an administration people can challenge. A right becomes real when they can depend on its fulfillment.

Participation also needs material support. Accessible venues, suitable meeting times, childcare, translation, and understandable information determine who gains an effective voice. People unable to attend continuously need ways to remain informed and participate in consequential decisions. Professionals should explain technical constraints and alternatives so that knowledge supports democratic judgment. Equal standing must be something people can exercise.

Social ecology extends this responsibility to the living world. We investigate how ownership and hierarchy shape production, resource use, and ecological harm. Communities need enforceable obligations toward shared watersheds, habitats, and future generations. Local freedom gives no right to export damage. When a harmful industry must change, the transition must secure the lives of workers and residents while ending the practice. Their deprivation cannot count as an environmental achievement.

Dual power develops organized capacities that reduce dependence on institutions of domination and prepare a transfer of authority. A tenant organization turns isolated grievances into collective bargaining power. A care network builds dependable support and a claim to the resources sustaining it. A municipal campaign can open public resources to assemblies and make residents harder to exclude from decisions. Connecting these efforts carries them beyond the survival of each individual project.

We use achievable reforms and available electoral choices to protect people while building that independent capacity. A vote can help prevent a threat to rights, alongside organizing, education, and the acquisition of common resources. Our strategy should improve people’s lives now and strengthen their ability to pursue further change, with practical support for those facing barriers to participation. We reject accelerationism because suffering doesn’t organize democratic power. A crisis can exhaust communities, destroy resources, and strengthen actors prepared to impose their rule. People still need food, housing, and care throughout disruption, so we prepare continuity instead of expecting deprivation to do the work of organization.

The society we build must remain inhabitable through disagreement. People retain religious freedom, cultural difference, privacy, and room for harmless eccentricity. Common provision supports their agency. Fair procedures protect those harmed by misconduct, with independent review and meaningful appeal. Our institutions must survive the illness, departure, and mistakes of particular organizers, which means sharing knowledge, developing successors, and making correction an ordinary public capacity. Liberation continues through the maintenance of these relationships after a major victory has been won.