The Communal Cult
The Communal Cult
One of the principles we need to carry into the liberatory society is anti-cruelty. This matters precisely because liberation requires us to confront people, institutions, and movements that may be actively hostile to liberation. We are going to encounter reactionaries, authoritarians, fascists, racists, queerphobes, misogynists, and people who want to preserve systems of domination. We need to be capable of […]
One of the things we have to understand clearly is that authoritarian socialism is not the same thing as liberation, and the existence of social programs under an authoritarian state does not automatically make that state socialist in the emancipatory sense. This matters because people often point to achievements such as universal healthcare or mass education as though those things […]
The liberatory society is the society organized around the idea that people should have real power over their own lives, rather than being dominated by governments, employers, landlords, corporations, patriarchal institutions, racial hierarchies, or any other structure that treats some people as rulers and others as subjects. When we talk about the liberatory society, we are talking about one broader […]
We have to reject one of the most poisonous confusions in revolutionary politics: the belief that a willingness to kill proves seriousness. Too many self-described revolutionaries, especially in the United States, have absorbed the deepest assumptions of American gun culture while imagining themselves to be opposing it. They reject the flag, the police, the Republican Party, the militia movement, and […]
A lot of people are attracted to Marxism-Leninism because authoritarian systems can look effective from the outside. They can build quickly, move resources quickly, reorganize cities quickly, punish corruption quickly, and carry out enormous projects without spending years asking whether everybody affected agrees. That speed can be mistaken for liberation. But there is a huge difference between getting something done […]
I have been thinking a lot about how genuinely social-revolutionary communalism, libertarian municipalism, and democratic confederalism actually are. They do not just ask for a kinder version of the present world. They ask us to imagine a society that exists after capitalism, after domination, after the centralized state, after hierarchy has stopped being treated as the natural structure of human […]
Many people misunderstand the differences between a commentator, an activist, a politician, and a philosopher, especially when discussing socialist ideas, and this confusion leads to unfair expectations about how each type of figure should behave. A commentator is someone who analyzes, interprets, or communicates ideas to the public shaping discourse but not necessarily organizing or legislating; figures like Bhaskar Sunkara […]
