A-Infos (en) NZ, Aotearoa, AWSM: Polar Blast - Getting From Here to There: The Question of Transition (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

There is a question the anarcho-communist theory of freedom tends to 
leave unanswered, or answers only in fragments, and it is the question 
that sceptics most persistently raise: how do you actually get from the 
world as it is to the world as you want it to be? Prefiguration tells us 
that the means must be consistent with the ends. Historical examples 
tell us that people have built free institutions under conditions of 
crisis and collapse. The theoretical argument tells us what a free 
society would require. But none of this amounts to a coherent account of 
transition, of how a society saturated in domination, whose institutions 
are designed to reproduce themselves, whose people have been formed by 
the conditions they live in, actually moves toward something different.
The anarchist tradition's resistance to providing such an account is not 
simply evasion. It is grounded in a genuine and well-founded suspicion 
of revolutionary blueprints. The history of the left is littered with 
detailed plans for the postrevolutionary society that turned out to be 
either irrelevant to the actual conditions of revolution or, worse, 
templates for new forms of domination. The Bolshevik programme was not 
vague, it was precise, detailed, theoretically elaborated, and it 
produced the Gulag. The anarchist insistence that you cannot specify in
 advance how a free society will organise itself, that genuine freedom 
means people determining their own arrangements rather than having 
arrangements determined for them by revolutionary theorists, is 
philosophically serious and historically vindicated. However, there is a 
difference between refusing to blueprint the post-revolutionary society 
and having nothing to say about the process of transformation. And the 
anarchist tradition does, in fact, have things to say, they are just 
scattered across different thinkers and tendencies rather than assembled 
into a single coherent account. What follows is an attempt to draw those 
threads together.
The oldest and most persistent anarchist theory of revolutionary 
transformation is the general strike, the idea that the coordinated 
refusal of workers to sell their labour is both the most powerful weapon 
in the working class arsenal and the embryo of a new social order. 
Georges Sorel developed the most elaborate philosophical account of 
this, but the idea runs from Bakunin through the syndicalist tradition 
to the IWW and beyond. The general strike is not merely a tactic, it is 
a demonstration that production depends on workers rather than on 
owners, that the economy as a whole is held together by the cooperative 
labour of those at the bottom of the hierarchy rather than by the 
decisions of those at the top. A successful general strike does not just 
win concessions, it reveals the actual structure of social power and 
prefigures, in its organisation, the kind of voluntary coordination that 
could replace the coercive coordination of the market and the state.
Alongside the general strike, the anarchist tradition has theorised what 
might be called the insurrectionary commune, the moment of revolutionary 
rupture in which existing institutions collapse and new ones are built 
in their place. The Paris Commune of 1871 is the paradigmatic example:, 
an improvised experiment in direct democracy, workers' self-governance, 
and the dismantling of the bourgeois state apparatus that lasted 
seventy-two days before being drowned in blood by the French army. 
Kropotkin drew extensively on the Commune as a model, and the Spanish 
collectivisations of 1936 can be understood as its most developed 
realisation. The insurrectionary commune is not planned in advance, it 
emerges from the collapse of existing authority and the spontaneous 
self-organisation of people who find themselves, suddenly, without 
masters. Its strength is its organic connection to real conditions, its 
weakness is its dependence on a crisis that creates the space for it and 
its vulnerability to the organised violence of counter-revolution.
A third strand of anarchist thought about transition, one that has 
become more prominent in recent decades, partly in response to the 
defeats of the classical revolutionary moment, is the accumulation of 
what some have called dual power: the building, within existing society, 
of institutions that meet real needs and prefigure the kind of 
collective self-governance that a free society requires, gradually 
expanding their scope and legitimacy until they are capable of replacing 
rather than merely supplementing the existing order. This is not 
reformism, it does not accept the legitimacy of the existing order or 
seek to improve it from within. It is the patient, difficult work of 
building the infrastructure of a different world alongside the 
infrastructure of this one - workers' cooperatives, mutual aid networks, 
community land trusts, free schools, housing cooperatives, solidarity 
economies. Each of these is imperfect and partial, none of them resolves 
the fundamental contradictions of capitalism, but collectively and over 
time they develop the capacities, relationships, and institutions that a 
free society requires, and they do so in ways that are immediately 
useful rather than deferred to a revolutionary future that may never arrive.
These three approaches, the general strike, the insurrectionary commune, 
and the accumulation of dual power, are not mutually exclusive, and the 
most sophisticated anarchist thinking about transition has always 
understood them as complementary rather than competing. The dual power 
institutions provide the social infrastructure that makes a general 
strike viable and gives the insurrectionary moment something to build on 
rather than starting from scratch. The general strike tests and develops 
the capacities for collective self-organisation that dual power 
institutions have been cultivating. The insurrectionary moment, when it 
comes, is more likely to produce lasting free institutions if it emerges 
from a social fabric already partially organised on free principles than 
if it erupts in a vacuum.
What all three approaches share is a refusal of the Leninist model of 
transition, the seizure of state power by a vanguard party that then 
directs the construction of socialism from above. The anarcho-communist 
objection to this model is not simply that it has historically produced 
authoritarianism, though it has. It is that the model is structurally 
incompatible with the goal of freedom. A revolution that passes through 
the seizure and exercise of state power cannot produce a stateless 
society, because the exercise of state power develops precisely those 
habits of command, hierarchy, and institutional self-perpetuation that 
the stateless society requires to be abolished. You cannot abolish the 
state by using it. You can only build, practice, and defend the free 
institutions that make it unnecessary, and then, when the moment of 
rupture comes, extend those institutions rather than capturing the 
machinery of the old order.
This account of transition is less satisfying than the Leninist one in 
certain respects. It does not promise a decisive moment of revolutionary 
victory after which the hard work is over. It does not offer a clear 
organisational form, the party, the vanguard, the disciplined cadre, 
that can serve as the instrument of liberation. It requires the 
acceptance of a long and uncertain process, full of setbacks and partial 
victories, in which the outcome is never guaranteed. But these features 
are not bugs in the anarcho-communist theory of transition, they are the 
honest acknowledgement of what social transformation actually involves. 
History does not offer shortcuts. The freedom worth having is not 
delivered, it is built, slowly and collectively, by people who have 
decided to refuse the terms on offer and organise their lives on 
different principles, now, in the present, in whatever conditions they 
actually face.

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