Another Future

Everywhere, reaction, regression and destruction are at work. Built on inequality, on the monopoly of wealth by the ruling classes, the capitalist system and its agents at the head of states have no intentions of slowing down their folly regardless of the ever more serious crises that they generate and which, by now, are out of their reach. Deeply deadly, this system, based on the private ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and on the search for profit, destroys living beings and devours the planet to the point of threatening our very existence. It organizes, on a global scale, a generalized competition that fractures societies, throwing them against each other.

Only one watchword seems to prevail : the precariousness of living, working and social conditions. Methodically, the solidarity chains essential to the proper functioning of society, together with the rights forcibly taken, through struggles, from the voracity of the dominant classes are being attacked and destroyed. All forms of protest are repressed by ever-increasing violence.

In industrialized countries, authorities no longer even care to legitimize their domination through redistribution or the guarantee of public liberties. Social democracy is no more. The times we live in have given its place back to fear. The fear of losing one’s means of subsistence, when everyone is forced into social isolation. The fear that allows hatred of differences — the ultimate asset of a system that has been laid bare — to flourish in political speeches.

An abundance of possibilities

In the face of such a situation, there is an urgent need to build a radical change in society. Yet, our social camp is experiencing difficulties.

The crisis of legitimacy that is hitting those in power, rightly accused of representing only themselves and defending a system from which they benefit, is also weakening the traditional organizations of the social and revolutionary movement, which are struggling to embody an alternative.

But this legitimacy crisis is also giving rise to new mobilizations that reject old forms of organization and ideologies in order to demand direct and radical democracy. A thriving proliferation of both possibilities, and, lets face it, pitfalls, but experiments at any rate.

This demand for direct democracy, this rejection for delegation, this affirmation of power given to the grassroots, are also ours. But there is still a long way to go before they break with the electoral illusions sold by social democracy, which mask the promise that abandoning one’s capacity for decision making in favour of a few individuals would benefit everyone. It is also a break with the dictatorship practiced by authoritarian socialist regimes.

To this demand for direct democracy, we add the struggle against all alienations and oppression — capitalist, racist, patriarchal, religious... — without any hierarchy among them.
An organization useful to the struggles

We also assume our analysis that a formal organization is both a useful tool for struggles and a way of guaranteeing real democracy, through the implementation of collective frameworks.

We inscribe this organization in the libertarian communist current. But we are not immovably set on a dogma that would have been defined once and for all. Basing our political practice on involvement in social struggles, where we work and where we live, in line with the realities of contemporary society, with the evolution of class relations and domination. Drawing from the revolutionary, self-managing, anti-authoritarian, anti-racist, anarchist, ecological, feminist and trade unionist currents, past and present, we take inspiration from the experiences of all the places where the exploited are fighting for their emancipation. Without limiting our references. Without limiting ourselves, either, to the State borders, our fight echoes those carried out elsewhere and is in solidarity with them. It is part of a struggle that is international, and part of an internationalist project.

We know what we want

These are unstable times, and we do not claim to know all the answers to the challenges they pose. But we know what we want ; we do not need providential men. We know in what conditions we want to live, grow old, work, learn, love. Our struggle, detailed in this manifesto, is a struggle for a society in which cooperation would be logical and competition absurd, in which working would be interesting and useful, in which the arrival of a foreigner would be good news.

A society in which workers would manage their own activity, in which users would determine their own needs, in which people would not be oppressed because of their disability, skin colour, gender or sexuality, in which the planet would be neither a garbage can nor a stockpile to be taken advantage of. A society in which a few, the owners of capital, would not stuff themselves on the backs of everyone else, in which a leader would not be right against everyone else. A society free from capitalism and state, from racism and patriarchy.

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