How can we get free? How can we free ourselves, our communities, our environments, our societies? And what will this freedom look like? While the present moment holds incredible possibilities to organize for our collective liberation, there are powerful forces readily willing and able to summon all available weapons of repression to contain and suppress revolutionary movements. Our present civilization, argued Herbert Marcuse, always must defend itself “against the specter of a world which could be free.”[1] It is our task to give this specter an earthly form.

The question of freedom is central to all revolutionary movements. It is at the root of everyday struggles against white supremacist colonialism, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, the authoritarian state, and every other form of systemic oppression. But we have to ask, again, what will freedom look like? Often, the realities we each face constrain the ways we can answer this question, so we ask it in pieces: How do we provide for each other? How do we protect, nurture, care, love, and create? How do we liberate ourselves from the hardships of enclosure, exploitation, and dependency that are imposed on our minds, bodies, communities, and environments? How do we free our sense of freedom, so that it is not a set of individual and extractive privileges, but is instead the grounding for a communal form of abundance?

Where we stand today is the result of centuries of struggle between forces of liberation and forces of domination. Governments and corporations pour toxins into bodies, minds, and environments, creating an unsustainable world of individualism, disposability, and extraction that festers with antiblack, heteropatriarchal, and settler-colonial violence. The powers that structure our “civilization” have brought the entire planetary system to the precipice of ecological collapse, while at the same time preparing the ground for resurgent forms of fascism that exploit ordinary people’s frustrations by fragmenting the oppressed with xenophobic and antiblack sentiments. Imperialism—justified under the guise of multiculturalism and sustainable development—now increasingly must contend with forms of right-wing nationalism and white supremacy promoting a vision of the future in which outsiders of any sort are walled off by frightened and insecure attempts to recreate a mythic past of white, heteropatriarchal bliss.

As an individual, it can seem almost impossible to confront such massive forces of global devastation and reactionary violence. In isolation from one another, as individualized consumers, workers, voters, and families, it is easy for avoidance and apathy to close in and keep us from seeing that, together, side-by-side, we can turn our faces toward the storm.

“Revolutions are made not to get more (or, of course, less) of what we already have,” André Gorz reminds us, “but to get something altogether different which will put an end to conditions that are felt to be unbearable.”[2] The aim of social revolution is to succeed in creating a different way of life, one that can liberate the immense creative potential of a humanity united in its diversity. Social revolution aims to nurture new sensibilities about how life can and should be lived, and to establish the conditions for their flourishing. Social revolution is not just seizing power or tearing down the system, it is a passage between worlds.[3] We need analyses, visions, and strategies to guide us from this world to the next, based on an honest assessment of the material realities we face. Our values—freedom, equality, autonomy, solidarity—and the histories of struggle past and present, can help us chart a path toward liberation. 

[1] Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), 85.

[2] André Gorz, Socialism and Revolution (London: Allen Lane, 1975), 11.

[3] Georges Fontenis, “Manifesto of Libertarian Communism (1953),” The Anarchist Library, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/georges-fontenis-manifesto-of-libertarian-communism.pdf/.

CounterPower is a revolutionary organization committed to building the power of working and oppressed people, from below and to the left. Drawing lessons from past and present movements, we offer an analysis, vision, and strategy to build for social revolution in the heart of empire. We organize to dismantle the imperialist world-system: a system based on the fusion of capitalism, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and the state. This system is killing people and the planet. In its place, we want to build a free society where all people have full control over their lives. Revolutionary movements must build the “counterpower” necessary to overthrow and abolish all forms of oppression. We believe that autonomous organizations, from labor and tenant unions to councils and communes, are necessary to advance the struggle for liberation. With branches throughout the United States, CounterPower has more than a decade of experience helping to build the collective power and autonomy of workers and the oppressed. As comrades, we work together to build and practice revolutionary politics in our grassroots organizing, embodying the values of a free society in the present. We care for one another as we work to transform ourselves and the world around us.