Activity

Responding to the twentieth-century failures of state-led political change, horizontalist movements instead advocate changing the world by changing social relations from below. They draw upon a long tradition of theory and practice in anarchism, council communism, libertarian communism and autonomism, in order to – in the words of one proponent – ‘change the world without taking power’.

If even ‘successful’ revolutions led to sclerotic technocracy and political repression in the long term, what then was to be the properly emancipatory course of action?

The problem is rather that folk-political thinking is content to remain at (and even privileges) that level – of the transient, the small-scale, the unmediated and the particular. It takes these to be sufficient rather than simply necessary moments

folk politics [...] often rejects the project of hegemony, valuing withdrawal or exit rather than building a broad counter-hegemony

Neoliberalism has failed, social democracy is impossible, and only an alternative vision can bring about universal prosperity and emancipation.