Draft Theses of Amtel
The first document of Amtel, a newly-founded libertarian socialist political collective
(Image credit: Julian Stallabrass, CC-BY 2.0)
a’mtel (from the Tsotsil language)
work that one does to live, to survive, and to thrive in the world; collective forms of work that are democratically defined and administered by the community
DRAFT THESES OF AMTEL
EPIGRAPH
Now is the time in which we truly make the world that we want, the world that we imagine, the world that we dream. We know how. It is difficult. . . . But if we don’t do it, our future will be even harder and there will never again be freedom.
— Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés
THESIS ONE
The crisis of our time is social-ecological in character—that is, the inevitable consequence of a capitalist system and a society built upon dominance and hierarchical social relations—and therefore can only be resolved through respect and recognition of all life on the planet.
Our assertion is that there can be no separation between social and ecological crises when these share the same root cause: hierarchy and domination. The development and perpetuation of hierarchical social relations—both among humans, and between humans and all other life on the planet—serves as the most fundamental mechanism by which life, labor, and nature are exploited; through which the working class is divided and imbued with false consciousness; and from which all things are subjected to the corrosive interests of capital. So writes Murray Bookchin in his essay “The Power to Create, the Power to Destroy,”
The basic conception that humanity must dominate and exploit nature stems from the domination and exploitation of man by man. Indeed, this conception goes back earlier to a time when men began to dominate and exploit women in the patriarchal family. From that point onward, human beings were increasingly regarded as mere resources, as objects instead of subjects. The hierarchies, classes, propertied forms, and statist institutions that emerged with social domination were carried over conceptually into humanity’s relationship with nature. Nature too became increasingly regarded as a mere resource, an object, a raw material to be exploited as ruthlessly as slaves on a latifundium.1
From this follows our belief that capitalism must be understood as the latest, most encompassing, most destructive form of hierarchy and domination yet conceived, and that this state of being necessitates its overthrow. “Capitalism,” again to quote Bookchin, “is unquestionably the most dynamic society ever to appear in history. [... it] never remains permanently in only one form; it must always transform the institutions that arise from its basic social relations.”2 But each new form of capitalism nevertheless retains a fundamentally amoral and hierarchical core of capital—one whose guiding principles, in the words of Tad DeLay, must always be for
[the] tendency of profit to follow the path of highest return, the pressure to lure investors with ever-greater profits quarter after quarter, the praise for unlimited expansion in a world of finite resources, labor exploitation and destruction of nature, the allure of cheap energy no matter the cost, and most of all the ability to discount true ecological and social costs that don’t show up yet in the price of exchange-values.3
There can be and will be no continued existence of our biosphere on such terms; our duty, therefore, must be to combat in all forms this amoral, hierarchical core of capital, and to replace our hegemonic capitalist economy with a socialist one.
The mere overthrow of capitalism does not content us, however; it is our belief that freedom will not be fully attained until the realization of a stateless, classless society free of hierarchical social relations and governed on the basis of libertarian socialism. Capitalism, to reiterate, is merely the latest, most encompassing, and most destructive form of hierarchy and domination yet extant; it is not the only form. Other insidious manifestations of these corrosive tendencies, less damaging but more commonplace in social and political life, must also be rejected and dismantled. Nor does the mere implementation of a socialist economy—or even the realization of communism—preclude us from exploitation, domination, and destruction of our biosphere. If we are to bring a permanent end to our social-ecological crisis, we must strive to flatten all hierarchies among humans; and in turn between humans and all other nonhuman beings too. We must begin to see ourselves as a part of the ‘democracy of species,’ as Robin Wall Kimmerer puts it, and recognize nature—and its constituent nonhuman beings—as equally deserving of our consideration in governance.
THESIS TWO
The abolition of hierarchy and domination must be accomplished through a program that directly democratizes social, political, and economic life—that is, all power of governance must be returned to the proletariat and be wielded by the proletariat (through neighborhood communes, tenant associations, workplace assemblies, and similar popular bodies).
Our assertion is that the abolition of hierarchy and domination can only follow from the protagonism of the proletariat. The elevation of the proletariat into genuine stewards of their own destiny, afforded through the “knowledge of how to govern as an authority,” is paramount to realizing any future society free of hierarchical social relations. But this knowledge of how to govern—in the words of Dylan Eldredge Fitzwater—“[must] never be held by a select group of specialists but must be shared equally among the people” lest we replicate hierarchy once more.4 A political existence where every worker participates in governance and is prepared to take a turn in a governing body—or is at least afforded this opportunity—must be our ultimate aspiration.5
Our duty then must be to reproduce socialism through institutions that not only democratically facilitate this protagonism—that make workers conscious of themselves as a collective political subject with the capability of changing the world—but also function as “permanent decision-making institutions [and] arenas for educating the people in handling complex civic and regional affairs.”6 In this context our foregrounding of the neighborhood commune, the tenant association, and the workplace assembly—rather than a party of the working class—is intentional. We agree with the assertion of Dario Azzellini that “only workers and communities, collectively assuming control of the means of production, can construct a new social economy leading to overcoming capitalist relations.”7
This is not to say there is no place for a party of the working class; in fact, one of our most pressing tasks as socialists in the United States is to realize the conditions that will allow a viable independent party in the first place. Only through such an independent party can we bring forth the conditions needed to elevate the proletariat into genuine stewards of their own destiny, much less to eventually abolish hierarchy and domination. But nor are we willing to myopically constrain our vision of society to the bounds of what is possible through such a party. Indeed, we argue the party-form is ultimately incongruent with a society free of hierarchical social relations and itself must be transitory. “Instead of having active, creative, imaginative, and dynamic citizens,” observes Bas Umali, the party-form, given primacy, seems only to consign the proletariat to the same bourgeois democratic role of “passive and mechanized constituents” strung along in a never-ending “‘leader and led’ relationship.”8 We must not settle for such a passivization of the working class; we invoke, in short, the slogan of the Assembly of Barrios: ‘We don’t want to be government, we want to govern!’9
THESIS THREE
The project of “democratic socialism” must be to gradually realize this program, and to prefigure such a society, from the bottom-up—that is, democratic socialism must take the form of a counterpower of socialist-organized municipal, federal, and confederal institutions.
Our assertion is that the project of “democratic socialism” is at heart the project of contesting, through the protagonism of the proletariat, what Kristin Ross describes as the “dispossess[ion] of our dignity, our social life, our time, the sense of mastery over our lives, the beauty and health of our lived environment, and of the very possibility of working together to invent our future collectively.”10 To speak of a democratic socialism, in our mind, must be to speak of a society “consciously built by the [workers], where the [workers], and not an elite, decide how they want to live and how to share the social wealth produced within that society so that everyone can live a full and meaningful life.”11 Our belief, ultimately, is expressed in another aphorism of Bookchin: “If state power begets state power, so too does self-governance beget self-governance.”12
We recognize the attainment of this society will not be an easy task; there is, most immediately, perhaps no capitalist class which has attained such complete hegemony as the one which governs us today. But we must make such an attempt anyways for, in the words of Subcomandante Moisés, ‘If we don’t do it, our future will be even harder and there will never again be freedom.’13 The duty of our party of the working class, then, must be to facilitate a socialist counterpower, a muscular collection of social institutions set in opposition to the state and capital through which the protagonism of the proletariat will develop.14 In their hands must be placed the power of the neighborhood commune, the tenant association, the workplace assembly, and other such institutions through which workers can become stewards of their own destiny. “Power that is not retained by the people,” notes Bookchin, “is power that is given over to the state.”15
This counterpower—and likewise the institutions which comprise it—in our view must be embodied through municipal formations that progress to federal formations and ultimately confederal formations. That is to say, these institutions must each be rooted in their communities but also cohere with each ‘rung’ of politics into a greater, more interdependent whole. Their decision-making, moreover, must ultimately and inexorably flow from the proletariat themselves through democratic participation within their communities. Delegates, where necessary for administration and coordination, must be “strictly mandated, recallable, and responsible to the [institutions] that choose them for the purpose of coordinating and administering the policies formulated by the [institutions] themselves.”16 Above all our goal, as Azzellini describes, must be the enhancing of the “capacity of the marginalised and oppressed to change power relations by means of processes of organisation, formation, and coordination for administering and determining their own lives.”17 We know such a thing is possible, for it has lived before in the collectives of Catalonia and the caracoles of Chiapas; what we need do now is fight for it.
THESIS FOUR
The urgency of our present crisis obliges that socialists use all avenues available to them to realize such a counterpower composed of municipal, federal, and confederal institutions—that is, these collective institutions and their support must be built through organized labor; tenant advocacy; political education; selective contesting of elections; and more.
Our assertion, to paraphrase Andreas Malm, is that the capitalist class is incapable of responding to our social-ecological crisis in any way other than by expediting it.18 So long as profit remains to be extracted through exploitation they will do nothing but burn their way to the end, and in so doing they threaten to take the world with them. Indeed, it would seem the capitalist class has left us with little but a Manichaean dichotomy: ‘transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.’
That ‘regression into barbarism’ has been the choice thus far—with results equally befitting this description—goes without saying. Warming continues unabated, and realistic pathways which limit warming to 1.5°C have evaporated. A dramatic change, in fact, is necessary to even avoid warming of 2°C or 2.5°C against the pre-industrial average.19 The future displacement of hundreds of millions—if not billions—seems already a foregone conclusion. Yet ‘barbarism’ has proven even more dismal for the natural world, which faces a mass extinction—the Holocene extinction—of such severity that it has been likened to the systemic extermination of nonhuman life.20 Millions of species seem threatened with extinction and thousands of ecosystems seem destined to unravel in our lifetime. Now ‘barbarism’ comes for democracy, organized labor, and the very essence of civil society; now it is increasingly a question of whether ‘something new will be or could be born’ at all.21
So wrote Murray Bookchin four decades ago: “In this confluence of social and ecological crises, we can no longer afford to be unimaginative.”22 If there is to be a ‘transition to socialism’—if we are to elevate the proletariat into genuine stewards of their own destiny—then we must free ourselves of any fastidious impulses which have constrained our organizing. Our counterpower must be malleable and multitudinous, ‘composed of different parts which maintain their diversity’ and yet still come together in the service of the same project. Our institutions must be parliamentary and extraparliamentary; willing to, without contradiction, challenge the hegemony of state power but simultaneously compete in elections to defend and reify our advances. Our task, above all else, must be to facilitate the protagonism of the proletariat by whatever means are available, such that the workers can end for all time this ‘regression into barbarism’ and attain for themselves a stateless, classless society free of hierarchical social relations. To do anything less is to surrender ourselves to the terrible chasm of oblivion, stained with the blood of man and animal alike.
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Bookchin, Murray ([1980] 1986). Toward an Ecological Society, p. 40
Bookchin, Murray (2007). Social Ecology and Communalism, p. 81
DeLay, Tad (2024). Future of Denial, introduction.
Fitzwater, Dylan Eldredge (2019). Autonomy Is in Our Hearts: Zapatista Autonomous Government through the Lens of the Tsotsil Language, p. 127
ibid, p. 132
Social Ecology and Communalism, p. 105
Azzellini, Dario (2017). Communes and Workers’ Control in Venezuela, p. 14
Umali, Bas (2006). “Archipelagic Federation: Advancing Genuine Citizens’ Politics through Free Assemblies and Independent Structures from the Barangay and Communities.” In: Umali, Bas, Pangayaw and Decolonizing Resistance: Anarchism in the Philippines (2020).
Communes and Workers’ Control in Venezuela, p. 42
Ross, Kristin (2024). The Commune Form: The Transformation of Everyday Life, chapter 3
Harnecker, Marta and Bartolomé, José, trans. Federico Fuentes (2019). Planning from Below: A Decentralized Participatory Planning Proposal, p. 20
Bookchin, Murray (1992). Urbanization Without Cities: The Rise and Decline of Citizenship, p. 277
Quoted in Autonomy Is in Our Hearts, p. 5
Graeber, David (2004). Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, p. 24
Urbanization Without Cities, p. 284
ibid, p. 297
Communes and Workers’ Control in Venezuela, p. 50
Malm, Andreas (2021). How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire, chapter 1
November 2025 update of the CAT [Climate Action Tracker] Thermometer
Hickel, Jason (2021). Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World, p. 9
Davis, Mike, “Thanatos Triumphant” (March 7, 2022). New Left Review
Bookchin, Murray (1982). The Ecology of Freedom, p. 40