Reclaiming Class Unity Beyond Reform

Introduction

Every revolutionary century begins by rediscovering that reform is a seduction. The oppressed demand transformation, the state offers a compromise, and the people mistake movement for progress. Spain’s nineteenth century was an endless showcase of such betrayals: uprisings crushed or redirected, constitutions unveiled then undone, generals staging coups in the name of stability. From these ruins, the anarchist Anselmo Lorenzo distilled a truth that remains alive today: where political systems recycle power, liberation must come from the organized unity of those who produce everything—the working class itself.

The heart of the current activist dilemma mirrors that historical cycle. Popular anger combusts online and in the streets, only to be absorbed by parties or NGOs that operate as pressure valves for capitalism. Each social eruption, whether spontaneous or orchestrated, gets neutralized through incrementalism. To escape this loop, movements must do two things simultaneously: organize spaces where cooperation becomes daily practice and cultivate a culture that neutralizes the prestige of reform.

The thesis is simple but radical: class unity can be built only through sovereign spaces of mutual aid and collective creation that prefigure the end of both exploitation and authority. The task is to turn our community centers, kitchens, and workshops into laboratories of egalitarian life where ideology is enacted, not preached. What follows is a strategic exploration of how movements can embody Lorenzo’s vision—how to rebuild class identity from below, resist co-optation, and craft cultural narratives that immunize against the temptations of bourgeois reform.

The Bourgeois Loop: Why Reform Repeats Failure

Revolt Without Sovereignty

Every uprising that confines itself to political reform will be betrayed by the architecture of power it petitions. The Spanish First Republic promised emancipation yet collapsed into factionalism under military pressure. Workers briefly glimpsed the possibility of a society governed without masters, only to watch their assemblies subsumed under a parliamentarian logic built for capital’s endurance. The mechanics remain recognizable today: governments adopt the aesthetics of rebellion, institutionalize its leaders, then restore order by praising moderation.

This pattern thrives because rebels chase legitimacy from the very structures they oppose. Repression is expected; incorporation is not. The system survives by offering recognition at the precise moment when autogestion—the collective control of life by its participants—could gain irreversible momentum. The lesson: sovereignty cannot be won through delegation. Every reform that pauses the self-organization of the oppressed postpones freedom.

How Militarism and Bourgeois Interests Collude

Militarism is not just the roar of an army; it is the organization of society around obedience. In Spain, generals were businessmen with battalions. Today, militarism wears managerial suits and algorithmic dashboards. Both produce the same psychological consequence: hierarchy internalized. Bourgeois interests exploit this mentality by dividing the working class into functional castes—soldiers of industrial labor, soldiers of automation, soldiers of bureaucracy—until the idea of common cause is forgotten.

Resisting this requires exposing the ritual of domination inside every institution. When workers salute flag or brand, they reaffirm the myth that a larger order grants them meaning. The counter-strategy is to relocate meaning into mutual solidarity. A shared action, however small, can puncture centuries of programmed loyalty. The abolition of militarism begins when obedience loses its glamour.

The Reformist Trap and Psychological Co-optation

The smoothest form of control does not punish; it embraces. Reformism operates like a credit card: immediate relief, deferred cost. Activists accept small wins under the assumption that big wins will follow, yet every compromise buys off the risk that makes transformation possible. The gradualist dream hides a deeper corruption—the substitution of moral urgency with policy patience.

Political history shows this rhythm clearly. Germany’s Social Democrats once sang revolutionary songs; today they manage austerity. Environmental movements chase carbon-neutral branding deals. Radical feminism funds empowerment seminars inside corporate offices. The revolution collapses into professionalized bureaucracy. To break the loop, movements must abandon the metric of influence and return to the metric of sovereignty: how many decisions, resources and emotional energies have escaped the rule of capital.

Rebuilding Unity Through Mutual Aid

The Kitchen as the First Commune

Mutual aid is not an accessory to protest; it is its test. The kitchen teaches solidarity more effectively than any manifesto because cooking for others collapses ego into shared delight. When community spaces turn surplus food into collective meals, they quietly dissolve class distinctions. The activist and the unemployed mother, the student and the migrant worker—all stand equal before the stove.

Turning kitchens into communes, however, requires design. Menu decisions should be made by open assembly; finances published daily. Rotating culinary teams prevent hierarchy from reemerging. Meals must always be free or collectively determined by income. Transparency disarms suspicion, which authoritarianism thrives on. Such details convert charity into shared governance.

Consider the example of the 2012 Greek solidarity kitchens born amid austerity. Their ethic, “Nobody alone during crisis,” formed parallel governments of care. The lesson is transferable: when organized generosity spreads faster than state relief, people practice self-rule without permission. Food becomes a political language of trust that no capitalist media can counterfeit.

The Mutual Aid Hub as Strategic Infrastructure

Community hubs should mirror the ecosystem of survival: food, shelter, education, artistic expression and defense. Each node—tool library, print workshop, childcare circle—is both practical and symbolic. It says, “We can reproduce life ourselves.” When people realize this, the mystique of the market wanes.

Financial architecture matters. A solidarity escrow system—micro-contributions pooled weekly—can underwrite local struggles. Imagine a network where, if one workplace faces layoffs, automatic micro-donations flow from all connected hubs to sustain striking workers. This mechanism prevents selective concessions from fragmenting the class. Every victory must advance everyone.

Coordination across hubs can rely on digital tools that resist hierarchy. Federated decision software, for instance, allows decentralized consensus without central command. Yet technological sophistication must never eclipse embodied relation. Shared meals, face-to-face decision circles and cultural rituals are what transform cooperation from task into identity.

The Discipline of Maintenance

Mutual aid decays when glamour replaces grit. Cleaning the toilets of a cooperative center is a higher revolutionary act than retweeting theory threads. Maintenance demonstrates whether solidarity is genuine or theatrical. To prevent the drift toward spectacle, each member should periodically rotate through essential upkeep roles—cooking, cleaning, accounting. This is not punishment; it is pedagogy in equality.

Tracking success by participation depth, rather than audience size, inverts capitalist logic. When a first-time visitor becomes a steward, a new molecule of sovereignty forms. Gradually, such spaces birth a practical communism—unannounced yet undeniable. The ordinary becomes insurgent not by rhetoric but by repetition of care.

From here, mutual aid shades into culture, for every act of collective creation teaches that wealth lies in relationships, not accumulation.

Culture as the Glue of Class Identity

Story Maintenance and Collective Memory

A movement without memory repeats its enemies’ mistakes. Bourgeois ideology endures because it writes history as a sequence of respectable moderations. To counter that, communities must curate their own canon. Story maintenance nights—where workers narrate experiences, artists remix them, and children transform them into playable myths—turn oral history into strategic inoculation. Each retelling reaffirms that exploitation is not inevitable but designed.

Historical revivalism works when it connects struggle to joy. Festivals of remembrance should avoid nostalgia; instead, they should convert past defeats into cultural energy. A “No Boss, No General” festival that combines local art, reclaimed army rations turned into communal cuisine, and street murals linking wage slavery to militarism makes politics sensorial. The people begin to feel their unity before articulating it.

Counter-Narratives and Class Imagination

Bourgeois narratives depend on depicting the working class as disorganized, resentful, or petty. Counter-narratives must reconstruct the class as creative, tender, and intellectually sovereign. This does not mean propaganda posters but cultural infrastructures that project dignity through daily practice.

Create zines for children illustrating collective farming adventures, radio shows where factory stories become poetry, or neighborhood exhibitions where wage-labor tools are reimagined as artistic relics. Each artifact whispers: “We are the authors of civilization.” Progressive journalism may mock this as naïve folk culture; let it. Subversion blooms in what elites dismiss as sentimental.

The Role of Art in Preventing Co-optation

Art is often the first wing captured by capital because it feeds on recognition. Movements must therefore construct art economies detached from official approval. An independent print shop inside a mutual aid hub can reproduce revolutionary imagery faster and cheaper than any professional design agency. Musicians can refuse corporate platforms by cultivating local circuits of solidarity gigs and recording collectives.

To guard authenticity, cultural production should follow two rules: use resources held in common, and reward participants by contribution, not popularity. This transforms art into shared labor. It ceases to mirror the market and starts modeling the desired society. The result is not austere but exuberant; creativity thrives when liberated from competition.

Like the Paris Commune’s Federation of Artists, today’s movements can unite painters, coders and educators in a guild of emancipated producers. Culture thus becomes both weapon and refuge, defending the class from ideological fatigue.

Designing Unity Against Division

Healing Historical Fractures

The working class is not a homogeneous subject but a mosaic shattered by colonialism, patriarchy and nationalist myth. To construct unity, one must first identify where division has been profitable to the ruling order. These fault lines—ethnic, gender, regional—are not obstacles to erase but wounds to heal collectively.

A practical approach involves creating cross-sector assemblies with rotating, recallable delegates and transparent mandates. Each assembly must represent intersectional realities without solidifying identity into bureaucracy. Livestream sessions, publish minutes, and translate proceedings into all local languages. Visibility drains suspicion, which is the primary nutrient of militarism. Without secrecy, authoritarians lose camouflage.

Embedding Anti-Militarism in the Everyday

Most movements fail to notice how militarism infects their internal culture: rhetorical wars, hierarchy disguised as efficiency, leaders unaccountable under crisis pretext. To detoxify collective life, rituals of equality are essential. Begin meetings with collective breathing rather than applause for facilitators. Replace winner-loser debates with listening rounds that value curiosity over certainty. These gestures may appear small, yet they erode domination at its root—the craving to command.

Anti-militarism also means refusing to celebrate sacrifice. Martyrdom appeals to the same authoritarian instinct as discipline. Movements sustain themselves better through regeneration rituals: community feasts after actions, shared walks instead of endless debriefs, timeouts that restore empathy. Protecting the psyche is not weakness; it is strategy.

Immunizing Against Reformist Drift

After every surge comes the temptation of legitimacy: media praise, government invitations, grant money. Each contains a toxin. The antidote is public clarity about non-negotiable principles. Declare openly that the abolition of exploitation and the dissolution of coercive command are not distant horizons but current coordinates. Label any concession that fails to advance these ends as a detour, not a victory. This naming function will cost applause but save integrity.

Train members to detect the rhetorical signs of co-optation: when critics suddenly praise responsibility, when radical demands are reframed as symbolic, when strategy departs from collective consent. Regular internal reviews, not to police dissent but to realign intention, keep momentum free from bureaucratic hypnosis.

Just as important is laughter. Satire aimed at reformism can do more damage to its prestige than endless polemics. Humor transforms ideology into farce, disempowering fear. A movement that can laugh at temptation owns its narrative.

The Architecture of Self-Governance

Assemblies as Living Organisms

Effective assemblies are less about procedure than metabolism. They must breathe: gather, decide, decompose, metabolize feedback, and gather anew. This prevents sclerosis. To function, each assembly should operate with recallable delegates tied to specific mandates. Delegation without accountability breeds hierarchy, yet absence of delegation breeds paralysis. The middle path is rotation.

Digital coordination can support this organic rhythm. Platforms that allow real-time consensus without central servers preserve autonomy. Still, the flesh-to-flesh gathering remains irreplaceable. Embodied deliberation forges bonds that outlast connectivity blackouts. Trust is analog.

Federations of the Future

Once local hubs mature, they should federate regionally without surrendering autonomy. The model is the old anarchist federation or modern peer-to-peer networks: distributed authority, shared ethics, optional participation. Unity without uniformity. Each hub remains responsible for its priorities while contributing to collective defense and shared projects. Decisions of one assembly bind none but influence all through example.

Such federations can coordinate responses to repression, synchronize resource flows, and share innovations in mutual aid. Their greatest asset is speed. Institutions move by calendar; federations move by mood. In crisis moments, agility wins.

Economic and Psychological Resilience

Revolutionary ambition collapses without material and emotional security. Economic resilience arises from cooperative production—community farming, worker-owned service enterprises, and local currencies backed by reputation rather than profit. These initiatives free activists from dependence on the system they oppose.

Psychological resilience is forged through rituals of decompression. Festivals, art nights, mutual care circles and rest days are not luxuries but armor. Movements burn out when they mimic the capitalist obsession with productivity. Slowness can be insurgent; it prevents authoritarian urgency from hijacking purpose.

Through this architecture, communities transition from protest units to embryonic societies. The goal is not perpetual opposition but prefigurative sovereignty—a life already partially liberated.

Putting Theory Into Practice

Building class unity beyond reformist co-optation demands deliberate structure and cultural creativity. The following steps translate the preceding ideas into action:

• Transform everyday spaces: Convert kitchens, garages, churches, and libraries into cooperative hubs offering food, tool sharing, and education. Make governance transparent and participatory.

• Create a solidarity escrow: Establish a shared fund from small regular contributions. Automate release of resources when any node faces repression or economic need, ensuring collective defense.

• Launch cultural programs: Host storytelling nights, street festivals, and creative workshops that celebrate working-class history and abolish the prestige of hierarchy. Art becomes memory and motivation.

• Institutionalize maintenance: Rotate unglamorous roles such as cleaning and bookkeeping. This keeps the equality ethos grounded and inoculates against charisma politics.

• Set non-negotiable principles: Define explicit revolutionary baselines—abolition of exploitation and coercion—and evaluate all decisions by their alignment with these goals.

• Federate for scale: Link local hubs into flexible networks capable of rapid coordination while preserving autonomy. Share resources, strategies, and emotional support.

• Protect collective psyche: Integrate rest, laughter, and celebration as strategic imperatives. Resilient joy sustains rebellion longer than anger alone.

These measures couple material provision with cultural transformation. When practiced consistently, they teach populations to govern themselves, dissolving both dependency and despair.

Conclusion

Reformism promises gradual liberation yet delivers perennial dependence. The alternative is neither insurrectional fantasy nor nostalgic socialism, but disciplined experimentation in self-rule. Class unity will not reappear as a mass rally under one banner; it will grow from hundreds of small institutions practicing the ethics of equality until the logic of domination becomes absurd.

The future of revolution depends on activists capable of building kitchens as confidently as they draft manifestos. Mutual aid centers, federated assemblies, and cultural co-ops are not add-ons to strategy—they are the strategy. They transmute solidarity from sentiment into structure and culture into consciousness. Through them, we rediscover what Lorenzo knew: that emancipation is not delegated, it is lived. The question then is not whether this is possible but rather—when will you start building the first space where the new world quietly rehearses itself inside the shell of the old?