Part 1, Chapter 3 : Post-Left Anarchism, Open Marxism and ‘New’ Autonomist Social Movements in Latin America: Convergence through the praxis of rebel subjects

Post-Left Anarchism, Open Marxism and ‘New’ Autonomist Social Movements in Latin America: Convergence through the praxis of rebel subjects

Sara C. Motta

This paper addresses the question of the convergence between the anarchist and Marxist traditions arguing that the practices of Latin America’s autonomist social movements demonstrates the strengths and weaknesses of Post left autonomy and Open Marxism offering the possibility of a productive convergence through praxis. It argues that many autonomist Latin American social movements are overcoming this dualism and in the process practicing ‘creative destruction’[169] of reified conceptual and political categories in order to create an emapncipatory epistemology as lived practice. The implications of this type of emapncipatory theory construction for academics committed to furthering social justice are immense as they suggest a paradigmatic shift[170] in our understanding of the nature of radical theory and of the subjectivity of the revolutionary academic. Crucially this moves ‘us’ beyond questions of the content of theory to questions of the process of theorizing.

The significance of asking questions about how knowledge is made, whose knowledge is made visible and how this relates to processes of social and political transformation are of central importance at this political conjuncture. This is because for many in the Global South and increasingly Global North, ‘the sphere of political representation has come to a close’ (CI, 23). People are no longer content for things to be done for them, feelings to be felt for them, politics organized for them, life lived for them.

Much of the 20^th century was a political and historical terrain in which a representational understanding of social and political transformation was hegemonic. This terrain is now unraveling as the failures of vanguardist revolutionary politics to bring about social transformation and of liberal democracy and liberal markets to bring about meaningful inclusion are ever more intensely experienced by the world’s poor and excluded. As Neka of the MTD Solano expresses, ‘I think there was a very important break with traditional politics and political issues, and it is precisely related to all this. We’ve been through a lot of different organizational practices, lots of experience and what we’ve finally learned is that we can build up better projects without leaders. We don’t need anyone speaking on our behalf; we all can be voices and express every single thing. They’re our problems and it’s our decisions to solve them. The fact that we have education, popular education, as a central axis of our project, allowed us to open space for discussion and thought, to start building up new social relations, to deeply know each other, so we could feel we are all part of everything we are building. Getting back our dignity depends only on ourselves and not on a boss or anyone else imposing on us a way to live’ (Neka, Dissent 61)

This nonrepresentational understanding of social transformation has implications for revolutionary academics of both the anarchist and Marxist orientation. This is because in general it was assumed that the theory of social change is produced by great thinkers who are able to orientate and guide the politics of the masses out of their concrete and often parochial world views. Theoretical abstraction was thought to occur away from the lived experience of political struggle, and radical academic or political theorization the domain of the ‘educated’ (formal and informal). This paradigm of theoretical production is embedded within a representational understanding of the relationship between theory and political practice in which there is a division of labor between doers and thinkers, intellectual labor and practical labor. Such a framework of practice is both alienating and alienated, presenting knowledge as the product of isolated individuals, produced in textual form as an object to be consumed by the masses.

Post-left anarchism and open Marxism are strands of anarchist and Marxist thought which are concerned with the creation of a post-representational politics. They ask questions about what is to be done and what needs to be known in order to create such social transformation. The resolution to their questions and the place in which there is a convergence in their desires and analysis is to be found, I argue, in the autonomist social movements of Latin America, for this paper particularly the Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados de Solano (MTD Solano, Unemployed Workers Movements Solano) of Argentina and Comite de Tierra Urbana (CTUs, Urban Land Committees) of Venezuela.

As the Invisible Committee argue, ‘What we mean by the party of insurgents is the sketching out of a completely other composition, an other side of reality, which from Greece to the French banlieues is seeking its consistency...What this way is being over is not various ways of managing society, but irreducible and irreconcilable ideas of happiness and their worlds.’ And as Werner Bonefeld states in the most recent edition of Open Marxist analysis, ‘We have to attain a conception of realism that knows how to dream and sing, and dance. Imaginative realism is not just an art-form — it is subversion in practice.This volume is dedicated to the communist individual, her imagination and subversive cunning and reason. It is about the beauty of human values — freedom and equality of individual human needs, human dignity and respect, solidarity and collectivity, affection and warmth, democracy and social autonomy. And it is about subversive knowledge, what do we have to know to prevent misery’

The methodology used in this piece will be one of dialogue. In attempting to open up a dialogue between post-left anarchism, open Marxism and the autonomist social movements in Latin America I hope that I can contribute to the systematization of our understanding of the nature of emapncipatory theory of a post-representational political practice. I organize this dialogue in terms of an identification of the strengths and weaknesses of post left anarchy and Open Marxism to then suggest how movement theorizing can move beyond their weaknesses whilst retaining their strengths

Post-left anarchy

Post-left anarchy (they usually avoid the “ism”) is a grouping of perspectives within anarchist theory which in addition to rejecting the state, capitalism and social hierarchies (hence being “post-left” rather than simply “anti-left”), also reject a number of hierarchical aspects and dispositions alleged to exist in leftism (socialist and communist movements) and in leftist anarchism (e.g. anarcho-communism, anarcho-syndicalism, platformism). Whilst theoretically anti-definition, liberation is usually treated in terms of the liberation of desire, difference and immediacy, rather than the liberation of a fixed essence or a particular group/entity.

Perhaps a ‘foundational’ text is “From Politics to Life” by Wolfi Landstreicher. Here the key elements that distinguish post left anarchy from in traditional leftism are: “revolutionary struggle is not a program” but a struggle for reappropriation of “the totality of life” — hence “anti-political” (in the sense of alienation of political from social) and against alienation of struggles from day-to-day life; rejection of representational organization; emphasis on quality over quantity; radical rupture instead of politics of demand; rejection of historical teleology and related idea of progress; prefigurative (not teleological) model of change; rejection of “identity politics” (reduction of people to identities); rejection of “collectivism” defined as “subordination of the individual to the group” and a rejection of “ideology” (Stirnerian spooks)

The piece I have chosen is topical and recent and fits into the category of post-left anarchy. It is the ‘Coming Insurrection’ by the Invisible Committee (IV). They embody the anti-representational understanding of transformation which rejects party lines, fixed ideologies and revolutionary leaderships and they also focus on unmediated desire (individual and collective) as a form of constructing the type of alternative way of living and loving that they aim to construct. Thus for the IV old politics of left and right represents ‘the same nothingness striking the pose of an emperor or a savoir, the same sales assistants adjusting their discourse according to the findings of the latest surveys.Nothing we’ve been shown is adequate to the situation.the breach between politics and the political has widened.’

However their understanding of social transformation as a process of liberating desire moves beyond the sometimes immediatist spontaneous focus of other post-left anarchy such as Bey’s immediatism and instead argues for the organization of communes in which the division between end and means, between the ideal society and the present is ruptured in collective doing and being. As they argue ‘the past has given us far too many bad answers for us not to see that the mistakes were in the questions themselves. There is no need to choose between the fetishism of spontaneity and organizational control; between the ‘come one, come all’ of activist networks and discipline in hierarchy; between acting desperately now and waiting desperately for later; between bracketing that which is to be lived and experimented in the name of a paradise that seems more and more like the hell the longer it is put off, and repeating, with a corpse-filled mouth that planting carrots is enough to dispel this nightmare.’

The rejection of vangaurdism in social transformation and the division of labor between thinkers and doers that accompanies such an understanding is manifested in a clear rejection of organization but not self-organizing. As they argue, ‘organizations are obstacles to organizing themselves. In truth there is no gap between what we are, what we do, and what we are becoming. Organizations — political or labor, fascist or anarchist — always begin by separating, practically, these aspects of existence. It’s then easy for them to present their idiotic formalism as the sole remedy to this separation.’

Separation of thought and action, of ourselves from our creative capacities is a constant theme. One which helps us understand how domination is understood as not something merely out there but inside, manifesting itself in alienation of ourselves from our selves. As they argue, ‘I am what I am. My body belongs to me. I am me, you are you, and something’s wrong. Mass personalization. Individualization of all conditions — life, work misery. Diffuse schizophrenics. Rampant depression...We treat ourselves like a boring box office. We’ve become our own representatives in a strange commerce, guarantor of a personalization that feels, in the end, more like an amputation.’

The individual internalization of processes of alienation and subjugation of our selves to the machine of capitalist reproduction results in, ‘Sickness, fatigue, depression [which] can be seen as the individual symptoms of what needs to be cured. They contribute to the maintenance of the existing order, to my docile adjustment to idiotic norms, and to the modernization of my crutches...But taken as facts, my failings can also lead to the dismantling of the self. They tend to become acts of resistance in the current war. They then become rebellion and a force against everything that conspires to normalize us, to amputate us.’

Problematic is that this passage sets up a dualism between the subjugated and the liberated with it remaining unclear how we get from one to the other. There is the implication that there is a non-subjugated essence that needs to be freed, ‘.we have been expropriated by our own language through education, from our own songs by reality TV contest, from our flesh by mass pornography, from the city by the police, and from our friends by wage labor.’

This dualism can result in an idealization and romanticization of the ‘free’ to be found in rioting banlieues or the organization for survival of chanty towns dwellers. As they argue, ‘Whoever knew of the penniless joy of these New Orleans neighborhoods before the catastrophe ( Hurricane Katrina) , their defiance towards the state and the widespread practice of making do with what’s available wouldn’t be at all surprised by what became possible there. On the other hand, anyone trapped in the anemic and atomized everyday routine of our residential deserts might doubt that such determination can be found anywhere anymore.’

Conversely, it can result in a condemnation and exclusion of the duped subjugated lifeless pawns of the spectacle which can result in the formation of a moral critique of the subaltern ‘other.’ Both condemnation and romantisisation prevent a concrete engagement with the everyday forms of domination and resistance in the lived experiences of the excluded. Such an abstracted engagement with new forms of politics and popular organization is also not strategically engaged, as it disenables reflection about the contradictions that arise in the construction of ‘communes’

Such weakness in strategic thinking about how we go about building communes and transforming alienated practice into liberating practice is expressed in the ideas about knowledge and communal practice that are developed in the piece. The type of knowledge that is imagined ‘we’ would need in order to construct communes is conceived in traditional and instrumental terms, so ‘Street kitchens require building up provisions beforehand; emergency medical aid requires the acquisition of necessary knowledge and materials, as does the setting up of pirate radios. The political richness of such experiences is assured by the joy they contain, the way they transcend individual stoicism, and their manifestation of a tangible reality that escapes the daily ambiance of order and work.’ There is almost a transcendental understanding of the nature of the non-alienated subject, as if the very act of doing together will enable the re-appearance of the (essentialised) silenced subject. This removes any notion of struggle and politics from the construction of ‘communes’ and from the construction of the new popular subjectivities and practices that are the basis of such ‘other’ ways of doing and living politics. The building of non-alienated subjectivities and practices is a struggle, internal as well as external, and involves not merely the acquisition of certain skills and objects of knowledge but rather the making visible of ‘other’ subjugated knowledges and the making of knowledge differently.

When the subject of political knowing and knowledge is mentioned it is if by the very nature of these ‘freed’ people coming together they will spontaneously produce a new way of understanding themselves, their relations with others and with the world. As they state, ‘As for deciding on actions, the principles could be as follows: each person should do their own reconnaissance, the information would then be put together, and the decision will occur to us rather than being made by us. The circulation of knowledge cancels hierarchy; it equalizes by raising up. Proliferating horizontal communication is also the best form of coordination among different communes, the best way to put an end to hegemony.’

Post-left anarchy of the IV places non-alienated practices at the heart of social transformation, it rejects a separation between doers and thinkers, between means and ends, and between politics and life. It thus brings the human subject in her entirety into our understanding of resistance and social transformation. However, its conceptualization of domination and resistance falls into a dualism that becomes a barrier to concrete political and strategic engagement with new forms of living and making politics in the North and South. There is no bridge from here to there, neither in empirical narrative or theoretical understanding and so we are left with a pure free ‘us’ and an alienated limbless ‘other.’ The essentialised subject of resistance removes any notion of political struggle from the creation of such other forms of living and making politics which again does not enable the strategic discussion necessary for us to share, reflect and move forward with the creation of this type of post-representational politics. And finally, the conception of knowledge falls back into a representational understanding in which there are those that have made knowledge that becomes an object that we learn as individuals and use to practically enable either the functioning of our communes and/or the creation of a place of absolute otherness. Post left anarchy’s passionate poetry therefore misses a strategic and concrete fleshing out of the practice of post-representational politics and social transformation.

Open Marxism

In many ways Open Marxism can speak to some of these barriers to our strategic engagement with the questions ‘what do we need to do’ and ‘what we need to know’ in order to create a post-representational politics.

Open Marxism’s ability to more concretely engage with post-representational politics comes from its more complex and systematic conceptualization of the nature of domination in capitalist society. For Open Marxists structures of the state and market are perverted human forms; alienated human practices which veil the reality that political power and economic goods are actually the result of our energies used against us. Therefore domination is subjective (collective alienation). As Bonefeld explains ‘What then needs to be explained is not the relation between capital and wage labor in its direct and immediate sense but rather the social constitution upon which this relationship is founded and through which it subsists... The class antagonism between capital and labor rests on and subsists through the separation of human social practice from its means, a separation that appears to invest these means with independent power over the very human social practice from which its springs. Thus capital is a perverted form of social cooperation. Social cooperation subsists in and through the perverted form of commodity relations where human beings produce through their own social activity a reality that increasingly enslaves them to things.’

Therefore if capital is not a thing but a relation it is as the Leeds May Day Group argue, ‘the way we live, the way we reproduce ourselves and our world — the entire organization of the ‘present state of things’ as they are today.’ Then resistance is not about resisting something out there but rather changing the way we live, reproduce and the entire present state of things today. This implies a non-dualistic understanding of the relationship between domination and resistance, one in which each is internal to the other, which implies that the unfree are not out there but in here and that any form of representational politics will reproduce alienated human practice and a division of labor with thinkers and doers. Thus as Bonefeld argues, ‘The society of the free and equal or the mode of production of associated producers can not be achieved through a politics on behalf of the working class. Theory on behalf of the working class leads to the acceptance of programs and tickets whose common basis is the everyday religion of bourgeois society: commodity fetishism. A politics on behalf of the working class affirms what needs to be negated. The emancipation of the working class can only be achieved by the working class istelf.

Thus the critique of traditional leftism or vangaurdism is based on its replication of forms of alienated human practice in which the capacity to think and theorize is delegated to a select few on behalf of the masses. It is then reified in the form of tome of abstract theorizing and party doctrine in which the mass sacrifice in the name of truth as opposed to creating truth in collective praxis. Thus as Tischler continues, ‘Here the issue of form is fundamental, for it involves a process of abstraction (real abstraction) where form finally dominates and stabilizes the political on the basis of alienation. Predominance of the form entails reification. Class consciousness appears as a universal attribute of the party or the state; it is not the working class in struggle that forms the content of experience but the party as organization or the (workers) state as the collective consciousness of the working class. In this sense, the theory of class struggle has undergone a period of stasis, a stasis of a specific historical experience, which was canonized and thus achieved hegemonic position. The institutionalization of class struggle is precisely this. Institutionalism in the state form or in the party form replaces the self organization and self determination of the working class. In short, canonization entailed the constitution of a vertical subject’

Such a dialectical understanding of the dominated subject and their transformation through struggle into a free collective subject necessitates concrete historical engagement with working class politics in order to give meaning to concepts as tools of political development, develop theoretically engaged analysis and understand the contradictions of such struggle in order to engage in a strategically useful way. The new subjectivities and practices of communist woman are not there by the very fact of a coming together. They are forged in a struggle in, against and ultimately beyond such alienated forms of human practice. Thus Tischler continues ‘If collectivity is not a mere sum of individuals, of groups, of movements, but a kind of illumination (Benjamin’s) that gives rise to a new subjectivity and a new subject, then what is the element that gives meaning to it....collectivity is not an abstraction, but a real form of existence that is produced as an instance of negation/overcoming of the logic of separation upon which the rule of capital rests.’

This theorizes a way to build upon the abstract idealization and celebratory presentation of the liberated commune found in post-left anarchy of the IV. It suggests that only concrete engagement between theory and political practice will result in the formation of adequate concepts and understanding to move such post-representational politics forward in our own lives and communities. It also suggests that engaging with the contradictions and politics at the heart of such a construction is more politically enabling as it allows the asking of strategic questions by movements. However, the theorization of this necessity remains predominantly at the level of abstract critique. Thus whilst attempting to negate dominant understandings of the world, there is a lack of practical collective negation of the world. The producers of knowledge remain individual academics to a great extent abstracted from struggle. This paradoxically reproduces a division of labor between thinker and doer. It also perhaps points to one of the inherently paradoxical positions of university academics; they may be able to make visible subjugated knowledges and theorize the need for other ways of creating knowledge as living as opposed to reified but the very nature of their perfomativity as academics mean that they produce knowledge in a reified and alienating form.

Tischler’s work is perhaps the most embedded in political struggle, which is evident in his movement towards not just theorizing the dialectical interplay between movement practice and movement knowledge but also suggesting ways in which we might engage with these practices in a politically enabling way. Thus he argues,’ ...one can argue that revolution is reinvented by the radical social movements of our time. To reinvent revolution under the current circumstances is to change the meaning of words, to create a new language for naming radical change...The rebel subject creates a language that tells us that the desired change will no longer be trapped in the form of a vertically constructed power, but that it will be one of the self-organization and self-determination of the exploited and dominated.’ This suggests that the best strategic way forward is dialogue with such movements’ practices and theorizations.

Open Marxism helps us to theorize a more strategically relevant epistemological practice for the development of post-representational politics. It overcomes the dualism between the dominated and the free, conceptualizes the contradictory nature therefore of the construction of the commons, and accepts that such a process is a process of construction. This suggests the necessity of concrete grounded engagement and participation in the commons. They indicate that it is important to make visible subjugated knowledges, they also indicate that concepts and revolution cannot be theorized outside of such concrete grounded experiences of social transformation. However, the production of knowledge abstractly, but not concretely, negates at the same time as it falls back into the construction of reified individualized products of knowledge that engage from the outside with movements.

Post left anarchy engages from the heart of the subjectivity of some of the agents of the commons in the North and captures its spirit, humanity and desire yet it neglects a strategic and theoretical engagement with how we construct such a rebel subjectivity and practice. Open Marxism abstracts from the outside at once negating subjugated human practice and offering ways to think about how we might concretely construct such subjectivity whilst falling back into a process of reification which re-inscribes subjugation.

It is therefore imperative to begin not only to make subjugated knowledges visible but to think through post-representational ways of making knowledge. This involves moving beyond abstract negation to concrete negation and the creation of a living epistemology that can be a basis of the construction in struggle of a post -representational politics. It is, I contend, in the praxis of such autonomous social movements that a politically enabling convergence between post left anarchy and open Marxism that creatively destroys the reified categories of each can most fruitfully occur. Their praxis suggests what a creative convergence between an immanent and situated account of change which pays attention to complicity and subject-formation (Open Marxism’s strength) with an orientation to autonomy and radical refusal at a movement level, avoiding purely academic theorizing ( post-left anarchy’s strength) might look like.

Latin America’s autonomist social movements: The pedagogy of practice

Many of the autonomous social movements in Latin America are developing in practice a living epistemology that presents the possibility of dialogue in order to build upon the strengths and avoid the strategic and theoretical political weaknesses of post-left anarchy and open Marxism. Their practice is post-representational in which what we are, what we are becoming and what we want to be are combined. Accordingly, knowledge is not created from the outside in an individualized manner, nor is it seen as in an external relationship with practice. This involves a negation not only of traditional leftism in its political form, but also in its academic form. As Neka of the MTD Solano explains, ‘As we understand society, it is based on domination relationships, so anything coming from its institutions will be based on this same principle of domination. Education is education for domination. Same as the family. So when we propose social change we have to begin at the beginning and devise new relationships. I think this is the challenge. When we decided that we have to produce our own foods to struggle against the monopoly of food production, we understood that new relationships are born of this practice, through discussing all these issues. Also horizontality and autonomy, and all these things that are not abstract ideas or theories, but a practical issue and a process.’

This suggests the deconstruction of the subjectivity of the radical academic and the creative destruction of reified conceptual and theoretical deliberation and production. It points to a living conceptual apparatus and a theory that is part of everyday life, an overcoming of the separation between those who think and act, and a reuniting with our intellectual and political capabilities that are alienated from us in the form of specialized objects that we cannot reach.

However, the practice of these movements is not only a negation of all forms of representational politics but also the creation of new forms of living and being. The methodologies of practice developed help us think through how we construct a nonrepresentational, horizontal knowledge that enables the construction of new rebel subjectivities and practices. As Neka continues to explain, ‘In the production units we discuss the type of relationships we wish to develop, in this way a form of organization develops from the collective.the way we move ahead is based on agreement, before doing anything we work out together what we want to produce, for where and how we wish to achieve this. Only after all of us are clear we begin to work. We then reflect, in weekly meetings, whether we are achieving our objectives.’

This suggests that knowledge for social transformation is collectively constructed through critical reflection in the moment of political struggle. It suggests that such a living epistemology is embedded at the heart of struggle as opposed to orientating and making sense from the outside of that struggle. However, this does not amount to the making of ‘revolution in solely empirical or pragmatic terms’ rather, as the MTD explain, ‘We do have a project...but our project occurs at the neighborhood level with the people. Our analysis is more comprehensive precisely because we work in this manner.our goal is the complete formation of the person, in every possible sense.’

There are attempts at systematization of such forms of living epistemology, not as a guide and straight jacket of our practice but as a tool to stimulate ‘critical reflection as part of the struggle as a true criticism in motion’ (Tischler, 170). Perhaps paradigmatic of this is the work of the CTUs of Venezuela who based on the heritage of popular education and liberation theology are developing a methodology of democratic practice from which they are attempting to construct another way of producing the knowledge of rebel subjects. As Nora, a community educator of the CTUs explains, ‘If we want to talk about projects coming from below, then we can’t take the role of leaders who come in and tell communities what, how, and why they should do things. We have to create the conditions in which communities develop, in equality and together, their understanding of their situation, their analysis, their solutions. It is only in this way that we will break the old way of doing things.’

The CTUs were created in February 2002, as the result of a presidential decree (1,666). They now constitute one of most powerful and autonomous organizations of the popular sectors, with over 6,000 CTUs nationally. The original decree stated the need, in light of the illegal status of the majority of chanty-town dwellers, for the formation of Urban Land Committees based on local community assemblies that would coordinate and organize the struggle for the legalization of their individual property rights. However as Irma,[171] commented, “This process began as a decree. It is us that have made it real, have given it its meaning and content, through our struggles, our mistakes and our successes.” Thus, whilst initiated by the centralized government, it has created a context for the development of a praxis that escapes the boundaries of the decree’s original intent.

The CTUs’ immediate objectives were reached relatively quickly. By January 2003, over 1000 titles had been granted. Many of the CTUs’ founding members of La Vega had worked from the 1980s in popular education projects around culture and literacy and had been involved in struggles over access to water and education. From these experiences, an uneven political culture emerged, in which politics was conceptualized as community self-actualization based upon equal collective participation in the formation of identity and strategy. Therefore, some key individuals organized regular meetings to discuss problems in the community related to housing and environment.

However, during this period, problems of maintaining participation and overcoming traditional hierarchical relationships within the CTUs re-surfaced. Thus as Mariela discussed, ‘I am so used to rallying the community and the community is so used to me speaking for them that when we get to the assembly if I am not there they wait for me. Then when I am there they look to me to structure the meeting.’ In light of such experiences the CTU’s, via the OTN, organized an ‘equipo de formadores’; a group of individuals committed to using collective reflexive practice as a means of stimulating participation, the creation of emapncipatory subjectivities and the formation of identity and strategy from communities themselves. All the promoters are themselves from the communities of the CTUs and entered into a process in which they reflect upon their participation in said community together in order to develop a diagnosis and systemization of the causes of uneven participation and the reproduction of de-facto leadership.

The experiences of trying to create the conditions for community praxis have been contextualized in the gradual development of what the CTUs call a democratic methodology of practice. Such a methodology illustrates the epistemological form of knowledge production that is emapncipatory. The methodology works from the precept that communities are knowledge producers and that the role of the CTU facilitator is to create an environment for the creation and development of such knowledge. The ultimate objective is that all will be facilitators and able to generate the conditions for the production of emapncipatory subjectivities, knowledges and practices.

The steps in this process involve a facilitator, either from within or outside of a particular community linking with a CTU and organizing a local meeting in which to begin a process of collective reflection about the community’s political struggle. In the meeting a facilitator will begin with a number of questions which are discussed in groups; these involve talking about the achievements of the CTUs, the biggest barriers or problems that are faced locally and nationally, and ideas about how to overcome such problems. Points from each group are put up on sheets around the room and are then discussed so that a consensus is formed around the most important strengths and weaknesses and ideas about how to address particular problems etc. The process of facilitating this meeting is an example to community members interested in becoming facilitators themselves. The facilitators then work separately with these individuals in a process of critical reflection about the role of a facilitator, how the particular meeting progressed and how to conceptualize and understand why it is important to have facilitators. The meeting in the local community is ideally the first of many in which the particular CTU can develop a conceptualization of its political struggles and strategic understanding of how they wish to proceed. This process ideally occurs within and between communities to try and develop a scaled up CTU project and practice. The aim is to create the conditions for a systematization of experiences and the development of emapncipatory subjectivity within the participants so that they can understand the causes of the impoverishment they face, the problems and the successes that a CTU community has confronted and ways forward.

Conclusion

The CTUs are an example in practice of the type of conceptual thinking that creates emapncipatory critique upon the basis of a systematization of experience. Despite the challenges and uneven nature of this process, their self-reflexivity is evidenced by their reactions to the successes and failures of organizing CTUs. Developing dialogue with such movements is a way of learning about the methodologies of practice which are a concrete expression of the elements of an emapncipatory epistemology. Knowledge production is collective not individual, forged in the heart of struggle as opposed to the isolation of abstraction at a distance. Its validity is based upon its usefulness for movement struggles as opposed to its relationship to other theories. Localized political struggles have the capacity to combine the concrete and the abstract, the particular and the universal. This capacity is immanent in the lived experiences of such communities of resistance. The type of theory that is a result of such collective reflexive praxis forges projects of social transformation which attempt to avoid the alienated relations of power characteristic of twentieth century revolutionary politics and the practice of radical academics embedded within representational forms of knowledge construction.

Such a living epistemology creates new knowledges and suggests post-representational modes and processes of creating knowledge for such social transformation. It moves beyond the dualism between domination and resistance found in post-left anarchy via their grounded theorization of the parallel existence of subjugated and liberated human practice among their communities and themselves. It does so via its processal view of subject formation and the development of methodologies of subject formation aimed in their practice and outcome to create rebel subject (s). Such praxis moves beyond the alienation of practice of Open Marxism as knowledge arises immanently from the struggle to construct the ‘commons’ in every day life and not externally in the form of reified theorization. To post-left anarchy such movements offer a set of pedagogical practices which help think through strategically and political how to move from subjugation to liberation and in so doing construct rebel subjects and social relations. For Open Marxism they provide other forms of knowledge and other forms of learning and creating knowledge, suggesting similar practices to academics in and outside of the university space.

Such praxis also illustrates the need to deconstruct what was the 20^th century’s dominant practice and conceptualization of emancipatory theory and subvert, in order to move beyond, the subjectivity of the radical academic. It suggests recognition of our inherently paradoxical situation as academics in higher education systems wedded to the reproduction of alienated human practice and the reification of intellectual capacities into individualized production and textual objectification. A deconstruction of our role as knowledge producers as a moment of praxis, dialogue and critical reflection, a de-linking of ourselves from truth as abstract theory and a move towards the construction of truth as part of our collective struggle as waged laborers in our institutions, as teachers in our classrooms, and as researchers within communities. We may throw a brick in the window of normalcy with our critique and in this way conceptually negate social reality but at the same time we practically are complicit in the production of alienated knowledge and the subjugation of the living epistemology of the rebel subject. Being in, against and finally beyond the straitjacket of the identity radical academic is one way in which the convergence of the traditions of post-left anarchy and open Marxism can push towards the development of a living epistemology as part of the creation of a post-representational politics in all the contradictory spheres that we inhabit.