A-Infos (en) Spaine, Regeneracion: Organizational dualism, class and revolution: some clarifications to continue the debate (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

In recent months, a debate has developed in various libertarian circles 
surrounding specifism, anarchist organization, the class struggle, and 
the possibility of revolutionary transformation in the 21st century. 
Capi Vidal's article, "Specifism, the Proletariat, and 21st-Century 
Anarchism: Traces of an Endless Polemic ," summarizes much of this 
debate, in which he also takes a position regarding the different 
authors who have participated in it. ---- I believe it's worth 
responding, not so much to add another chapter to an endless debate, but 
because some criticisms of Especifism stem from a rather particular 
understanding of what this current of thought is. And, at the same time, 
because some of the questions raised by Vidal, Tomás Ibáñez, Gustavo 
Rodríguez, Laura Vicente, and Alfredo Apilánez are perfectly legitimate 
and should be taken up by those of us who consider ourselves organized, 
social, and revolutionary anarchists.

It is not, therefore, a matter of proving that some are entirely right 
and others entirely wrong. It is a matter of clarifying concepts and, 
above all, of asking ourselves what it can mean today to be 
revolutionary from an anarchist perspective.

What exactly is specifism?

I would start with a fairly simple point: specifism is not a closed 
doctrine nor an attempt to literally reconstruct the anarchism of a 
hundred years ago.

The term is used to describe a current of anarchist organization that 
developed primarily in Latin America, especially from the experience of 
the Uruguayan Anarchist Federation (FAU), and which was subsequently 
influenced by both earlier social anarchism and platformism, but which 
developed its own strategic conceptions.

Their central idea is not particularly complicated either: we anarchists 
need to organize ourselves specifically as anarchists and, at the same 
time, participate in the social organizations and struggles where the 
popular classes are found.

This is often referred to as "organizational dualism" or "dual 
organization":

On one side we have the anarchist political organization, made up of 
militants who share principles, an analysis and a strategy.

On the other hand, there are social or mass organizations: unions, 
neighborhood organizations, housing organizations, student 
organizations, peasant organizations, feminist organizations, etc., 
where people with different political positions participate and who 
organize themselves around specific needs and interests.

These two expressions are not two separate worlds; a synergy and 
relationship exists between them. And the question is precisely how that 
relationship is established.

A specific anarchist organization should not replace a trade union, a 
housing organization, or a popular movement. Nor should it become an 
external authority that dictates what these movements should do. Its 
role is to intervene within them, organize, contribute proposals, expand 
their membership and involvement, learn from experience, and strive to 
develop a revolutionary orientation. This anarchist conception 
originated with Bakunin and his Alliance of Socialist Democracy and 
continues to be present in contemporary organizations influenced by 
specificism, platformism, or organizational dualism. Examples include 
Liza, Embat, Xesta, Hedra, and, to a lesser extent, FAI, Horizontal, and 
Redes Libertarias, which tend to prioritize cultural or concrete 
libertarian social projects.

Therefore, it seems somewhat strange to automatically identify the 
Especifist political organization with a party in its social-democratic 
or Leninist conception. A Leninist party aims to seize state political 
power and direct the process from within its own organization. 
Especifism starts from the opposite idea: "revolutionary transformation 
must be the work of the organized popular classes themselves."

Naturally, this doesn't mean that a specific anarchist organization 
can't develop vanguard dynamics. It can happen. It's a real risk if the 
dynamics and functions of organizations aren't understood, and it 
deserves to be discussed. But pointing out that risk is one thing, and 
quite another is asserting that the existence of an anarchist political 
organization necessarily implies vanguardism.

And what about the Platform?

I think there's a fairly common misconception here. It's true that 
there's a historical relationship between Dielo Truda's Platform and 
later currents of organized platformist or specifist anarchism. But 
current specifism can't simply be reduced to a Latin American re-edition 
of the Platform; it's more accurate to speak of a contemporary 
commitment to the organizational dualism of Bakunin and Malatesta.

The experience of the FAU and, subsequently, the elaborations of 
organizations in Brazil, Argentina and Chile developed their own 
concepts: social insertion, grassroots work, popular power, situation 
analysis, strategy, specific political organization, organizational 
dualism, etc.

It also makes little sense to use the existence of an "Executive 
Committee" in the 1926 Platform as proof that all contemporary 
specificism is a kind of anarchist party. Even today, those who identify 
with the Platform don't use such bodies. We can discuss whether certain 
formulations of the Platform were too centralized. We can discuss 
whether some mechanisms of unity and collective responsibility can 
generate bureaucratic dynamics. These are perfectly legitimate 
discussions; one doesn't preclude the other.

But we shouldn't confuse "the need for political coordination with 
authoritarian centralization." A federation can have coordinating 
bodies, delegates, collective agreements, and a common strategy and 
still function through direct democracy, federalism, and bottom-up 
control. In fact, contemporary specifist organizations explicitly 
advocate for this combination of political unity and federalism.

Unity does not mean dogma

Another common criticism is that specificism seeks to impose a 
"doctrinal line" on everyone else. And I think we need to make a 
distinction here, since a specific anarchist organization is pointless 
if each member does what they deem appropriate, regardless of collective 
agreements. For that, we don't need a political organization, but rather 
a network of shared interests.

If ten people form an organization to jointly develop a strategy, they 
will have to discuss and reach agreements. Then they will have to act 
collectively. That is political unity. It is quite another thing to 
claim that those agreements are eternal truths that cannot be changed.

A revolutionary program should be precisely the opposite: "a tool to 
guide practice and be able to be revised based on experience." This is 
how Black Rose, an anarchist organization in the United States of 
America influenced by specifism, expresses itself, defining its own 
program as a living document, subject to revision as conditions change.

And finally, advocating for an anarchist political organization, whether 
platformist, specificist, or in favor of organizational dualism, neither 
implies nor requires that other anarchist political organizations cannot 
or should not exist, even if they differ in their principles, analysis, 
and strategy. There is no incompatibility. I believe there is a harmful 
tendency in our circles to be more focused on what others are doing than 
on what we develop within the organizations we choose to join and support.

Does the working class still exist?

I have the feeling that the whole issue of the debate surrounding the 
proletariat is being blown out of proportion.

Here I believe that some criticisms from Tomás Ibáñez and others point 
to an important issue. We cannot use the word "proletariat" as if the 
society of 2026 were the same as that of 1867, 1917, or 1936. Although 
theoretically I may agree with Guillamón's definition of the proletariat 
and that the vast majority of the population belongs to it, the 
collective imagination in society, and even among those of us who are 
ideologically aware, does not use it or does not see it that way. It 
seems simpler to me nowadays to speak of a worker or another expression 
that serves the same discursive function, allowing us to be understood 
by "ordinary people."

The composition of the working classes has changed enormously. Labor 
relations, industrial structure, technology, global production chains, 
the role of services, reproductive labor, precariousness, migration, and 
forms of control have all changed. All of this is true. But it doesn't 
follow from this that classes have disappeared. Nor do I believe that 
the specificist position has to be that "the proletariat exists and will 
inevitably make a revolution someday." I would consider that a rather 
poor interpretation.

I would distinguish several issues here:

There are a huge number of people who need to sell their labor in order 
to live.
There is a minority that controls large amounts of capital, property, 
and means of production.
There is a relationship of exploitation and dependence between the two.
But this does not automatically imply that wage earners already 
constitute a conscious and organized revolutionary subject. That could 
be the case for those who form a sector that is transforming into a 
community in struggle. Likewise, a reactionary sector is forming among 
wage earners.

And I would also say that this very fact shows why specifism does not 
start from a pre-existing revolutionary subject. Rather, it seeks to 
answer how a fragmented, heterogeneous, and contradictory class can 
develop organizational capacity and become a social force capable of 
transforming society.

The class does not have to be homogeneous

When some authors speak of the "working class," we seem to immediately 
picture the male industrial worker in a factory. But a contemporary 
conception of class doesn't have to be that.

A nursing home worker, a delivery driver, a nurse, an Amazon worker, a 
precarious programmer, a cleaner, a migrant construction worker, a 
digital platform worker, or someone juggling several temporary jobs may 
have very different situations. But in all of them, there are common 
relationships of dependence on capital. And the point is not to deny the 
differences, but to understand them. That's why I'm also unconvinced by 
the opposition some draw between "class struggle" and "fragmented 
struggles."

Housing, gender, racism, migration, territory, social reproduction, and 
the environment are not issues that can simply be placed outside the 
class struggle. However, we also cannot reduce all struggles against 
domination to a question of wages.

An anarchist conception of social transformation must be capable of 
understanding the relationship between different forms of domination. 
Capitalism is not the only existing power structure. But neither does it 
disappear simply because we discover that others exist. And it is true 
that contemporary struggles are multiple and that there is not 
necessarily a single organized workers' movement that can become the 
center of them all. But saying that many autonomous struggles exist does 
not solve the problem of how to accumulate strength, since we can 
perfectly well have a constellation of organizations that respond to 
different problems and needs in the lives of workers. I don't 
necessarily see any problem with that; the question is how, both within 
and outside of organizations, we develop a strategy for overall progress.

It is interesting, at this point, to ask ourselves:

Who preserves the memory of the struggles?

Who develops a long-term strategy?

Who trains new activists?

Who are trying to connect the different struggles?

Who thinks beyond the specific campaign?

And this process of putting theory into practice, while applicable to 
both social and purely political organizations, usually originates with 
their active members. This illustrates precisely the value that 
proponents of specificism attribute to political organization: not to 
replace these struggles, but to help connect them and develop a common 
strategy through their members.

The network model proposed by Capi Vidal can be useful for certain 
things, from my point of view, especially for cultural matters. A 
network of autonomous collectives can be flexible, dynamic, and 
facilitate resource sharing. But a network can also have problems with 
continuity, memory, accumulation, collective inaction, and strategy. 
This is something many of us have experienced with the proliferation of 
anarchist coordinating bodies and federations of this kind-also called 
synthesis bodies-that the 15M movement spurred on the libertarian 
movement not so long ago.

It is neither useful nor positive to speak in terms of which 
organizational form is necessarily superior to another. That does not 
contribute to or help us position ourselves as a social force capable of 
influencing our society as we did in the golden age of the 1930s.

If we want to criticize specifism, or other organizational forms, 
whether network-based or synthesist, it is better to leave aside 
caricatures, abstractions and theorizing, because it is by getting down 
to the ground, to the concrete and practical, where we see what each one 
contributes and does.

So, what's this about revolution?

On this point, I partly agree with Tomás Ibáñez that we cannot 
necessarily imagine the 21st-century revolution as a repetition of 1936, 
the Russian Revolution, or any other historical event. We don't know 
what a future revolutionary transformation will look like. However, the 
idea of revolution always resonates, and therefore we shouldn't abandon 
it altogether.

We can learn lessons from the past and understand the processes that led 
to them: that long, non-linear process of transforming social relations 
and building communities in struggle, with their own culture and 
organizational capacity, capable of confronting the State and capital.

In this sense, there is no inherent contradiction between social 
revolution and concrete, everyday struggles. The key lies in working to 
ensure that these daily experiences increase people's capacity to 
organize, make collective decisions, confront those who hold positions 
of power, and build their own institutions.

This process of accumulation is precisely what some contemporary 
activist organizations call "people power." Black Rose in the US, for 
example, understands this people power as the long-term construction of 
independent, lasting, and combative movements that can both win 
improvements and accumulate strength for revolutionary social 
transformation.

The debate we should be having

I think Vidal is right when he calls for critical thinking, even though 
I don't share several of his conclusions.

Anarchism shouldn't have sacred texts. Neither Bakunin, nor Malatesta, 
nor Dielo Truda, nor the FAU, nor Guillamón, nor Ibáñez, nor the FAI, 
etc., have the final word. And neither does current particularism.

A revolutionary organization should be able to make mistakes, 
acknowledge them, and change. But critical thinking doesn't necessarily 
mean abandoning the concepts of class, organization, or revolution 
simply because they come from a particular historical tradition. It 
means examining whether they still serve our purpose and, if not, 
transforming them.

And frankly, with that premise, I think it would be more interesting if 
we reflected on:

How is the social majority that lives from its work organized today, how 
does it relate to other forms of domination, and how can it become a 
force capable of radically transforming society?

How do we build organizations that are strong enough to build capacity 
and libertarian enough not to become a new form of domination over those 
who fight?

How do we ensure that everyday struggles develop capacities, 
relationships, and forms of organization that make revolutionary 
transformation possible?

Because if we discuss practical matters, one becomes more aware of what 
separates us, what unites us, and where there can be bridges of 
collaboration, which in my opinion are more numerous than those that are 
not.

Julio F.

https://regeneracionlibertaria.org/2026/10/05/dualismo-organizativo-la-clase-y-la-revolucion-algunas-aclaraciones-para-seguir-debatiendo/
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