Liberation has shifted from structural change to symbolic defiance, weakening its transformative potential. Erik Olin Wright’s “real utopias” suggest that true emancipation erodes capitalism by building alternative infrastructures. The Communitarium Project embodies this, prioritizing durable, self-sustaining communities over episodic, performative resistance.
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Introduction
Liberation has long been a rallying cry for leftist movements, signifying the struggle against oppression and the pursuit of freedom. But, like
solidarity,
mutual aid, and
organizing, its meaning has become increasingly nebulous, often evoked in ways that emphasize
individual expression, momentary rupture, or symbolic resistance rather than
durable structural transformation. In contemporary discourse,
liberation is often framed in terms of
personal authenticity, identity recognition, or ideological purity, rather than as a process of
collective material restructuring.
This shift has profound consequences. While symbolic and performative acts of liberation are often necessary in oppressive conditions, they alone do not dismantle
capitalist enclosures, hegemonic control, or systemic inequalities. By contrast, Erik Olin Wright’s concept of
real utopias presents an alternative vision of
emancipation—one that focuses not just on
naming oppression or defying power, but on
eroding capitalism through prefigurative, structurally embedded alternatives.
This article examines the evolution of
liberation, its divergence from
emancipatory social transformation, and how truly liberatory action must move beyond
occasional, reactive, and performative gestures toward
sustained, structural, and communal projects of world-building—as exemplified in the Communitarium Project.
1. The Evolution of Liberation: From Collective Struggle to Individual Performance
Historically,
liberation was rooted in
material struggles against systemic oppression, closely linked to
anticolonial movements, workers' uprisings, and feminist, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist struggles. It meant not simply
resisting domination, but actively creating
alternative social, political, and economic structures that could
sustain liberated life.
Yet in contemporary discourse,
liberation has undergone several shifts:
- From Structural Change to Individual Expression- Where liberation once meant
overcoming systemic obstacles to collective flourishing, it is now frequently framed in terms of
individual freedom, self-expression, and identity affirmation.
- While personal liberation is crucial, its
detachment from collective, material transformation means that it can be easily co-opted by neoliberalism—turning liberation into a matter of
lifestyle, consumption, or representation rather than
structural change.
- From Strategic Emancipation to Symbolic Defiance- Many contemporary calls for liberation focus on
defiance and resistance, often through
spectacular or disruptive acts that momentarily challenge power but do not establish alternative structures.
- Protest, disruption, and withdrawal have their place, but without
prefigurative institution-building, they remain
temporary assertions rather than long-term counter-hegemonic strategies.
- From Durable World-Building to Episodic Insurgence- Historically, liberatory movements built
cooperative economies, community-based governance, worker-owned industries, and alternative knowledge systems—not just
reactive resistance, but autonomous infrastructures.
- Today, much of what is called liberation is
momentary and
unsustained, rather than
the continuous construction of autonomous, interdependent social realities.
These shifts have resulted in a
liberation discourse that often
valorizes rupture over reconstruction, individual transformation over communal reconfiguration, and defiance over endurance.
2. Liberation vs. Emancipation: Erik Olin Wright’s Real Utopias
Erik Olin Wright’s framework of
real utopias offers a crucial counterpoint to the weakened contemporary concept of
liberation. Instead of treating liberation as
an act of defiance or individual assertion, Wright’s notion of
emancipatory transformation is based on
gradually eroding capitalism by constructing viable, systemic alternatives.
In Wright’s schema,
emancipation requires three key strategies:
- Smashing (revolutionary rupture)
- Taming (regulatory constraints on capitalism)
- Eroding (building parallel institutions that outcompete and replace capitalist structures)
While revolutionary movements historically focused on
smashing, Wright argues that
erosion is often a more effective long-term strategy. Instead of merely resisting capitalism, emancipatory movements must
render it obsolete by constructing non-capitalist alternatives that sustain life better than the current system does.
This is precisely where the
Communitarium Project enters the conversation. Rather than engaging in
episodic, spectacular, or purely oppositional struggles, the project aims to
build durable, self-sustaining, and interdependent alternatives that
replace, rather than just resist, capitalist infrastructures.
3. The Communitarium Project: Prefigurative Liberation as Emancipation
The Communitarium Project represents
a model of liberation that is not just performative or symbolic, but structurally emancipatory. By prioritizing
embedded, long-term collective structures, it seeks to
erode capitalism through the creation of viable communal infrastructures.
Key Features of the Communitarium Model:
- Liberation as Communal Autonomy – Liberation is framed as the construction of autonomous, cooperative networks that meet material and social needs outside of capitalist enclosures.
- Liberation as Interdependence, Not Isolation – The Communitarium approach centers collective interdependence as the foundation of real freedom.
- Liberation Beyond Resistance: Parallel Institution-Building – Liberation is achieved through constructing material, epistemic, and social infrastructures that embody liberated forms of life.
- Liberation as a Process, Not a Moment – Liberation is continuous, evolving, and structural—requiring long-term investment in sustainable, alternative systems.
By shifting liberation from
ruptural, individual, and episodic acts to
continuous, communal, and structural world-building, the Communitarium Project aligns with Wright’s vision of
eroding capitalism through emancipatory transformation.
Conclusion: Beyond Liberation as Spectacle
For
liberation to be meaningful, it must move beyond
occasional defiance and individual self-expression toward
a sustained, collective process of world-building.
The Communitarium Project offers a concrete example of what this might look like. It is not just a critique of existing systems but an
ongoing experiment in how life might be reorganized outside of capitalism’s constraints.
True liberation is not merely fought for; it is lived, structured, and sustained. The challenge before us is not just to demand liberation, but to
inhabit it, cultivate it, and make it real.
