In order not to stumble while walking, we have to look at the ground to see where we are going, but we also mustn't forget to look up from time to time in order to stop and look at what is around us, and to assess whether the path we are taking is the right one. If it isn't, we'll know that we must change course, and will consider the paths followed by other people who are heading to the same destination. If it is the right path, we'll walk more vigorously, and with our spirit strengthened, and we will also be able to share the directions with others if they ask us to.
When I discovered the phenomenon of Integral Cooperatives back in 2011 - or maybe better to say that when I understood its essence and potential scope, which is not necessarily an immediate consequence of merely discovering their existence, I hoped that a good part of the radical social libertarian movements would join in with one of the most ambitious projects of popular liberation of the last 80 years - together with the neo-Zapatista uprising and the Kurdish experience - this also having the advantage of being a globally replicable project, with no geographical limits other than those of the planet itself. Few things could be more appealing to a revolutionary than a movement designed to help us to escape from capitalism, but as time went by, my expectations were largely unfulfilled.
In September 2013 I attended a talk at AureaSocial (a kind of headquarters of the Cooperativa Integral Catalana) on Civil Disobedience. In it, Martí Olivella, a well known activist for nonviolence, and one of the first conscientious objectors to military service within the Spanish state, theorized about ways to promote social transformation, varieties of response to conflict, and set out a series of five ascending levels of response - both in terms of scope and, as might be expected, also in terms of the difficulty of the task.
Having explained the five categories, we shouldn't forget, however, that they refer to concrete actions but social organizations are complex entities acting in non-uniform contexts, so they combine multiple actions rarely corresponding to just one kind, even while they might tend to prefer one way of working to another.
Those of us who are part, in one way or another, of the Integral Cooperative movement, of which FairCoop is a global version designed to complement the local implementations, believe that entering into dialogue with those who hold the political and economic power of an exploitative, unjust, patriarchal, and ecocidal system has been demonstrated to be an absolutely useless way to put an end to the unequal and oppressive situations in which we live. For example consider the following: "Ladies and Gentlemen of Goldman Sachs, you may not have noticed but...". To be honest, it's pretty funny just to think about it. The disparity in power between the parties is such that no negotiation is possible if we do not bring more powerful weapons to the table, metaphorically speaking.
We have also seen that public protest rarely works, and that if it ever does, it is always in matters of relatively little importance. There is no doubt that demonstrations can focus the public's attention on an issue that was not previously on the agenda of the the mass media, and that's positive of course, but how many people can remember when a demonstration ever changed something structurally important? Not even the most global and well-attended protests, such as those against the war in 2003, had any effect on preventing the American invasion of Iraq, and if they had, it would have only been until the next war, never forcing a change in the militaristic outlook of the United States or that of the vast majority of governments around the world. I don't want to say that organized street protest can never be useful, but we surely cannot hope that protest alone will solve things.
Equally, we do not believe that non-cooperation on specific issues can affect the system on any deeper level, even if it can help to resolve specific conflicts. We can stop buying products made with palm oil, and this can lead to an improvement in the future outlook for the forest flora and fauna of the island of Borneo, but the food industry will easily replace this ingredient with a new one, the cheaper the better, regardless of the consequences for the ecosystem where it comes from, and for our health, (and it may not simply be that the company is being evil in ignoring these harmful effects, but rather it comes down to a question of pure survival in a competitive capitalist environment where the one who least externalizes costs simply disappears from the market). The only non-cooperation that we see as sufficiently useful is one which can seriously disrupt the ubiquitous power of the capitalist system, and that is why we are dedicated to building an alternative with which to meet our needs as people.
For us, civil disobedience is not in itself a solution when it comes to facing the full extent of the problem which afflicts us: capitalism and its preferred tool, the bourgeois state - but we greatly recognize its value and legitimacy as a tool, and we actually are in favor of using it as a tactic.
And as you may have already realized, our main idea, the one thing that can really get us past the capitalist system and into a new phase, or rather - so as not to fall into delusions of grandeur - we could say that it's the one thing that could establish a secure foothold for us in this new phase that will inevitably arrive sooner or later - is the construction of an entire alternative socioeconomic system governed by principles such as self-organization, horizontality, cooperation, decentralization, free knowledge, and degrowth, amongst other things.
We are not naïve, we know that the difficulty of doing this is pretty great, and that we could pay heed to the many occasions on which similar projects have been attempted and where things haven't turned out well, but we think it's easier this way than trying to beat the monster in mortal combat, the monster of course being capitalism, which today is perhaps half-dead but is still a giant. Our hope is that people will realize that they don't need the monster in order to fulfill their needs and simply stop feeding it, thereby starving it to death. Also we have powerful tools that in other times did not exist, such as the internet and the infinite possibilities it offers, starting with a currency managed by the users themselves, worldwide in scope, and allowing for anonymity.
There are several reasons why we believe that the answer to the prevailing system should be the construction of an alternative one; some are strategic and others are more substantive.
As for the latter:
And, as I was saying, there are also strategic factors illustrating the viability of our proposal:
In short, as we have seen, there are several possible ways to simultaneously respond to injustices and promote social transformation and, while we do not renounce the occasional use of any of the mentioned tactics of resistance, especially that of civil disobedience, those of us who form a part of FairCoop - and as is also the case with the members of the various integral cooperatives - we believe that the only way for us to free ourselves from capitalism is via the construction of a new system: self-organized, equitable, horizontal, feminist, cooperative, decentralized, where knowledge is free, degrowth-oriented, and managed from the grassroots by the people who are part of it.
And that's why we do it - because we believe the only way to make our dreams come true is to get down to work, favoring actions over words, and with the intelligence to see the weaknesses of the enemy and to take advantage of them in order to protect ourselves. And maybe by the time they realize that we've built an alternative that makes their system unnecessary, it will be too late for them to try to destroy it - because by then it already will have deep roots and many people who are willing to defend it; because they see that it is up to them whether they have or do not have a dignified life, a life that - as Yayo Herrero would say - is worth living.
