By Akracia – Fenikso Nigra
When we say that “politics never changes,” we are describing the nature of the State, not the limits of social transformation. The State is, by definition, a machine of conservation—but the mistake lies in believing that it is the only possible field of politics. True politics happens in society, in its multiple forms of organization, resistance, and creation. And it is precisely this multiplicity that synthetic anarchism recognizes as strength, not as weakness.
Unity in the Diversity of Tactics
The anarchist movement has historically fragmented into schools: anarcho-syndicalists focused on unions, libertarian communists on communes, insurrectionists on disruptive direct action, mutualists on cooperatives and mutual credit. Synthetism, as proposed by Voline and Sebastián Faure, rejects this fragmentation. It recognizes that all these tactics are valid and necessary—not as mutually exclusive alternatives, but as simultaneous fronts of the same emancipatory project.
A union strike puts pressure on capital and demonstrates the power of the organized working class. A cooperative proves that production without bosses is viable. An urban occupation redefines property and creates spaces for experimentation. An insurrectionary blockade disrupts the oppressive normality of the system. None of these actions alone will overthrow capitalism or the State—but together, they create multiple and simultaneous fissures that weaken the pillars of domination.
Synthetism is not uncritical eclecticism. It is the strategic recognition that social revolution will not come from a single tactic applied uniformly, but from the flexible coordination of multiple forms of struggle, each suited to its context and moment.
The State as Adversary, Not as Arena
Unlike reformist perspectives, synthetist anarchism does not see the State as a field of dispute to be occupied, but as a structure to be dismantled through the construction of alternatives. This doesn’t mean ignoring that partial gains can be wrested from institutional frameworks—minimum wages, reduced working hours, social rights—but it does mean not confusing these concessions with emancipation.
Every right won through the State is simultaneously a victory and a trap: a victory because it improves concrete living conditions; a trap because it teaches us to depend on the power we seek to abolish. The synthetic perspective resolves this tension not by denying the importance of immediate gains, but by refusing to make them the ultimate goal. It means fighting for better conditions within the system while building the infrastructure beyond it.
This implies a tactical, not strategic, relationship with institutional frameworks. Anarchist trade unionists can participate in legal strikes and labor negotiations without illusions about legislation; mutualists can use legal loopholes to establish cooperatives without believing that the State will genuinely protect self-management; libertarian communists can claim public spaces for assemblies without expecting the government to voluntarily provide them.
Self-Management: Permanent Laboratory, Not a Fixed Model
Synthetism recognizes that there is no single form of horizontal organization that serves all contexts. A factory reclaimed by the workers operates under different logics than an agricultural commune, which in turn differs from an urban neighborhood assembly. Imposing a single model—be it the soviet, the commune, the union, or the federation—is to repeat the authoritarian error of sacrificing reality to theory.
Instead, synthetism proposes that we constantly experiment with organizational forms, learning from successes and failures. Some communities will function better with rotating delegation; others with modified consensus; still others with radical direct democracy. Organizational plurality is not chaos—it is intelligent adaptation to the diversity of situations.
But this flexibility does not mean relativism. Certain principles are non-negotiable: collective ownership of the means of production, the abolition of permanent hierarchies, the rotation of coordinating functions, the revocability of mandates, transparency in decisions. Within these limits, a thousand flowers can bloom.
Federalism: The Solution to Scale
One of the blind spots of classical anarchism was the question of scale. How to organize complex societies, with millions of people and interdependent infrastructures, without resorting to the State? Synthetism offers the answer: libertarian federalism.
Local communes, cooperatives, unions, and assemblies maintain absolute autonomy over their internal affairs. Issues affecting multiple collectives—distribution of water resources, energy networks, transportation coordination—are decided in federations composed of delegates with imperative and revocable mandates. These delegates do not govern; they coordinate. They do not decide; they execute decisions made at the grassroots level.
The larger the scale of the issue, the more levels of federation are needed: neighborhood → city → region → territory. But power always flows from the bottom up, never the other way around. And the federated instances exist only as long as necessary—they dissolve when the issue that originated them is resolved.
This model is not hypothetical. It was practiced in revolutionary Catalonia in 1936, in the Zapatista communities of Chiapas, and in the structures of Rojava. It is not perfect—it faces problems of communication, coordination, and, yes, also of informal power—but it demonstrates that complex organization without a state is possible.
Addressing Conflict Without Creating a Leviathan
The issue of irreconcilable conflict is real and must be addressed without illusions. Even in libertarian societies, there will be interpersonal violence, abuse, and crimes against the community. The difference lies in how we respond.
Instead of a permanent police and prison apparatus, self-managed communities can create systems of restorative justice, popular mediation, and, in extreme cases, collectively decided community exclusion. Instead of prisons, measures such as reparations, mandatory community work, or temporary isolation focused on reintegration.
Is this more difficult than outsourcing violence to the State? Yes. Does it require collective maturity, the ability to deal with ambiguities, and acceptance that not every problem has a clean solution? Absolutely. But it is the price of living without delegating our power of life and death to a separate class of armed bureaucrats.
And for external threats—neighboring states that try to crush the libertarian experience—synthetism does not embrace naive pacifism. It recognizes the need for organized popular self-defense, federated community militias, and resistance strategies ranging from guerrilla warfare to mass non-cooperation. The Spanish Revolution and the defense of Rojava show that it is possible to fight without reproducing authoritarian militarism.
Building Tomorrow’s World Now
Synthetism distinguishes itself from both reformism (“we will change the State from within”) and pure insurrectionism (“we will destroy everything and then see”). Its proposal is simultaneously constructive and destructive: to build the structures of a free society within the shell of the old while undermining that shell from all sides.
This manifests itself in concrete actions:
In the workplace: organizing combative unions that fight for immediate improvements but also educate for self-management; creating cooperatives that demonstrate that production without bosses works; occupying abandoned factories and putting them to work under workers’ control.
In housing: occupying empty buildings in cities with people on the streets; In urban development: create urban communes that experiment with collective living; push for housing while building alternatives to private property.
In education: create free schools that practice libertarian pedagogy; occupy universities to democratize them; produce knowledge that serves emancipation, not the market.
In economics: establish direct exchange networks that bypass the market; create time banks and social currencies; build solidarity-based supply chains that connect producers and consumers without capitalist intermediaries.
In defense: organize community self-defense committees that replace the police; create mutual support networks for victims of violence; train communities in mediation and restorative justice.
Each of these actions is, at the same time, a concrete improvement and a school of self-governance. Each surviving cooperative teaches that bosses are not necessary. Each assembly that effectively decides proves that we don’t need professional politicians. Each mutual support network demonstrates that the welfare state can be replaced by horizontal solidarity.
Revolution as a Process, Not as an Event
Synthetism abandons the fantasy of Revolution with a capital R—the mythical moment when everything changes at once. History doesn’t work that way. Profound social transformations are long processes, made up of advances and setbacks, partial victories and temporary defeats.
But this is not discouraging; it is liberating. It means that the revolution begins now, in every gesture of autonomy, in every act of solidarity, in every refusal of authority. We don’t need to wait for the perfect “objective conditions” or the ideal insurrectionary moment. We can begin to live libertarianly today, even within authoritarian societies, creating islands of freedom that expand and connect.
When these islands are so numerous and interconnected that the State becomes irrelevant to most people in most situations—not because it has been overthrown, but because it has been circumvented—we will have achieved not THE revolution, but a revolution: permanent, unfinished, always reinventing itself.
Synthesis as an Open Horizon
Anarchist synthetism offers no absolute certainties or definitive blueprints. It offers principles—equality, freedom, solidarity, mutual support—and the willingness to experiment with multiple ways of realizing them. It offers a rejection of both sectarian dogmatism and unprincipled eclecticism.
Institutional politics will continue to “never change” because that is what it does: conserve. But while it conserves itself, we build—on a thousand simultaneous fronts, with a thousand different tactics, always learning, always adapting, always advancing.
And when we finally build a sufficiently dense network of horizontal relationships, of self-managed structures, of libertarian practices—when solidarity is stronger than competition, when cooperation is more efficient than hierarchy, when freedom is more secure than authority—then we will not need to ask ourselves if politics has changed.
We will simply have created a way of life in which politics, as we know it today—this dance of domination and submission—will no longer make sense. And this will not be the end of the story, but its beginning: the first time that humanity will be truly free to decide its own destiny.
