Keywords

1 The Emergence of Popular Power in the Face of the Crisis of Liberal Democracy

During the last 2 years, we have been witnessing a profound crisis of liberal democracy that has been characterised by lack of participation, lack of legitimacy, lack of representativeness or lack of interest on the part of large sectors of the population (Crouch, 2004; Rosanvallon, 2007; Hermet, 2008; Wolin, 2008; Posner, 2012; Harvey, 2012; Mair, 2013; Ortí, 2015; Castells, 2017; Laval and Dardot, 2017; Gentile, 2018). In response to the crisis of liberal democracy, in recent years and in different parts of the world, community and communal dynamics have been generated that question the liberal model and suggest a different approach in the characterisation of the idea of democracy (Ayboga et al., 2017; Fernández, 2015; Akuno, 2018; Ruggeri, 2017; Códigos Libres, 2016; Öcalan, 2012). Along with the idea of communal democracy, the notion of popular power is emerging with considerable force (Knapp & Jongerden, 2014; García Linera, 2016; Bookchin, 2019; Iglesias Fernández, 2017; Mazzeo, 2006, 2007). In fact, popular power pulses and beats in many of the communal dynamics being generated by different actors: sometimes in specific fashion, on other occasions indirectly, and even as a force enclosed in community dynamics. El popular power and communal democracy are not presented as a finished and defined model mimetically opposed to the liberal model but as an alternative possibility in continuous construction. Thus, the force that encloses these practices follows another more dynamic logic of continuous construction. In this way, “alternative systems can be imagined and problematized, but not through their ‘application’ (…) they are not applied”, but “emerge” (De Angelis, 2019, p. 99). Therefore, the idea of communal democracy should be understood more as the possibility of a possible future that is concealed in multiple practices and different dynamics that are rich and diverse in form, content, intensity, maturity of development or strategic development. Those future possibilities as a current emergence recall the ideas of concrete utopia (Bloch, 2007), Benjamin’s Messianic times (2009), Wallerstein’s Utopistics (1998), Wright’s real utopia (2014) or Santos’s Sociology of Emergences (2006).

El popular power as collective political subject of communal democracy is conditioned by the social reality that surrounds it and, in turn, dialectically conditions this same reality. Since the late 1990s, we have been witnessing a new cycle of social protests, deepened by the systemic crisis that erupted in 2007–2008. Since then, different territories have seen the development of popular and social dynamics that are highlighting the emergence of the community as a new social momentum that appears as a counterpoint to the increasingly extreme individualisation of neoliberal subjectivity (Laval & Dardot, 2013; Ortiz, 2014). There is therefore a reappearance of community not only as a space of protest and grievance but also as a space in which to find solutions to many problems and needs resulting from the crisis (Úcar, 2012; Torres, 2013; Curto-López, 2019). The concept of community, however, is neither new nor concrete. There are many visions of community (Agamben, 2006; Augé, 2011; Bauman, 2003; De la Peña, 1998; Tönnies, 1947; Esposito, 2003). Among the subjects of a community nature, we find a great variety of forms, themes and even opposing ideological positions. Our aim here is to consider community subjects with the potential to reinforce the idea of communal democracy and, therefore, those subjects that develop an alternative emancipatory vision to the liberal vision, closer to the interests of the subordinate classes. From that perspective, we find a wide range of collective subjects: cooperatives, trade unions, political parties, cultural or social associations, local communities, peasant movements, indigenous communities, popular movements, etc. (Negri & Hardt, 2011; Patzi Paco, 2009; Fabbri, 2013; Escalante, 2013; Ruggeri, 2017; Uharte, 2019). Throughout this mesh of community subjects appears, in a transversal and qualitatively renovating way, the idea of popular power as a political space for the generation of transformative political subjects.

But what do we mean by popular power? What type of subject is it, and what characterises it? What does it contribute to democratic intensification from a different logic to the liberal one? What aspects are important in its development? ¿En qué escalas se desarrolla? To answer these questions, we have turned to different authors and movements that have addressed the subject matter. Popular power as power of the people can have politically different meanings. In recent centuries, the power of the people has been used by different constitutions as a depositary of national sovereignty. This idea has been employed by the constitutions of nation-states in theoretical and ideal fashion for the development of the modern liberal state (Sartori, 2003; Rosanvallon, 2015). We want to refer in specific and real manner to popular power, “the real, concrete fact of a collective will, the real will of the cooperative of which Marx also spoke” (Mendez, 2020, s.f.: 7). Based on that idea, according to Mazzeo:

Popular power, generally speaking, refers then to all those historical experiences in which the subordinate classes (the workers, the poor, the marginalised, the peripheral) exercised control and power more or less directly, within delimited areas or in an extensive set of institutions and from patterns imposed by a more or less conscious and deliberate search for libertarian spaces and egalitarian relational patterns, qualitatively superior to those imposed by the social totality from which they emerge and to which they are opposed. (Mazzeo, 2006: 64)

That idea of popular power, despite having been employed more clearly as a concept in recent decades, is not new in essence and, though not always under this name, has been in use since before. In this vein, Marx had already observed that the Paris Commune of 1871 represented a qualitative leap in terms of both the organisation and the prospect of direct self-government of the oppressed classes: “The Commune was essentially a government of the working class, the result of the struggle of the producing class against the appropriating class, the political form under which the freedom of labour could be attained being at length revealed” (Marx, 2003: 71). From that point onwards and until the second half of the twentieth century, at different moments, during different social processes and in different places, general or partial experiences have developed that were based on the idea of direct, communal management and administration by the subordinate classes. Some of these larger experiences have aspired to structural changes, and others, smaller and more partial, have seen the proposal of more specific alternatives to meet specific needs (Azzellini & Ness, 2017). From the 1960s onwards, with the processes of decolonisation and independence, with the emergence of new social movements and national liberation movements, the idea of popular power is manifested in new practical and theoretical experiences – experiences like the Cordones Industriales in Chile, the Black Panthers in the USA, the independence process in Vietnam, the fight against apartheid in South Africa, the Cuban Revolution, May 68, etc. In the last two decades, the idea of popular power is back on the table, along with dynamics and counter-hegemonic disruptive collective action combined with processes that reinforce or are a reinforcement of the idea of communal democracy.

One can begin to delimit the idea of popular power by considering its two concepts. Power is not an object in itself, but a relationship that is formed between subjects and normally results in patterns of power that reproduce situations of domination (Sánchez, 1989; Foucault, 1979; Castells, 2009; Bourdieu, 2000; Villoro, 1997). Those in power eventually have privileges over the oppressed. Popular power seeks to become a power because it wants to dispute power with the dominant class, not in order to dominate but in order to end domination. In this way, popular power can have no “other objective than a society without domination” and a reversal of power relations (Mendez, 2020, s.f.: 7) – a power for a project of emancipation and of suppression of domination, not for domination (Caviasca, 2011). The popular in popular power refers to the people, to the plebeians, to those below, to the working class social majority in situations of exclusion or marginalisation or who suffer from different types of oppression, but also to those sectors with a conscience that, from their positions of less exclusion or greater privilege, engage with the masses in the quest for emancipation (Stratta & Barrera, 2009; Romero, 1991; Gómez Vilalr, 2011; Errejón, 2015; Cobo, 2002). The social reality of workers is increasingly fragmented and heterogeneous, generating different capitalisations of power in the pluri-dimensional representation of the fields of domination to which Bourdieu (2002) referred. That involves the field of “the popular” leading us to complex and different expressions, realities, values and diverse positions that arise in relation to different axes of exploitation and oppression.

Popular power, apart from as a project for emancipation and as an articulating popular subject, is clearly characterised as a process – a complex process that includes in its interior different types of processes that exercise mutual influence upon one another: processes of self-organisation, democratic and deliberative processes, processes of production and reproduction, of resource management, of struggle, of construction, of offensives, of defences, of knowledge transmission, of development of political awareness, etc. According to Mazzeo:

Popular power is the process by means of which the places of life (of work, of study, of recreation, etc.) of the subordinate classes turn into a constituent cell of an alternative, liberating social power that enables them to gain positions and modify the disposition of power and the correlation of forces and, of course, progress in the consolidation of a counter-hegemonic field. (Mazzeo & Stratta, 2007: 11)

Popular power, like communal democracy, becomes a space and living process of experimentation that “can foreshadow the forms and content of the new society” (Caviasca, 2007: 46). Marx and Gramsci underlined the power of the Paris Commune and of factory councils, respectively, due to the scope of their prefigurative politics of future societies in the present (Ouviña, 2007: 166). Experiences of popular power appear as spaces of “social and political anticipation, inhabited by the possible real” facilitating new openings (Mazzeo & Stratta, 2007: 12). Thus, popular power can be studied as part of the sociology of emergencies, since it “produces possible experiences, which do not arise because there are no alternatives for it, but are possible and already exist as an emergency”. We are not speaking of an abstract future, but of a future “of which we have clues and signs; we have people involved, dedicating their lives – often dying – to those initiatives”. In this way, the sociology of emergencies “enables us to abandon that idea of a future without limits and replace it with that of a specific future, based on these emergencies: this way we are building the future” (de Sousa Santos, 2006: 31). For this reason, popular power as a process of construction of the new

Is conceived of as a prefigurative and inaugural space of the new society and as a moment of historical materialisation – always partial, always incomplete, of absolute utopia. This notion acknowledges that utopia is nothing if it does not target the “here and right now”. In this fashion, metamorphoses into rupture, into the moment of gestation and anticipation of what is yet to be. This is a utopian present that works to shorten the distance between subject and object. (Mazzeo, 2006: 79)

The prefigurative is not inherent to any popular dynamics, but is linked to a “political decision” to wish to construct the new, and is therefore “a conscious labour” of popular power “and not so much with immanent principles or with structural forms of determinism” (Mazzeo, 2006: 154). It thus forms a part of what Bloch would call “concrete utopia” identified as “that which is not yet, which in the core of things drives towards itself, which awaits its genesis in the tendency-latency of process” (Bloch, 2007: 507). Thus, popular power “makes libertarian utopia possible and not the other way round. Because popular power is the form assumed by the present trend towards the future society”. This emergency shortens the time before the future and the present (de Sousa Santos, 2006). On this journey, the practices that construct popular power “are bearers of a new institutionality that preannounces the forms of the society of the future” (Mazzeo & Stratta, 2007: 13).

We want to focus on popular power as an emergent process in three structural aspects of its configuration and development: the construction of a new type of power, popular power as a project and popular power as subject.

2 The Construction of a New Kind of Power

Popular power, insofar as it is the construction of an emerging power and is set against established power, can also be seen as a gradual process that passes through different stages. Modonesi presents three dimensions of power and a trajectory where popular power as emergency can be forged and developed. The first dimension is power-over as relations of domination, the second dimension is power-against as practices of antagonism and the third dimension is power-to do as a collective, autonomous capacity of creation (Modonesi, 2009). This idea links up with the idea of passing from domination to conflict against domination and emancipatory empowerment. Thus, within the “formulation of an emancipatory project”, popular power would be passing “from subordination – as a state to be overcome – to antagonism – as a necessary conflictual and combative passage – and finally to autonomy – as materialisation, goal or finish line-” (Modonesi, 2010: 171). With regard to the idea of counter-power, we find various positions. While in Modonesi’s schema the idea of counter-power conforms to the ideas of power-against and of hostility to established power, but in a gradual manner related to power-to do or the autonomy of the actual power under construction, for Rodríguez, counter-power is related to the radical idea of ending the power of state domination. In this sense, he separates it from the idea of dual power, associating the idea of dual power with new state power. According to his approach, counter-power would assume both the dimension of power-against and of power-to do, since he sees counter-power as “self-determination: formation of social and political subjects, self-organisation of segments of life with their own political forms”. This would be “the immediate form of an organised social power”, being “by definition politics that does not admit mediation (representation, party, etc.). Counter-power is “pure affirmation”, “positive self-determination” (Rodríguez & Fernández, 2017: 98). It is removed from the idea of reconciliation, underlining the founding idea of new powers from below (Rodríguez, 2018: 198).

Negri’s idea of counter-power ties in well with the two positions described above. For him, the idea of counter-power incorporates three meanings: “resistance against old power”; “insurrection” as “a form of mass movement” that “merges different forms of resistance” and as event and “the constituent power of a new power”. Thus, while “insurrection is a weapon that destroys the enemy’s way of life, constituent power is the force that organises new forms of life in positive fashion” (Negri, 2001: 83–84). Here the notions of resistance and insurrection would be related to the ideas of power-against and power-over of domination and the notion of constituent power to that of power-to do as a constructive force. He coincides with Rodríguez, emphasising that the objective of popular power is not to “seize and take control of old power but develop a new power of life, of organisation and of production” (Negri, 2001: 88). Atilio Borón presents a criticism of Negri’s arguments with regard to counter-power (2001) and those laid out by Negri along with Hardt in their book Imperio. Borón criticises their reading of the insurgent processes of modernity, which characterises them according to only one of the three notions they assign to counter-power (insurrection) and suggests the illusory nature of the insurrectional character of postmodernity owing to the minor degree of internationalisation of processes (Borón, 2003: 6). Reviewing experiences during the twentieth and early twenty-first century, Borón argues that the insurrectional character of different struggles can always be latent in different situations if the necessary conditions exist. He also considers that the three notions they propose within the idea of counter-power is not far from the strategy developed by the Bolsheviks between February and November 1917 but also in the factory councils to which Gramsci refers (Borón, 2003: 10).

In these debates, there is counter-position of and dissociation between the idea counter-power and the idea of a process of construction of power itself, where a situation of dual power would arise, an idea that was developed by Lenin and Trotsky (Caviasca, 2007). Thus, there is concealment of the contention that one cannot aspire only to seizing the state apparatus in order to change it, but one simply has to fight against it. These debates between the extremes of autonomism and orthodox Marxism are transcended by means of approaches that reject the two routes and in turn integrate them within a superior approach: in the construction of popular power, the struggle “against, with and beyond the state” is necessary and complementary (Rodríguez, 2007). For this reason, “conceiving of popular power as emanating from the state is as childish as conceiving of it without the latter” (Mazzeo & Stratta, 2007: 12). One can and must work from within the state and against the state simultaneously, inasmuch as the masses’ capacity for self-government is increased. According to that conception, the idea of dual power is not contrasted with counter-power with Modonesi’s idea of power-to do, with Rodríguez’s idea of counter-power as self-determination or with Negri’s constituent power. However, rather positing this self-affirmation only from the “edges”, it is posited “in parallel and towards the heart of the structures” of the future society under construction. This is why “double power materialises in the existence of a new institution that disputes the functions of the old bourgeois institutionality, and we say ‘towards’ because these new institutions tend to eliminate the old ones and encompass the integrality of society”. That is why the “advance of double power involves the weakening of the old state and old society” (Caviasca, 2007: 46). From that dynamic perspective, the idea of double power is not in contradiction with counter-power or popular power, but with a necessary stage fuelled by both.

In line with the above reflections, the creative force of popular power increases as it deepens in procedural and progressive fashion its capacity to combine its power-against (hostility towards the present) with its power-to do (the creative power of the new). This recalls the interaction between notions of destituent, instituent and constituent power. Regarding the idea of the force of instituent power (Castoriadis, 1989, 1997), there are stances such as Agamben’s (2013, 2018) or collective interpretations such as those of the Invisible Committee (2015, 2017), which emphasise destituent power and advocate the latter as a structural characteristic of alternative movements, contrasting it with constituent or instituent power. Negri proposes a reading of constituent power that is different from the classic, static interpretation that identifies it only with the founding constitutional processes of modern states. Thus, they present a constituent power that transcends the constituted power itself, with a capacity for continuous self-constitution (Negri, 1994). This idea of construction of popular power as self-constitution reinforces the idea of a process of construction of power-to do based on the capacities themselves, on self-construction.

The idea of popular power has been questioning the orthodox, static way of understanding the strategy of power. Throughout the twentieth century, different left-wing movements were largely convinced by the idea that power was situated in established state institutions, and consequently, confronting and defeating power means “taking” the power of the state apparatus, whether by insurrectional or electoral means (Mazzeo, 2007; Rauber, 2004). From a more heterodox and dynamic vision that has been developed from both libertarian and Marxist positions, a strategy of power is proposed that passes from the idea of the “taking of power” to the “construction of power”. From this perspective, “a social revolution is not the ‘taking of power’ designed and directed by a political elite (be it via reformist or political-revolutionary means), but the real production of another form of power that, consequently, corresponds to the ‘dissolution’ of the old society” (De Angelis, 2019: 98). For this reason, the shift from the “taking” to the “construction” of power “equates to transforming the modalities of the struggle on the political stage”. It is no longer a question of organising social sectors so they participate in the armed struggle or the electoral battle, but of “conceiving of political subjects whose pursuit is a growing accumulation of local and territorial power, which construct a society and a state upon the basis of a new democracy”. From this standpoint, agencies or nuclei of popular power as “constructed power, power born of creative human activity and the radical actions of supportive subjects” generate a context conducive to

The development of a conscience capable of perceiving that social relations are not independent of individuals or the expression of the social movement as a whole; thus, they create the conditions for a social life outside the (material) nexus of capital, outside the value of change (that transforms relationships between people into relationships between things). They also promote rapprochement among subordinate classes, build or strengthen their organic unity and their status as opponents of capital. (Mazzeo, 2007: 3)

The state and the struggle for social hegemony are related to the construction of popular power. Both the idea of power and the idea of state are indissociable in modernity; therefore, “no discussion about power (in this case, popular power) could fail to mention its link with the state” (Acha, 2007: 31). The state represents part of the portion of power of a complex totality, and in a strategy of construction of power, this needs to be borne in mind. Moreover, understanding the state in a broad sense, as “all the structures responsible for reproducing the hegemony of the ruling classes” (Caviasca, 2007: 40). Because of this, “the exercise of state power by the subordinate classes is an instrumental moment in the project to create a new hegemonic bloc” (Mazzeo & Stratta, 2007: 12). The construction of popular power is thus proposed as “the primitive accumulation of power” outside and inside the state, which would make it easier for the oppressed classes “truly to lay their hands upon a considerable part of the state’s power (state in the broadest sense)” to constitute dual power and become hegemonic (Caviasca, 2007: 48). That dual power would represent “an alternative statehood (not only alternative)” where popular power can be expressed “as the capacity to exercise government functions in dispute with the bourgeois state”, in the struggle “between the new and the old” (Caviasca, 2011: 66). This is a clear dispute with the dominant sectors (Mazzeo & Stratta, 2007: 14). “What is essentially questioned” by popular power “is the capacity of the ruling classes to develop their hegemony over society as a whole, not only state power” (Caviasca, 2011: 25).

3 Popular Power as a Project

The idea of popular power is usually more directly associated with the idea of subject but transcends this as a project for society. Popular power builds its project as “the way of designating the foundation that shapes an ethic of liberation, that which is the support and purpose of the emancipatory project” (Mazzeo, 2006: 38), not only as the overcoming of oppression, but which “should express the anticipation of a change of era, and therefore should tend to be ‘total’ and a ‘change’ in production relations and a new world vision that would the tendency towards the universalisation of new values of the oppressed classes” (Caviasca, 2011:19). This ethic of liberation is contrasted with the different ‘historical forms of oppression’ of the ‘system of multiple oppression’ of ‘capitalist civilisation’: economic exploitation and social exclusion; political oppression in the framework of formal democracy; sociocultural discrimination (ethnic, racial, gender, age, regional differences, among others); and ecological injustice vis-à-vis nature” (Valdés, 2001: 49). Therefore, in terms of practice and space to overcome dominations, it proposes the integration of different anti-classist, anti-patriarchal and anti-racist visions within social construction. For this reason, within “situated, our-American, decolonising, anti-racist, anti-heterosexist and anti-capitalist feminisms”, one finds both theoretical and practical contributions with great “potential for the radicalisation of the emancipatory quests embodied by social and popular movements fighting for social change” (Fabbri, 2013: 139). The “popular power” project always arises from a “horizontal intersubjectivity and from new social relations in which altruism, solidarity and cooperation prevail”. Thus, a project based on the “construction of social relations that are critical of and alternative to those of capital, is construction of popular power” (Mazzeo, 2006: 73). The project of a new social metabolism, “a construction that is both the instrument and the final objective of emancipation” (Mendez, 2020, s.f.: 11), with popular power thus the end and the means. In this way it is related with “oppressed classes’ possibilities of developing, unaided, political, social, cultural, economic and military means” (Caviasca, 2011: 25), and, in that sense, the holistic, comprehensive popular power project “refers to the exercise of power over social conditions of existence and to effective and democratic control of a metabolic social order alternative to capital” (Mazzeo, 2006: 194).

Popular power as a project involves the idea and practice of communal democracy, which is differentiated from liberal democracy in both its idea of project and its idea of subject. With regard to the project, it thus questions the tenets upon which has been built the idea of democracy in modernity. If liberal democracy has been constructed as the political form with which to defend and develop private property, the market economy and individualist values (von Mises, 1996; Laval and Dardot, 2013; García Linera, 2016), communal democracy counters with the ideas of social or communal property, a non-market economy and community values and also questions the roots of the patriarchy, structural racism or the abuse of mother nature (Bookchin, 2019; Federici, 2019; Patzi Paco, 2009; Fabbri, 2013; Zabala, 2015; Negri & Hardt, 2011). The project that proposes the idea of communal democracy can be associated with the anarchist and communist traditions of the nineteenth century but also with workers’ cooperative and trade union projects in the eighteenth century or with the union struggles or the defence of communal lands of indigenous peoples in the seventeenth century (Bookchin, 2019; Azzellini & Ness, 2017; Vargas Arenas & Sanoja Obediente, 2017). To speak of communal democracy is to speak of a way of organising society from a holistic perspective, accepting within that society the comprehensiveness of different forms of production, reproduction, revitalisation and expansion of life: administration, management, economy, culture, health education, information, communication, etc. We refer to social relations, production relations, consumer relations, distribution and management relations, etc. For this reason, communal logic conceives of democracy in a completely different way to the liberal vision, in terms of both form and content.

Direct democracy is a cornerstone of the project of popular power. Consequently, popular power, insofar as it is based on the organisation, management, selection and development of the necessary elements for the development of life, appears as the emergence of a new democratic possibility. From that perspective, the dynamics of the construction of popular power become active subjects that promote communal democracy by means of specific community practices as a possible mergence. Thus, “the agencies and nuclei of popular power are the places that offer the most possibilities to the most profound and authentic democratic action” (Mazzeo, 2006: 156). Participation is not viewed as something aesthetic, but as something that should be structural to the democratic way, such as the fact of “participating in the process of elaboration and taking of decisions and their subsequent execution, sharing responsibilities (Rauber, 2016: 33)”. Popular power “rebels against the established order and takes on the universal project of a democratic society” (Mazzeo, 2006: 49). This is why

Democracy and popular participation are structurally connected to the conception of the construction of power from below and to the aspirations of a new type of society. They are articulated from their roots, from the genesis of the new, both creating and demanding coherence between means and ends. (Rauber, 2004: 37)

For this reason, there is a need for “forms of direct democracy” by means of which to resolve everyday problems (Casas, 2007: 133). For collective decision-making and the distribution of responsibilities, it is essential to have “spaces that make possible the reflexive re-appropriation of information and the modification of practices (they cease to be self-referential, begin to become aware of the ‘other’); those spaces that become decision-making, self-managed, horizontal and therefore democratic” (Mazzeo, 2006: 175).

Moreover, en route to “developing a new type of democracy in the political, economic and cultural, in law, in morality, as the basis for the construction of a caring society”, popular power as transformative community subject for the sustenance and development of life makes “interesting contributions” (Rauber, 2008: 10). All communal nexusesFootnote 1 that propose another form of life and consequently another comprehensive form of collective management of every aspect of life are a living and constructive force for popular power. In them, they are developing another “way of shaping social life”, and they propose dynamics by means of which “a collective has and assumes the autonomous, self-determined and self-regulated capacity to decide with regard to issues associated with symbolic and material production” to guarantee biological and social life (Gutiérrez & Salazar, 2019: 23). The management of social life, production and politics form part of the “process of reproduction of existence” as a whole in which the community takes part. In opposition to the formal democracy based on the delegation of power, these communal nexuses are based on direct involvement and participation, on commitment and on “the obligation to assume the needs to satisfy, to deliberate with others with regard to how to do it, collectively to be responsible for its execution, etc. An obligation, then, to ‘collectively agree’, an obligation to generate consensus as a condition of possibility of reproduction”. From this perspective “nobody has a monopoly on decision-making and nobody delegates their capacity to produce – along with others – the decision” (Gutiérrez & Salazar, 2019: 38).

Assemblies would form a part of everyday political life, where people would participate not in accordance with their responsibilities at work, but as free people in society. Thus, assemblies “should function not only as permanent decision-making institutions but as arenas for educating the people in handling complex civic and regional affairs” (Bookchin, 2019: 56). Thus, through popular power, there is a search for a democracy that “in all its forms envelops and passes through all everyday activities: from culture to politics, from the economy to education” (García Linera, 2016: 134). From this perspective, the economy should not be understood from the conventional liberal perspective of market, prices, productivity and profit, which would be “replaced by ethics, with its concern for human needs and the good life” (Bookchin, 2019: 57). With regard to forms of ownership, there is also consideration of a global process where private, state, cooperative and communal-community ownership can coexist. Community ownership is therefore seen as the key to the future, as “it arises and expands on the basis of the voluntary actions of workers, the example and experience of society” (García Linera, 2016: 135).

4 Popular Power as Subject

Popular power, as subject of communal democracy, questions the individual and individualised subject of modernity, a subject upon which has been constructed the vision of society in political, economic, social, cultural and legal spheres (Ovejero, 2017). The construction of this modern, individual subject involves the destruction of the communal subject and of the collective and communal customs, values and institutions that prevailed in many societies before and during the Middle Ages (Federici, 2010; García-Huidoro, 2020). The idea of communal democracy posits the recovery of the collective subject as basis for the organisation and development of life in society, without forgetting the importance of the individual within society (García Linera, 2016; Garcés, 2022, Laval & Dardot, 2015). The idea is to replace individualism, egoism, the struggle of all against all and personalist selfishness with communalism, solidarity, collaboration, collective care and mutual support (Iglesias Fernández, 2017). It is the specific aspect of construction of the collective self as an asset of democratic intensification that we wish to explore more thoroughly in this section. The political subject is inherently a substantial and structural part of the project, its characterisation and its development, since “there is no subject without a project through which it is constituted and expressed and, vice versa, no project without a subject that carries it” (Mendez, 2020, s.f.: 11).

In relation to the idea of popular power as subject, two important aspects to consider are the diversity of its unity and of its articulation (Stratta & Barrera, 2009; Fabbri, 2013; Valdés, 2001). The subject of popular power seeks to be heterogeneous in its constitution, as the forms of exclusion and exploitation have diversified considerably, resulting in “a diversity of subjects occupying subordinate positions in relation to different existing modalities of domination” (Fabbri, 2013: 174), Thus, from each of these margins affected and characterised by specific oppression emerge different situated and oppressed identities. However, the unitary common ground of that heterogeneity in the identity of subjects is to be found precisely in the project of emancipation via the liberating quest for the suppression of oppressions and for the construction of a free and liberated society. The objective is a world that accommodates many worlds and where everybody is recognised and not negated: “that does not violate the pluralism of collective popular life, which is the home of possibilities that can that can be discovered, combined and organised” (Mazzeo, 2006: 47). This requires the construction of “a world that is the negation of the entire relation of capital, all the more so in a context where this relation is increasingly totalizing and contrary to processes of subjectivation” (Mazzeo, 2006: 45). Necessary forms of being “subject” and “one” at the same time are proposed, inventing new forms of identity and of collective unity. In addition, popular power sets out a specific unity of action that respects the autonomy of subjects and not rigid organic unity that negates their peculiarities. Apparent here is the idea of articulation as key concept. Not prioritising oppressions, acknowledging them all to be important and seeking formulae of mutual recognition in an emancipatory direction are a fundamental aspect. From a peripheral position, popular power should be capable of organising “a plural, multisectorial subject, a multiple social subject capable of articulating a broad group of social sectors” (Mazzeo & Stratta, 2007: 13). Taking into account “new, multiple and fragmented social actors”, there is a need for “articulations between these multiple fastening wefts and positions of subjectivity, by means of prefigurative construction” (Fabbri, 2013: 34).

The relevance of the working classes within this subject continues to be crucial: popular power is a subject of class from a dynamic point of view, but not in dogmatic, orthodox or limiting fashion, as there is increasing heterogeneity within the working classes, with exponential growth in unemployment and job insecurity (Fabbri, 2013: 176). Thus, the subject of popular growth seeks to articulate this new social morphology that includes “from the classic industrial or rural workers, shrinking in numbers, to salaried service sector employees, the swelling ranks of outsourced, subcontracted men and women” (Stratta & Barrera, 2009) and all those in insecure employment or excluded from the job market.

With regard to popular power as a collective subject in process of continuous construction, its possible forms are not defined and specified at a particular moment or in a preconceived way, but will be created and reinvented in dynamic fashion. One of the characteristics of popular power is its possible manifestation in various forms, adapting and arising from specific realities while it is modified and reconstructed in the course of the communal dynamics whence it is developed. Thus, “the ‘we’, that inherits, produces and reproduces the common can be from very different classes, can assume different forms” (Gutiérrez, 2017:122). Given the distrust of traditional politics, popular movements are a good foundation with which to generate seeds or nuclei of popular power. Traditional political parties are showing themselves to be incapable of representation, and the “emergence of social movements” reveals people’s distrust and search for social protagonism (Garcés, 2002: 10). However, not all community dynamics and counter-hegemonic social movements are popular power, so “popular power should not be confused with any struggle for demands waged by the subordinate classes” (Mazzeo, 2006: 65).

However, many of the community and popular dynamics of self-organised spaces have the potential to progress towards more advanced forms of popular power as “agencies or nuclei of popular power” (Mazzeo, 2007). Insofar as there is an intensification of self-organisation, awareness and commitment and an increase in the capacity to dispute spaces of power, all the diverse forms within the popular movement can gradually progress from simple demands to long-term proposals of construction and dispute of power (Caviasca, 2011: 43). As advances are made in the construction of popular power, its manifestations will tend to become more organised:

They will undoubtedly acquire diverse sand changing organisational forms and denominations, which will make it possible to assume and lend relative stability to experiences that point to the community re-appropriation of conditions of existence and social praxis, on an increasing scale, in a movement that will also consolidate itself as a social and political force with a power born of re-appropriation and democratic management of diverse mechanisms of social life (productive undertakings, cooperatives, management of certain public services, experiences of control and revolutionary self-management, cultural associations, etc. (Casas, 2007:142)

The construction of popular power should also incorporate another logic of spatial-temporal scales for its construction and development. Insofar as it should be developed in conflictive-constructive dialectic fashion, challenging the old and generating the new, when confronting capital, it can do so from its spatial-temporal scales, but for the construction of the new and from a perspective of long-term transformation, it is important to generate new logics. The construction of popular power obliges us to reconfigure times and scales of politics, since

The spatial-temporal scales of the common force us to learn to conceive of social transformation on the basis of another kind of notion of space and time, a notion that is both quantitative and qualitative, capable of recognising and appraising differences. They force us to learn to conceive of social transformation as a simultaneous occurrence of a multiplicity of social actions of self-determination that inhabit and produce space and time in qualitatively different fashion and in different scalar dimensions; different from one another not only in terms of size but, also and above all, in terms of their relational content. (Linsalata, 2019: 116)

From this perspective, the quantitative is important, but above all, the qualitative, in other words, “not how fast we do it, but what we do”. Therefore, importance is acquired by “the quality of the relations that we succeed in consolidating amongst ourselves” and the “possibility we have of laying siege to capital via the consolidation of our capacity to self-determine the spaces and times of our practical life” (2019: 120). For this reason, the temporal scale should be long term “precisely due to its characteristics as constituent of new social relations reproducing life (and dissolving the old ones)”, and as a long process of self-constitution of the new, popular power as “social revolution cannot be reduced to a momentary event, to a ‘victory’; rather, it encompasses an era and is formed by a series of ‘victories’ and ‘defeats’” (De Angelis, 2019: 98).

In the construction of other spatial-temporal logics of the common, the spatial dimension of popular power is vital. This space is close, wherever community inhabits new forms of life. The new power under construction should be specified and situated in a particular territory (Perdia, 2019), hence the importance of territorialising the process, of including all those material and symbolic resources, social relations, infrastructures, collective capacities and knowledge in the construction of the new power. Thus, “popular power creates a social territoriality where the self-emancipatory capacities of the subordinate classes are expressed” (Mazzeo & Stratta, 2007: 13). Harvey recovers the concept of “heteropathy” employed by Foucault, to suggest that, from within capitalism, there may arise a “creation of heterotopic spaces, where radically different forms of production, social organisation and political power might flourish for a while, implies a terrain of anti-capitalist possibility that is perpetually opening and shutting down” (Harvey, 2014: 216). Here there is a fusion of the ideas of territorialisation and prefiguration of popular power, specifically of local power. Thus, although a strategy of popular power should not be localist and should aspire to expanding the construction, the forms and the control of popular power to a national and even international scale, the essence of that strategy is clearly based on the nearby or local scale. On the basis of those local dynamics of popular power in neighbouring territories and spaces, in the spirit of “territorial aggregation”, should be articulated and coordinated progress towards other, larger territorial scales, reaching territorial federations and confederations (Öcalan, 2012; Rojas, 2018).

But the idea of local power, like popular power, does not have to be associated with the emancipatory cause, since there may exist both local powers and conservative or dominating dual powers, “exercised by mafias, paramilitary or diverse reactionary groups”. For this reason, apart from being counter-hegemonic and emancipatory, “local is power is not popular power unless it breaks with the hard and fast division between representatives and represented” (Coraggio, 1987: 33). Thus, there are approaches that link the idea of popular power, popular self-government, community self-organisation, local power and territorialisation of social struggles on the path to constructing situations of double power, but not from the perspective of “taking” state power, but via a parallel and complementary process of struggle against the old and emergence of the new. Local power, therefore, “should be a general, national process” where agencies of popular power begin to come into existence “with the responsibility to govern their zone” (Santucho, 1995: 37). Furthermore, the idea of defending what has been built calls for the possibility of self-defence on a local basis as necessary not only in order not to retreat, but to be able to continue advancing (Santucho, 1995; Villoro, 1997; Öcalan, 2012).

5 By Way of Conclusion

In this time of crisis of liberal democracy, exacerbated in turn by the systemic and civilising crisis, popular power appears as an emerging social process for the construction of another type of society different from the liberal model. Popular power is thus presented as a complex meta-process with a democratising capacity, in turn comprised of subprocesses that feed off one another and are developed in different spheres and with varying intensity. Thus, popular power as process, project and subject evidences its capacity to integrate and unite different practical and theoretical approaches to overcome differences and seek renewed syntheses in the context of different emancipatory visions.

In terms of the construction of a new type of power, popular power transcends the dichotomy that pits counter-power against dual power, to integrate them into a gradual process of self-construction. It transcends the counter-position of the destituent, instituent and constituent powers to place them in dynamic relationship in a process based on a dialectic of self-constituent conflict. It transcends the idea of the reform of power and of the taking of power, via the process of construction of power itself. It also transcends the debate of state or no state, opting for work with, from and beyond the state, in other words, seeing work from the state as yet another battlefield, but always placing emphasis on the construction of the new institutionalities of the emerging popular power.

With regard to popular power as a project, via the different practices of popular power, forms, values and content are being created for a communal democracy that would transcend liberal democracy. Beyond presenting a finished model, the actual practices of direct participation, management, administration, debate, information, awareness-raising and self-organisation are prefiguring other democratic forms as present trials for the future. Thus, not only can popular power become a collective and unifying space to fight against different axes of the system of multiple dominations, but it can also constitute a space for the construction of subjects and projects for processes of emancipation, in other words, to drive a system of multiple emancipations.

With reference to the idea of subject, popular power offers very open and dynamic possibilities for the construction of a new emancipatory subject. This new subject is constructed on the basis of different situated and specific identities that arise in each different axis of domination but suggest the need and capacity to articulate and integrate the diversity of the different oppressed subjects in order to generate a new unifying emancipatory identity.

Thus, popular power as process, project and subject is based on the increase in its own capacities in the process of interaction between autonomy, self-management, self-determination, self-organisation and self-defence, which will deepen the possibility of constructing a comprehensive community government in political and productive, in social and cultural terms, as dynamic and continuous self-construction. It provides a living, collective space for the construction of alternatives in the face of different social, political and economic crises.