As proletarian revolutionaries, anarchists are faced with a catch-22: So long as our waking lives are spent working to afford to live, we lack the time for political resistance, let alone joyous whimsy. And so long as proletarians depend on their families to support them, they will be dominated by the orthodoxies of gender and politics that those families enforce. Communes and the Social Strike is both a theory and a how-to guide for the communes that could be our way out of this predicament.
Communes and the Social Strike is divided into 3 chapters. Chapter 1, The Big Picture, lays out the present state of the anarchist movement in the 21st century, the historian Mike Duncan’s ur-revolutionary model, and applies it specifically to anarchist prefigurative politics. Chapter 2, The Role of Communes in the Social Strike, gets into the role of communes as a prefigurative structure that seek to transform society, not just withdraw from it, and how they can become needed sites of desertion and refuge for queer (particularly trans) exiles or deserters from patriarchal families and communities and cultivate them as a revolutionary social base. Chapter 3, The First Person View, is a how-to guide for those who want to build successful communes of the type the first two chapters argue for, covering practicalities like location, choosing comrades, financing, and networking.
Covering the topic from the theoretical heights to practical minutia, this book is an indispensable read for anyone who wants to understand the prospects for communes as a means of prefigurative social change, or is interested in starting one themselves.