Liberal and mainstream Marxist theories assume that no politics can exist without
a state. Indeed, the main goal of classical Marxist politics is the conquest
of state power, whether it be via violent revolution alone, or through a combination
of force and persuasion, as in Gramscian theories of hegemony. While liberal
politics and theory are (these days!) non-revolutionary, they also focus on
the state, hoping, through slow reform, to ameliorate some of the worst excesses
of capitalism, patriarchy, racism, etc., without challenging the existence and
operation of these forms of oppression as such.
The polities in which we are interested break with both of these traditions
in orienting to how communities can be linked, and progressive change achieved,
without recourse to state structures. Protest movements emerging in the late
1990s, such as those associated with anti-globalization,
have taken on summit/convergence models that mimic those of the system of states,
but are crucially different in that they are non-authoritarian, decentralized,
and non-hierarchical. Federations such as People’s
Global Alliance and <Via Campesina> use a similar model for more sustained
work, and are, as their names sometimes suggest, global in scope. Anarchists,
of course, have long been theorizing and attempting to create non-statist federations,
from the work of Kropotkin and Proudhon,
up to present day experiments such as NEFAC
and FRAC. Indigenous peoples around the world
have also made extremely important contributions to the development of alternative
polities, as evidenced by the Iroquois Federation
of North America, the autonomous zones of the Zapatistas,
and the work of theorists such as Taiaiake Alfred
The links below lead to more detailed discussions of these, and other experiments
and theorizations of alternative polities.