Worldwide Proletariat and Concrete Utopia

Miquel Amorós’s text on “practical anarchism” and “concrete utopia” arises out of a matter that deserves discussion: what we ought to do when revolution looks like a distant prospect, when the old workers’ movement had suffered historic defeats and, at the same time, when the crisis in society and ecological destruction are getting worse.

There are a few important facets to Amorós’s response. His rejection of parliamentarism, productivism and unlimited growth, as well as his championing of autonomy, cooperation and the ability to get to grips in the here and now with the necessities of everyday living, add up to factors not to be pooh-poohed. The problem arises when the crisis within the old workers’ movement is construed as the disappearance of the proletariat and when community experiences take the place of an overall revolutionary outlook.

Capitalism’s transformation does, to be sure, require us to overhaul our traditional image of the proletariat. But that is not to say that the proletariat is no more.

A proletariat that has been globalized

The proletariat cannot be assumed to be the same as the stable industrial worker, concentrated in some huge European factory. That figure was of crucial importance, but it never was the last word when it came to the reality of the working class.

Over recent decades, production has shifted to far-off regions around the world, production lines have internationalized and work has been fragmented. Millions of workers have switched from farming to industry and the service sector, whilst further millions have quit their countries and regions of birth in search of work elsewhere.

Migrant workers are not a phenomenon unconnected with the class issue. They are one of the expressions of the formation of a global labour market. Capital can move goods, investments and centres of production around the global stage, whilst millions of workers cross borders, subject to legislation that leaves them particularly vulnerable. Migrant workers find work in farming, construction, the hospitality sector, care sector, logistics, transport and industry. Often they are paid lower wages, enjoy less security of employment and lack the same protection afforded to home-grown workers. 

All of which suggests that the proletariat is not disappearing but is undergoing change and globalization.

Today’s working class is more heterogeneous, more fragmented and is proving harder to organize. But that very fragmentation is one of the issues that any revolutionary approach is going to have to contend with. There is no ready-made worldwide proletarian consciousness. Nor does the fact of objectively belonging to a class automatically make its members revolutionaries. The divisions between workers, different pay-rates, borders and national identities are exploited by capital in order to sustain the fragmentation.

Territory no substitute for class

Amorós correctly points out that many underlying conflicts are no longer confined to the factory premises. Housing, care, food, health, transport and territorial defence are crucial theatres of struggle these days.

The fight against evictions, housing speculation or to defend a public service can represent a profoundly proletarian struggle. But we must not get territory muddled up with the social agent doing the fighting.

But simply being organized differently does not place a community outside of capitalism. 

There is the need for money, to buy goods and sell goods and pay rents or compete in the market and all of these are still subject to capitalist relations. A cooperative may organize work along democratic lines and yet find itself obliged to compete and boost its productivity or reduce its costs just to survive.

Which is not to say that cooperatives, squatting, support networks or community experiences are worthless. They can provide scope for struggle and organizing. The issue is if it helps boost the collective ability to stand up to the market, ownership and the State, or they may end up as tiny spaces doomed only to reproduce themselves under the umbrella of those same relations.

The “concrete utopia” makes sense when talking about making a start on effecting change in life in the here and now. A homeless person cannot be expected to wait for the revolution before organizing himself. But neither can we turn every local experience into an alternative capable of taking the place of an overall change. 

A squat may sort out an accommodation issue, but on its own it does not cure the housing problem. A cooperative may organize some activity collectively, but it cannot do away with the market. A community may build solidarity-based relationships, but it cannot do away with the State.

Whenever such experiences try to expand to the point where they are actually questioning existing relations, they stop being mere alternatives and come into conflict with the forces that sustain them.

The 1936 experience

The Spanish revolution of 1936-37 showed this contradiction.

In July 1936, the workers defeated an army revolt in Barcelona and elsewhere. Committees were set up, militias raised and collectivizations carried out. For a while, the workers’ effective capability profoundly curtailed the authority of republican institutions.

However, the State had not left the stage.

The CNT leadership plumped for antifascist partnership and participation in republican institutions. The agencies thrown up by the revolution were not orchestrated so as to substitute a general organization of the workers’ power for the authority of the State. The State was able to re-establish itself and recapture lost ground. 

The events of May 1937 demonstrated the consequences of that situation. The committees were overruled and the revolutionary organizations repressed. 

The lesson did not boil down to mechanically copying the solutions proposed at the time by the Friends of Durruti, but rather was a reminder that a revolution may conjure up scope for extraordinary autonomy whilst simultaneously leaving the power with the capability of destroying them untouched. 

Neither State nor isolation

Rejecting that conclusion is not tantamount to championing the Party-State nor bureaucratic nationalization of the economy. Emancipation cannot be the doing of an organization that stands in for those doing the fighting.

But likewise, a permanent smattering of tiny communities does not look like an adequate answer to bureaucracy.

Capital is organized on a global scale. Its companies, States, financial institutions and machinery of coercion operate in a coordinated manner. In the face of such organization, fragmentation of those doing the struggling cannot be allowed to become a political principle. 

The autonomy that is needed is the autonomy of those who struggle against the State, capital and the organizations that purport to represent them. Such autonomy is no barrier to coordination. The opposite: it cries out for forms of association capable of overcoming the divisions between sectors, territories and countries, without conjuring up a brand-new separate authority.

And this is where the existence of a worldwide proletariat assumes its full importance.

The workforce of some Asian factory, some European warehouse, some farm, some hospital, some logistical platform or care service may find themselves faced with very different circumstances, but they all share the same overall dependent relations vis à vis capital. 

Migration offers particularly striking proof of this unity. The worker who crosses a border in order to sell his labour is still part of the working class in the location he is moving to. The division between homegrown workers and migrants actually serves to thwart the emergence of any such shared interests.

A revolutionary outlook

The merit of Amorós’s approach is that it reminds us that we cannot keep putting off the transformation of life indefinitely. Concrete experiences, cooperation and autonomy are called for.

Its limitations emerge only when such experiences turn into substitutes for a comprehensive transformation.

The proletariat has not gone away. It has been transformed, fragmented and globalized. The migrations of millions of workers, the internationalization of production lines and the spread of precariousness in employment are all part of that transformation.

Labour, territorial, urban, ecological and reproductive disputes may, today, articulate class antagonism in ways that differ from the traditional way. But their power to emancipate will hinge upon their ability to break out of their isolation and get to grips with the social relations that give rise to them. 

It is not a question of choosing between State bureaucracy or isolated community. Nor between waiting for a future revolution and making do with administering little gobbets of autonomy.

The point is to use current struggles to build up a collective capability that can surmount borders and divisions that fragment the proletariat and to come to grips with property, the market and the State.
The concrete utopia may be a foretaste of other social relationships. Community experiences may help build these. But none of them can take the place of the mandatory fight to transform the relations that render exploitation possible.

This issue remains how the worldwide proletariat, which is presently highly fragmented, can be turned into a force capable of abolishing the social relations that sustain it as a class.

Agustín Guillamón
Barcelona, 11 August 2026
https://serhistorico.net/2026/08/12/proletariado-mundial-y-utopia-concreta/ 

Translated by: Paul Sharkey.