Charting a Communal-Ecological Path: Beyond the Growth Fetish

The concept of generalised autogestion, particularly as developed in the work of Henri Lefebvre, offers an important vantage point from which to critically examine a potential communal-ecological path to socialism inspired in large part by István Mészáros’s work on the communal system. To properly situate the ecological aspect of the communal system, however, it is first necessary to address the issue of growth/degrowth as it is frequently conceived—and indeed misconceived—within various strands of Marxism in the face of the current planetary crisis. Only then can we orient a genuinely communal-ecological path, geared not to growth or degrowth, but to sustainable human development.

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Research and analysis to provoke public awareness and critical thinking

We contribute to the liberalisation of the democratic instituions of society, for they have been captured by the owners of the market. They work in tandem with their market agents, who, posing as public servants, are entrenched in the halls of government. The political class has betrayed its public mandate and instead operates to impose a marketocratic state to maximise the shareholder value of the institutional investors of international financial markets. They own the global corporations and think they own the world on behalf of their very private interest.

Our spheres of action: true democracy – true sustainability – living wage – basic income – inequality – ecological footprint – degrowth – global warming –human development – corporate accountability – civil, political, economic, social, cultural and environmental rights, responsible consumption, sustainable autonomous citizen cells...

Parting from an ethos of true democracy and true sustainability, We, the citizenry, work to advance the paradigm whose only purpose is to go in pursuit of the welfare of People and Planet and NOT the market.

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• © The Jus Semper Global Alliance

Land, Cooperation, and Socialism

Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) is Latin America’s largest social movement, having struggled for decades for a people’s agrarian reform and social justice in Brazil. Since its foundation in the early 1980s, the MST has combined land occupations, cooperative work, political education, and internationalism to challenge the country’s highly concentrated latifundia system and resist the expansion of agribusiness. The movement has developed a model of collective struggle rooted in solidarity and mass mobilisation, organising hundreds of thousands of families in rural Brazil. When MST occupies a tract of underutilised or idle land, it first establishes an acampamento (encampment). An acampamento is a direct-action method of pressuring the government to redistribute land in keeping with Brazil’s agrarian reform laws. During this period, the movement organises political education, collective work, and self-governance.

If the struggle succeeds, the acampamento will transition into an assentamento (settlement), now recognised and legalised by the state, and therefore more stable. Like acampamentos, assentamentos are collective projects, even if the families in them maintain individual parcels. In an assentamento, the land cannot be bought or sold. It technically belongs to the state but is managed by the collective or by what could be called the commune. Assentamentos are also self-governed, administer much of their own justice, and self-manage their educational processes. In short, both acampamentos and assentamentos express a high degree of communal control over their production and day-to-day life.

Beyond the struggle for land, the MST works to confront broader capitalist dynamics by embracing agroecology, cooperative production, and political education. All these are elements of what the movement calls a “people’s agrarian reform.” The idea of the “people’s agrarian reform” is that, in a world where financial capital and multinational corporations dominate agriculture, it is not enough to secure land for the landless. One must also develop an alternative model of production and life, embodying socialist and ecological principles.

In this interview, João Pedro Stedile, a key spokesperson and founder of the MST, discusses the movement’s emphasis on collective struggle and solidarity, the challenges of organising cooperative production, and the evolution of the MST’s goals in response to the changing capitalist economy. He also examines the MST’s strategy of building alliances between the rural and urban working class and its engagement with international struggles, particularly with the communal movement in Venezuela. At a time when capitalism is deepening both inequalities and ecological destruction, the MST’s experiences and proposals offer valuable insights into the building of a socialist future

—C. G. & C. P. M. _________________________________
 

Subverting green growth propaganda: Degrowth, autonomous struggle, and media
 

AKC Collective (2023) has recently invited degrowth scholarship to engage with autonomous struggles in less abstract ways, specifically pointing at its tendency to “certify” rather than learn with and from them. Echoing this invitation, we suggest that an (eco)anarchist approach to corporate media may help to understand the creation and resilience of green growth narratives. We demonstrate this in the case of anti-mining struggles around Lützerath, Germany, where we explore the role of integrative propaganda (Ellul, 1965/1973) in managing this socio-ecological conflict. Building on ethnographic research, we identify and illustrate dominant narratives on a corporate-state agreement known as the “RWE-deal,” Lützerath’s symbolism, and left extremism; all of which omit, distort, and distract from the dissent emerging from Lützerath. We then analyze these dominant narratives as (un)intentionally manipulated by exploring news production at Rheinische Post Media Group through Herman and Chomsky’s (1988/2002) Propaganda Model. Building on a discussion around dominant narratives as a form of psychological warfare, we draw out how dominant narratives are intertwined and rely on centring the lifestyle and culture of Lützerath’s inhabitants to secure green growth narratives. We then elaborate on how cherishing the practice of re-inhabiting can help scholars in engagements with autonomous struggle.

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Systemic Strategies for a Complex Transition
 

This post summarises my talk on 11 July 2025 at the Summer Course of the University of Cadiz, Remedies for a Planet in Crisis. The talk was entitled Strategies for another possible energy model for other possible worlds. It came after those of Antonio Turiel, Alicia Valero, Ferran Puig, Antonio Aretxabala and José Luis Yeltes, who had already clearly defined the problems of energy, material and ecosystemic limits. This presentation aimed to identify solutions, and I used system dynamics tools to do so.

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The Grammar of Resistance: Rethinking Palestine Beyond Pity and Fear

It has become increasingly difficult to speak of Palestine without falling into one of the two dominant registers of Western discourse: on one side, a humanitarianism that evokes compassion but leaves structures of domination untouched; on the other, a strategic realism that calculates but cannot imagine. In both cases, Palestinian resistance is hollowed out—reduced to emotional pathology or excluded from the realm of political rationality. When it is not pitied, it is criminalised. And more and more often, this criminalisation bears the familiar marks of Islamophobia: resistance is framed as terrorism, survival as threat, and thought as potential radicalisation.

Yet, as pro-Gaza demonstrations multiply across Europe—often marked by a belated, conditional, and at times self-exculpatory awakening of conscience—there remains a lesson no intermittent outrage can obscure: Palestinian resistance preceded this moment, persists through it, and will endure beyond it not as a desperate reaction, but as a proposition for the world. It is a resistance that thinks, creates, and envisions futures. It seeks no approval from above but calls upon every political conscience unwilling to surrender to the imperial order.

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Venezuela's Communal Project

Unequal exchange is a key concept in Marxist critiques of the capitalist global system, proposing that uneven development between the global core and periphery is driven by the core's retention of a substantial portion of value produced in the periphery. This occurs by establishing average global profit rates and international market prices across the global market despite stark wage disparities. Today, global trade inequality and value transfers largely stem from multinational corporations relocating production to periphery countries, where similar productivity levels are achieved, butwage disparities only grow. These terms of trade underscore the supremacy of the law of capitalist accumulation over a monopoly driven global economic order. Mexico's export manufacturing sector illustrates this pattern, with productivity levels comparable to those in the United States yet a widening wage gap. This study highlights that wage disparities are crucial for monopoly capital accumulation, resulting in diminished wages and precarious social conditions in Mexico, with a labour value drainage of $135 billion dollars in 2023, representing 7.5% of its GDP.

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Degrowth and flourishing, or stay the same and perish along or stay the way

If we truly desire a dignified and thriving future for generations to come, we have no choice but to degrow by decisively eliminating our consumerist culture
 

So far this century, in a sector already fully aware of the planetary crisis, ordinary citizens have been called upon with increasing frequency to reduce their consumption urgently. We call for cutting fossil fuel consumption, abandoning them and replacing them with renewable energies, eliminating our consumerist habits, caring for nature, our entire planet, Gaia. However, we have not managed to transcend the citizen's maginary to become aware that either we cut our consumption or we will face an enormous existential risk. This is because capital has systematically prevented this, alienating us from our essence. This not only alienates us in our work and social relationships, from our sense of identity with the community to which we belong and with nature, of which our species is a part, but also prevents us from talking about the impact of the capitalist system on our planet, our home. Indeed, capitalism alienates us from our essence, harassing societies daily with its Promethean discourse that everything can be achieved through technology, that happiness lies in having—not in being—and that we must therefore strive to possess and consume.

The fact is that the vast majority of studies published by the scientific community have consistently sounded the alarm throughout this century, warning that unless we urgently change the unsustainable course we are currently on under capitalism, we will face planetary catastrophes not only from climate change, the most visible of these, but from eight other essential planetary processes that provide the conditions necessary for life to flourish and be sustained. If we fail to do so, as early as 2040, we will face multiple catastrophes that will cause perhaps millions, if not billions, of human deaths in the decades that follow. Likewise, we are well on the way to bringing about the sixth mass extinction of species and the probable extinction of life on the planet, as known to those who survive. This constitutes the collapse of civilisation and an enormous existential risk. A collapse which, ironically, is being brought about directly by the very civilisation that is so often touted—preeminently Western civilisation—because of its capitalist, warmongering, colonialist, and racist nature, the emblem of which is undoubtedly the United States. 

This essay is based on the geocratic paradigm I have been developing since 2020, which proposes reorganising ourselves to take care of our planet. To take care of us, it is necessary to put the planet's needs before our own. The latest version of Geocratia can be found here.

This essay focuses on demonstrating that it is perfectly possible to reverse the dystopian trajectory we are on, and that this is done by applying market logic through the exercise of our power of consumption. First, it is argued that it is clearly possible to greatly reduce our planet's response to the crisis the capitalocene has brought it into, after having enjoyed the equilibrium it maintained throughout the Holocene. This is achieved by changing our way of life, through a cultural shift, by decreasing our consumption of resources to styles that allow us to fully enjoy life while taking care of the planet, staying within the planetary boundaries necessary for its stability, and living much better by consuming less of everything. In Geocratia, degrowth is a consequence of cultural change and not a model or an end in itself. The end is to save ourselves by saving our planet by replacing capitalism. Second, there is a clear way to convince the majority needed to materialise such a change, by replacing the dystopian trajectory we are unconsciously following through the subterfuge of the culture of consumerism. This happens by following market logic, adopting a new culture of sustainable consumption aimed at satisfying our real and universal needs, and discarding everything the market instils in us about what we must consume, even if it is absolutely unnecessary and harmful to people and the planet. Indeed, market logic is the only one that significantly influences government decision-making, because by adopting the new geocratic consumer culture, the blow to the system is direct, forcing governments to change the bulk of their economic, social and environmental policies for the benefit of people and planet and to the detriment of capital. Moreover, regardless of the pace at which governments replace their policies, people and the planet will benefit from the fall in consumption. Finally, applying market logic, it also opens the door to organising ourselves in rural and urban geocratic communities under different forms of social organisation (nation, province, municipality, city, community, village...), beyond the increasingly obsolete concept of the nation-state

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Geocratia, the Paradigm that Pursues the Well-being of People and the Planet, Not the Market

Organising to save ourselves by saving the planet is the most important thing we will ever undertake in our lives; it is our last chance to have a future

From the moment I became aware of the planetary crisis, back in 2010, I began reflecting and imagining how we humans could live in harmony with nature. I was alarmed that, given the path we are currently on, it seems impossible for our species to remain within the planetary boundaries necessary for the reproduction and sustainability of life and health on our home, planet Earth. After much research and interaction with a community increasingly concerned about the planetary crisis, in 2020, I published a proposal to imagine and suggest how to abandon the current paradigm. It is about moving towards a vision that guarantees a dignified, pleasant and sustainable life for future generations by caring for Gaia, our planet's biosphere, to maintain the conditions necessary for the flourishing and conservation of all forms of life. Geocratia is a practical concept whose dialectic directly contrasts with the current market-driven paradigm; therefore, it must be concluded that it is anti-capitalist by nature. Five years later, after observing how those in absolute control of the reins of power insist on maintaining the same trajectory that ensures a high existential risk to humans and non-humans, I am reviewing and deepening the geocratic proposal. This is reinforced by commentary from colleagues and by new research published by a variety of authors, confirming that humanity's current trajectory is leading us straight to our final cliff. The first part situates us in the context in which we find ourselves, from a political, ecological, economic, and consumer perspective. The second part presents the proposal to transition to Geocratia in its symbiosis with the Gaia hypothesis, its structure and the practical way to implement it. It concludes by suggesting how to take the first step at the community level, raising awareness and forming citizen cells, the most basic and organic form of transitioning to Geocratia.

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«Geocratia proposes to establish a social contract with our planet»

A conversation with his ideologue

On the occasion of the publication of his latest essay (2026), Geocratia, the paradigm that goes for the welfare of people and the planet and not the market, we wanted to talk to the Mexican author to explore his original political proposal.

Introductory biography
Álvaro de Regil Castilla is the executive director of the Jus Semper Global Alliance. This organisation has been promoting living wages as the basis of any sustainable and democratic society since 2003. He launched the Living Wages North andSouth (TLWNSI) initiative, an international benchmark in denouncing unequal exchange through labour arbitration in global supply chains generated by corporate globalisation. He is also a founding member of the International Living Wage Observatory (OISAD) at La Salle University in Mexico City.

Since 2015, his work has centred on promoting the need to build the imaginary of a new paradigm for the well-being of people and planet in a truly democratic environment, free from capitalism. As part of this transformative concept, he works in the fields of labour rights, business and human rights, degrowth/steady-state economics, basic income, and the drastic reduction of humanity's environmental footprint as the only way to achieve the sustainability of life on our home planet, Earth.

Alvaro is also a contributor to the vision and transformative praxis of the Great Transition Initiative at the Tellus Institute in Boston, Massachusetts, and a consultant on the underlying causes of immigration with several community organisations in California and with California Lutheran University.

Starting concepts
Laura G. Vales: Five years have passed since you wrote the first version of Geocratia, a proposal that now has a much more forged structure. How would you summarise this paradigm for a citizenry that already perceives that the current system is in crisis, but does not know where to look?

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