Lived experience as a source of knowledge. What has the room been through? What do participants already know from the inside?
See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.
Almost everyone has practiced anarchism without calling it that: helping a neighbor with nothing expected back, sharing tools or food, running a group where everyone had a say, showing up when a storm or a crisis hit and the official help did not. This lens starts from those experiences, because the strongest evidence that people can cooperate without bosses is that they already do. It then turns to first-person accounts from the great experiments, so the room can hear what self-management felt like from the people who lived it.
Anchor questions
Sample prompts to open experiential work in this theme. Adapt to your room. See the facilitator guide for general guidance on experiential prompts.
- Who has helped you when you had nothing to give back? Who have you helped that way?
- Have you cooked, cleaned, built, or cared as part of a group, with no one in charge? What was it like?
- Where in your life do you already practice “from each according to ability, to each according to need”?
- Have you been part of a group that made decisions together? What worked, what was hard?
- When the systems failed, a storm, a crisis, a crash, who actually showed up?
- What have you built with others that you were proud of?
Materials that may help
Experiential work begins from the room. These materials extend it with the testimony of people who lived the largest anarchist experiments. All are free unless marked otherwise.
Oral histories and testimonio
- Compañeras: Zapatista Women’s Stories (Hilary Klein, 2015). Oral histories of grandmothers, mothers, and daughters who became Zapatista insurgents, educators, and leaders, gathered over seven years living in Chiapas. First-person accounts of building a new world. No borrowable copy exists. Paywalled: sevenstories.com, and see the note on access for how to get it.
- Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War (Ronald Fraser, 1979). More than three hundred taped interviews with survivors, including detailed testimony on the anarchist collectivization experiments and their internal conflicts. Free to borrow: archive.org
- Black Flags and Windmills (scott crow, 2011). A first-person memoir of co-founding the anarchist-inspired Common Ground Collective in post-Katrina New Orleans, running clinics and neighborhood defense under the banner “Solidarity Not Charity.” A recent, US-based account of mutual aid under pressure. Free to borrow: archive.org
Films
- Living Utopia (Vivir la Utopía) (Juan Gamero, 1997, 95 min). Thirty interviews with surviving participants of the 1936 to 1939 Spanish anarchist collectives, first-person accounts of self-management, mutual aid, and daily life in the revolution. The single best filmed testimony for this theme. Free: youtube.com/watch?v=gxRXtWvWCuY
- A Place Called Chiapas (Nettie Wild, 1998, 93 min). A firsthand look at the Zapatista communities in the years after the 1994 uprising, including a rare interview with Subcomandante Marcos. Streams on Kanopy with a library card, or on Netflix and Vimeo; details at imdb.com.
A note on method
The point of this lens is recognition: to help the room see that the cooperation they already practice is not naive or marginal but the seed of a whole politics. The testimony from Spain and Chiapas is not there to romanticize, those experiments had real conflicts and real defeats, but to show that ordinary people have run their own lives at scale, and that what felt impossible was once, somewhere, ordinary.
Status
First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Contributions welcome, especially first-person accounts from contemporary mutual-aid networks, cooperatives, and intentional communities.