Anarcho-communalism: Towards human flourishing and planetary equilibrium
Anarcho-communalism* is a political philosophy grounded in
i) voluntary association,
ii) individual sovereignty, and
iii) the expansion of empathy beyond kin and tribe toward all people.
It holds that coercive hierarchy, whether state, corporate, or cultural, is incompatible with human flourishing. The goal of political organization is thus to create conditions under which people can meet their needs by governing themselves collectively. And in case any person should desire, it must be possible to exit any association that fails them, both without penalty and with a reasonable chance of flourishing elsewhere.
This right to exit is non-negotiable: any collective that cannot be left freely is a cult, and any society that cannot be left freely is a prison. We understand human nature not as fixed but as evolutionarily plastic, and see the expansion of empathy as both the direction of moral progress and a viable political project. We especially recognize low-empathy predators, meaning those who accumulate power at others’ expense, as a phenotype to be constrained by structure rather than punished by law. Identifying low-empathy predators before they gain power over others, whether in public institutions or in familial relations, is a distinct goal achievable through distinct policy changes.
At the very core of what is wrong with the world today lies what is ignored by most political philosophers: the post-colonialism that feeds the imperial core. Extraction from the historically colonized peoples (the “periphery”) is overlooked, whether through ignorance or convenience: cheap labor, raw materials, and financial returns through debt structures, trade agreements, military presence, and currency dominance are the tools that sustain the wealth enabling the rich countries to flourish. Nordic social democracy, American innovation, and European stability are partly enabled through continuous extraction. We ignore this asymmetry, and by this prevent a just world from emerging.
State interventions — military, financial, and political — by the imperial core are rarely motivated by the stated reasons (politicians lie, who knew?). Humanitarian and democratic justifications are offered publicly, but the reality is consistently different: Socialist governments attempting financial independence, land reform, or nationalization of resources are destabilized (leaders assassinated), couped, or invaded because they are in direct opposition to the wealth extraction of the rich countries. The list is very long; some examples: Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954), Iraq (1963), Chile (1973), and Libya (2011). Korean and Vietnam wars, obviously. Continuing today in for example Cuba, Venezuela. DR Congo. Tyranny is besides the point, as many of the installed replacements were far more tyrannical. Western support for brutal dictatorships (e.g., Saudi Arabia) and the settler-colonial apartheid state of Israel receiving unconditional support despite documented war crimes make this an undeniable conclusion. What is targeted is financial autonomy from dollar-denominated debt systems and coercive wealth extraction. The willful ignorance of the above is unforgivable.
The overarching political goal is a global society that allows people the freedom that they desire, only constrained by the harm that their actions may impose on others and on nature. Sustainability must be achieved. It is imperative for our long-term habitation of the planet that we stop expecting growth, be it economic, resource use, or population size. Everyone must be cared for, as they can if we were to distribute current resources fairly. The inequality is driven by our emotional roots of greed and fear. These two ancient emotions continue to suppress our empathy, to crush systems that aim to free us from ourselves.
The direction is not unprecedented. Where war has been abolished between former enemies, where poverty has been reduced, and where basic rights have been extended, the general sentiment is that life is better for it. Even those most skeptical of change rarely argue for its reversal. The arc is not inevitable, but it is visible. We are, after all, not proposing something alien to human experience, but the extension of our humanity.
But such lofty goals are routinely dismissed citing the impossibility of ever arriving there. Admittedly the structural changes needed to take society there are immense. We should, for instance, not expect people to suddenly accept having to consider the plight of people they have never met, if that is a completely new radius of caring for them, or if they cannot imagine the benefits to themselves across perceived borders. Greed and fear is the basis for much of human interactions, shrinking the circle of empathy, pitting the in-group against the rest of the world. But consider that we are already better than what we used to be. Rampant tribalism ruled the day in our past, and war has been the norm for thousands of years. It is only in recent times that even the idea of forceful exploitation has been frowned upon. People massively engaged in helping others was simply not the common notion that it is today. This fact points to a light at the end of a dark tunnel that we are currently moving through.
We cannot be certain how to get where we want to go, but we believe that the following proposals for policy changes are both achievable and beneficial on their own, and in aggregate likely to accomplish this goal. Some policies are interdependent and impossible to implement without prior changes, and all of them will upset the status quo and the people in power who benefit from continuing inequality and power imbalance. Most of us could live with a radical global redesign.
Policies
Description
Rationale
Climate action
Immediate transition off fossil fuels; renewable infrastructure; ecological limits
Existential envelope within which all other policies operate; implementation both depends on and constrains all policies
Degrowth
Deliberate reduction of material output and consumption; redistribution of surplus rather than expansion of total
Growth does not resolve inequality, but serves low-empathy predators; required for planetary equilibrium
Public essential services
Abolition of for-profit provision of water, energy, housing, transport, healthcare, telecommunications, internet, food systems, waste management, banking, insurance, postal services, social care, childcare, legal services, media infrastructure
Too important to be governed by profit motive or left to the capricious control of low-empathy predators; they are not products, but conditions for human flourishing; their provision must be governed by need and collective accountability
Universal basic income
Unconditional income floor for all
Decouples survival from employment; enables genuine exit from coercive situations; reduces existential anxiety
Universal education
Collectively funded; core curriculum includes epistemology, rationality, statistics, basic psychology including identification of low-empathy predators, critical thinking, and media literacy
Builds cognitive infrastructure for self-governance; expands empathy radius; addresses ignorance sustaining religion, magical thinking, hierarchy, and low-empathy predators
Free information
Open access to knowledge; radical transparency of all institutions
Undermines epistemic asymmetry that low-empathy predators depend on; prerequisite for informed participatory governance
Labor unions
Collective worker organization and bargaining rights
Immediate power redistribution within existing structures; transitional tool toward worker ownership
Worker cooperatives
Common ownership and democratic control of workplaces
Erodes private accumulation incrementally; destination that labor unions help make viable
Land trusts
Community ownership of land removed from speculative markets
Decouples housing and agriculture from profit motive
Participatory budgeting
Direct democratic control over public resources at local level
Builds practical self-governance capacity; prerequisite for deeper decentralization
Localism
All decisions made at lowest viable level
Erodes central state power; builds toward anarcho-communal self-organization
Restorative justice
Conflict resolution focused on repair, accountability, and reintegration rather than punishment
Dismantles punitive carceral logic incrementally; consistent with empathy-expansion goal
Drug decriminalization
Removal of criminal penalties for personal drug use and possession; treatment framed as healthcare not criminal justice
Drug dependency is a health condition, not a moral failing; users are not criminals but people in need of care; criminalization disproportionately captures the vulnerable, not low-empathy predators
Animal rights
Legal recognition of sentience in non-human animals; prohibition of factory farming, animal experimentation for non-essential purposes, and exploitation for entertainment
Empathy radius expansion does not stop at the species boundary; sentient beings capable of suffering have claims on our moral consideration
International conflict resolution
Binding international law prohibiting armed conflict; mandatory disarmament under international oversight; military infrastructure converted to social and ecological uses
War is a failure of conflict resolution; bombing children is unacceptable; removes the material means of predatory dominance
Lottocracy
Randomly selected decision-makers replacing elected politicians at all levels
Structurally resistant to capture by low-empathy predators; viable once material security and education are established
UN reform
Abolition of permanent Security Council membership and veto rights; equal representation and voting weight for all nations; strengthened enforcement capacity; transitional institution toward eventual dissolution of nation-states
Current UN structure enshrines the dominance of the most powerful predator-states; reform makes the institution harder to capture
These policies are a best effort, not the final word. They are proposals grounded in the best available evidence and reasoning, offered in the spirit of the rationality that underlies this entire framework: the primacy of observation, a willingness to update, and no claim to certainty beyond what the evidence warrants. Some policies will prove more viable than others and will require revision as conditions change or as better alternatives emerge. The rational framework is fixed; the policies are not. Suggestions are welcome.
Bjørn Østman, Svendborg, June 2026.
* The term anarcho-communalism has appeared in prior usage with a different meaning. I use it here with a specific definition derived from the framework above, and readers familiar with the earlier usage are invited to treat mine as a distinct formulation.
Leftistism.
I am not sure "degrowth" is needed or maybe needs a clearer definition: Because with technological advances, growth (under a sustainability limit) is possible, and to a certain degree does scientific and technological progress build or somewhat demand growth ...