Withdrawal from the state cedes terrain to power---it’s unsustainable and inevitably co-opted

(Nick and Alex, “Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work,” Kindle Book)

Other movements argue for an approach of withdrawal, whereby individuals exit from existing social institutions. Horizontalism is closely linked to this approach, being predicated on the rejection of existing institutions and the creation of autonomous forms of community. Indeed, the recent history of activism has tended towards such approaches. 95 Often these approaches are explicitly opposed to complex societies, meaning that the ultimate implied destination is some form of communitarianism or anarcho-primitivism. 96 Others suggest making oneself invisible in order to evade detection and repression by the state. 97 At the extreme, some argue for what amounts to a left-wing survivalism: civilisation is in catastrophe, 98 and we should therefore become invisible, 99 retreat to small communes, 100 and learn how to grow food, hunt, heal and defend ourselves. 101 If left at the level of survivalism, these kinds of positions, while perhaps unappealing, would at least have some consistency. They at least have the virtue of being open about their implications. However, arguments for withdrawal and exit too easily confuse the idea of a social logic separate from capitalism with a social logic that is antagonistic to capitalism – or, in an even stronger claim, that poses a threat to capitalist logics. 102 Yet capitalism has been and will continue to be compatible with a wide range of different practices and autonomous spaces. The Spanish town of Marinaleda offers a useful example of this. Over the course of three decades, this small community (pop. 2,700) has built up a ‘communist utopia’ that has expropriated land, built its own housing and co-operatives, kept living costs low, and provided work for everyone. Yet the limits of such an approach for transforming capitalism are quickly revealed: housing materials are provided by the regional government, agricultural subsidies come from the European Union, jobs are sustained by the rejection of labour-saving devices, income still comes from selling goods on wider capitalist markets, and businesses remain subjected to capitalist competition and the global financial crisis. 103 Marinaleda is but one example of how the project of withdrawing, escaping or exiting from capitalism is still contained within a folk-political horizon, within which defending small bunkers of autonomy against the onslaught of capitalism is the best that can be hoped for. Yet we would argue not only that more can be hoped for (and achieved), but that, in the absence of broad and systematic contention, even those small pockets of resistance are likely to be swiftly eradicated.