The collective associations that have emerged throughout history to meet the needs of workers and, in general, expropriated workers are as old as humanity. The modern precursors of these groupings arise when in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a new offensive of capital occurs: the industrial revolution, which goes from an economy based on artisanal and rural production to a more competitive accumulation regime. The scarce living conditions caused by this emerging capitalism were common, such as cooperative workers ' associations, popular cooperation funds to combat disease and occupational risks, grass-roots associations, trade unions or workers ' parties to obtain consumer goods at a reasonable price.

Today, although the structural reasons that prevent us from carrying out our lives in a stimulating way are still very similar, today’s growing complexity shows us multiple but totally intertwined faces. The executioner has thousands of faces, the Red Winter said. So from feminism and environmentalism and other popular movements, we are warned that we are in a multiple crisis that leads us to collapse as a civilization. Because capital is trying to encompass all aspects of our lives in order to guarantee their reproductive conditions, although this has led to widespread precariousness. David Harvey theorizes accumulation by expropriation.

To combat it, when we gather in the neighborhood assembly, when we create a union house, when we defend our mountains and other commons, when we create spaces of free culture or when we do the neighborhood work, why don't we get together, as we did once, to produce goods that directly affect our lives, but that today depend on capital? This is where many popular cooperatives, associations and other popular associations are immersed, which deepen the path of emancipation. These are democratizing initiatives created by citizens to influence food, energy, housing, technology, telecommunications and other critical sectors, that is, collective initiatives to empower and recover expropriated people out of the logic and control of capital.

Faced with the change in the economic structure that may entail the increase in raw materials and international production, the bottlenecks of distribution, climate change, etc., we will have to be attentive to the exploits that want to take on the term: sovereignty is not to break any kind of indigenous production, that is, to precipitate our capitalism over the outside. Sovereignty is a non-capitalist proposal that should involve popular control, democratic management and universal access, based on self-training. In short, sovereignty focuses on the ability to decide and influence the issues that affect each people or community; it is as complicated and simple as owning ourselves.

We therefore come together and discuss the way forward: Do we want to leave control of what has a critical influence on our lives to what simply seeks to maximize economic profitability? Or do we want to empower ourselves collectively to make our lives more livable? We will always discuss, but we will come soon, because we are late.