Organizing for Autonomy

History, Theory, and Strategy for Collective Liberation

CounterPower

• Publisher: Common Notions
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781942173397
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

“How can we get free? How can we free ourselves, our communities, our environments, our society? Our present is infused with incredible possibilities for realizing a free association of social individuals, sustainably regulating our relations within nature. Yet the material possibilities for the realization of this freedom remain trapped within a present that summons all available weapons of repression to contain and suppress it

“The question of freedom is central to all revolutionary movements. It is at the root of everyday struggles to resist and overcome oppression. Often, the realities we face constrain how we understand this question, so we ask it in pieces. How do we provide for each other? How do we protect, nurture, care, love, create? These questions of survival and perseverance ask how we liberate ourselves from the hardships of enclosure, exploitation, and dependency that are imposed on our minds, bodies, communities, and environments.”

By laying bare the mechanisms of capitalism, imperialism, settler colonialism, climate catastrophe, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, exploitation and dispossesion, and a range of other oppressive structures and countering them with a historical account of revolutionary movements from around the world, Organizing for Autonomy offers a brazen and determined articulation of a world that centers community, love, and justice.

With an unparalleledbreadth and by synthesizing innumerable sources of revolutionary thought and history, CounterPower presents the result of years of inquiry, struggle, and resistance. Bold, fearless, and radically original, Organizing for Autonomy imagines a decolonized, communist, alternative world order that is free from oppressive structures, state violence, and racial capitalism and helps us to get there.

1

The Weapon of Theory

1.1: Power to the People

Our communist politics is grounded by a process of militant research, whose goal is to assist in the formation of a collective revolutionary subject. To be revolutionary, this subject must have the capacity to overthrow and abolish all forms of oppression and be capable of constructing a communal social system. The communist movement has historically identified the global working class, or proletariat, as the subject capable of accomplishing this task. Capitalism creates this class by dispossessing masses of people of all independent means of existence. This class owns nothing but its capacity to work (or its labor-power). From the standpoint of the proletariat, we are compelled to sell our labor-power to the capitalist class in exchange for a wage in order to survive.

The worker occupies a uniquely strategic position within the capitalist world-economy: capital depends upon the exploitation of labor-power and the indirect social cooperation of our class in order to produce and circulate commodities. Organized autonomously at the point of production, the worker can break the power of capital and the state, seize the means of social (re)production, and reorganize society to meet human needs directly. The victory of the world proletariat can herald our self-abolition as a class and indeed the end of all class hierarchies.

However, the proletariat is internally stratified into several modes of life, each with their own distinct standpoint.¹ Workers, the unemployed and those rendered unemployable, people dependent upon wage-earners, people only partially dependent upon wages for their survival, people earning wages in illicit and unsanctioned markets, people working for themselves but beholden to a capitalist market that offers only exploitatively low prices; there are many different ways that actual people entangled within the capitalist world-economy might still bring them into the general orbit of what we consider to be the proletariat. In order to bring these various social groups together as a collective revolutionary subject, processes of political recomposition are required which recognize, for example, the racialized and gendered character of class exploitation.

Yet even the unification of the many proletarian standpoints into an autonomous social class—no small accomplishment!—does not address the multiple struggles for liberation emanating from indigenist, decolonial, antiracist, feminist, democratic, and ecological movements. This is why we need a holistic materialist framework for militant research: by recognizing the complex intra-actions among multiple spheres of social activity, we not only deepen our understanding of the racialized and gendered character of class exploitation, but also the autonomy of subjectivities emanating from non-economic forms of social activity. The system we face is a system not only of class exploitation, but also heteropatriarchal, colonial, and authoritarian oppression, and the intra-action of these component parts constitutes a complex whole that we call the imperialist world-system. In order to overthrow and abolish this world-system, our movement must fight for the liberation of all oppressed people. We need to build a communist movement of movements, capable of overcoming fragmentation by unifying multiple fronts of struggle on the basis of autonomy within solidarity.²

The communist movement faces a condition of fragmentation. There exists a multitude of revolutionary subjectivities whose forms of struggle confront imperialism from different standpoints, but often in isolation. This “multitude” can be defined as “a plurality which persists as such.”³ This plurality consists of the global working class in all its diversity. However, it exceeds the proletarian class struggle, as it also includes what we term the popular social groups. These social groups are “popular” in the sense that they form an integral part of an emergent revolutionary people. Emerging from hundreds of microrevolutions, the popular social groups include the autonomous liberation struggles waged by Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian peoples and nations, migrants, prisoners, queer people, trans people, women, disabled people, elders, youth, and students.⁴ While overwhelmingly proletarian in their class composition, the popular social groups exercise forms of subjectivity challenging one or more of the central organizing principles of the imperialist world-system from their particular standpoints.

Through the successful articulation of common interests and a common world-making project, a revolutionary people emerges from this multitude of proletarian and popular social groups. Marta Harnecker emphasizes that a revolutionary people “includes not only those who could be called impoverished from a socioeconomic point of view, but also those who are impoverished in their subjectivity.”⁵ It is the solidarity of this multitude of autonomous liberation struggles—from Indigenous self-determination to Black liberation, transfeminism to proletarian autonomy—that defines a revolutionary people. Thus, the people form a collective revolutionary subject when it achieves explicit consciousness of itself as a “social bloc of the oppressed,” having internalized and synthesized demands arising from all proletarian and popular fronts of struggle.⁶ The category of “social bloc” is central, for it embodies a whole in which contradictions and struggles persist among its parts.

As a collective revolutionary subject, the people exceeds the class category of the proletariat, linking itself to indigenist, decolonial, antiracist, feminist, democratic, and ecological struggles. Yet to make systemic change, these struggles need to connect with the liberation struggle of the proletariat. The development of a collective revolutionary subject from a multitude of revolutionary subjectivities is a dialectical process. When the autonomous liberation struggles of the popular social groups successfully converge with the autonomous liberation struggle of the proletariat in an alternative world-making project, then we can say with confidence that a revolutionary people has emerged.

Juan Barreto defines a revolutionary people as “a multitude in movement.”⁷ Far from homogenizing this multitude, the unity of a revolutionary people is fundamentally heterogeneous and constituted through struggle.⁸ According to George Ciccariello-Maher, this heterogeneous subject is united “through dialogue and translation” as it envisions a world beyond the existing imperialist world-system and “towards a deferred universal whose only parameters are to be glimpsed in the demands of the oppressed and excluded.”⁹ It is in this sense that we raise the slogan: “power to the people!”

1.2: Partisan Social Science

The word “radical” comes from the Latin word radix, meaning “root.” According to Karl Marx, “to be radical is to grasp the root of the matter.”¹⁰ Social science can help us identify, understand, and transform the root causes of oppression. One way to enter into communist politics is by using social investigation to identify alternative modes of world-making, and to assess strategic locations within the dominant social system where proletarian and popular struggles can resist oppression, build counterpower, and win collective liberation. In fact, the research process itself can play an integral part in building these forms of organized autonomy. Our approach to the study and transformation of society looks to numerous traditions of militant social investigations into material realities that are conducted through direct participation in social struggles. We hope to avoid falling into cold and detached forms of academic observation, as well as the optimistic but at times just as detached wishful thinking of unsubstantiated idealism. Instead, we make every effort to engage with the world as it is and as we experience it, in order to transform it into what it can and should become: “a world in which many worlds fit.”¹¹

Marx advised revolutionaries to commit to a scientific understanding of the systemic causes of oppression. However, to claim the mantle of science need not require one to be rigid and mechanistic, nor to provide “the one true account” or an “absolute truth” that lies beyond the realm of questioning. We understand science through the lens of feminist thinkers such as Sandra Harding, as a method of inquiry that is always self-reflexively grounded both historically and geographically, and that enables the production of tentative conclusions reached through collaborative processes of knowledge co-production that always remain open to future developments. We embrace “a world of sciences” that recognizes the unique standpoints of diverse peoples and movements in shaping our collective understandings of social systems.¹² For our purposes, radical social science is a continuous process of inquiry, exploration, experimentation, theorization, and communication that requires accessibility so as to always remain open to popular review and critique by non-specialists. To achieve this goal, radical social science must be applicable to everyday situations, and it must pay attention to complex social dynamics including gender, sexuality, race, nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, spirituality, class, ability, health, age, governance, citizenship, territory, art, culture, technology, science, ecology, and so on.¹³

As revolutionaries who fight for a communist social system, we need a partisan science that is transformative of our lived social relations, and oriented towards overcoming internalized oppression and actualizing liberation through the construction of autonomous social movements. We stand against the idea that scientific theory and practice is neutral and disembodied.¹⁴ Which side are we on? With whom do we think? We concur with Marta Malo de Molina’s answer: “With workers’ struggles, with dynamics of social conflict and cooperation, with women, with ‘crazy people,’ with children, with local communities, with subjugated groups, with initiatives of self-organization.”¹⁵ Our task is to liberate science for the people by integrating proletarian and popular social groups into the making of theory, organizing social investigations where we can learn with and from the direct participation of diverse communities in understanding and transforming material reality.

1.3: Social Investigation

By conducting social investigations, revolutionaries can reveal forms of everyday resistance and alternative modes of world-making. Through militant research we situate ourselves within the material relations of the present, connect different sectors of struggle, and help articulate a collective revolutionary subject from a multitude of revolutionary subjectivities.¹⁶ The aim of the militant researcher conducting a social investigation is that of a catalyst: to establish themselves within a sector of struggle, draw out latent revolutionary aspirations, encourage their expression, synthesize them, and concentrate them in the form of political programs.¹⁷

Social investigation has been a part of the communist tradition from the beginning. In The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), Frederick Engels analyzes the lives and struggles of predominantly Irish women and children toiling in the factories of Manchester, England.¹⁸ In “A Worker’s Inquiry” (1880), Karl Marx proposed 101 questions to inform “a serious inquiry into the position of the French working class.”¹⁹ In the Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan (1927), Mao Zedong revealed that the class struggle waged by poor peasants in the countryside would prove integral to the Chinese Revolution, in contrast to the prevailing centering of the subjectivity of urban industrial workers.²⁰ In Italy during the 1960s and 1970s, radicals such as Mario Tronti, Romano Alquati, Raniero Panzieri, Sergio Bologna, and Antonio Negri—the so-called “anarcho-sociologists”—made this praxis explicit in the form of class composition analysis through workers’ inquiries conducted in the factories of FIAT, Olivetti, and Mirafiori.²¹ T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Weapon of Theory
• Chapter 2: Imperialism and Revolution
• Chapter 3: Envisioning the Commune
• Chapter 4: Building the Commune
• Conclusion
• References
• Index