Written as a Comprehensive paper for my doctoral program in Environmental Studies
2018
Autonomy gets a lot of grief from the rest of the left. For many it is little more than a mis-guided slogan to “change the world without taking power” (Holloway, 2002). Autonomy is lambasted as both abandoning structural change for puny, small-scale actions and for a naïve utopianism – “freedom without conditions, without constraints, without restrictions, action according to one’s own will and thinking without limits” (Thwaites Rey, 2011, p.145). Harvey sees it as a defeatist politics:
“What remains of the radical left now operates largely outside of institutional or organised oppositional channels, with the hope that small-scale actions and local activism can ultimately add up to some kind of satisfactory macro alternative …. Autonomist, anarchist, and localist perspectives and actions are everywhere in evidence. But to the degree that this left seeks to change the world without taking power, so an increasingly consolidated plutocratic capitalist class remains unchallenged in its ability to dominate the world without constraint.” (2014, pp.xii-xiii)
Bohm et al write that autonomy is not only wrong on strategy, but also mistaken in calling for a break with capital, writing that “Despite the discourse of self-determination and self-organization at the heart of autonomous movements, autonomy cannot be seen to be detached from accumulation processes of capital, nor from liberal democracy or development …. Autonomy cannot claim to have an essential ‘ground’, a space which is completely ‘beyond’ capital, the state or development” (2010, p.19). The editors of Marxism and Social Movements are perhaps the most severe in their condemnation of autonomy:
“Books like those by Holloway and by Hardt and Negri celebrate popular insurgency while disavowing any constructive suggestions as to what such movements should do …. The anarchist and autonomist hostility to ‘organisation’ is comprehensible as a response to the real dangers of cooptations and bureaucratisation. However, it also generates its own problems …. This is a counsel of despair that, to a substantial degree fails to imagine or anticipate the development of popular ‘replacement power’, the deliberate building of new and more democratic institutions ‘from below’ that might better express popular needs. In effect, the lesson it takes from past failures is to give up.” (C. Barker, et al, 2014, pp.20-21)
These are long-standing disputes on the left, bearing an eerie resemblance to Marx and Engel’s evaluation of Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Owen, written 170 years ago in the Communist Manifesto:
“The significance of Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism bears an inverse relation to historical development. In proportion as the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic standing apart from the contest, these fantastic attacks on it, lose all practical value and all theoretical justification. Therefore, although the originators of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects.” (2017, section III.3)
I will argue that autonomy is much more than a juvenile call to change the world without taking power. Instead, it is a theoretically-rich tradition, bringing together the distilled experiences from labour, feminist, and indigenous struggles. In doing so, autonomist thinkers dare to demand an end to class exploitation and life beyond capitalism. Yet they do not do so lightly, as they make strategic proposals for how to build comprehensive popular power capable of taking on the many-headed hydra that is capitalism while also being self-critical as to avoid organizing forms that ultimately reproduce divisions.
Like all attempts at revolutionary change, there are indeed ideas that get spread under the banner of autonomy that are misguided or have failed in practice. Yet I will seek to define autonomy based on its strongest arguments instead of its weakest ones. In doing so, I hope to show that – instead of being divisive and at once utopian and defeatist – the “no” and “yes” of autonomy resonate with that of much of the left. Autonomy seeks freedom from capitalist alienation and the freedom to build ways of living beyond class society. Although the autonomist critique and proposal are wide-ranging, I will endeavour to show they are also well-founded. Moreover, its “no” and “yes” are being put into practical use and offer guidance for further strategic action.
Throughout, I will centre alienation is a central concept for understanding autonomy and its critique of capitalism. Beginning with the most general level, the theory of alienation is predicated on the assertion that humans naturally and joyfully carry out the physical, social, political, cultural, and economic activities that give us a fuller life. This always involves interaction with the material world and interaction with each other. Dialectically speaking, ecology, economy, and society are not discreet areas, but instead a set of internal relations (Ollman, 2003). Within these relations, human activity is social and is “work,” but ever since the advent of class society alienation has made this natural proclivity into the act of servitude for the many and wealth for the few. As such, it is an act of violence that obscures the internal relations of humanity-nature. This separation of people from their own sense of humanity is alienation in its most general sense. Alienation is the practical breakdown of the interconnected elements of humanity, the seeming isolation of elements from their social whole, leaving us with the feeling that “all is under the sway of inhuman power” (Ollman, 1976, p.132). On the one hand there is the interconnected power of the billions of people who raise, nurture, and replenish successive generations, who make all the things we depend on to survive and thrive, who are endlessly inventive in finding ways to coordinate this despite suffering oppression and exploitation. On the other hand, this immense power is made invisible and concentrated in unaccountable elites, states, and social orders that use their accumulated wealth to perpetuate inequality. Alienation is the mechanism by which this occurs, that which fosters a society where the many are controlled by the few. To resist it, we need a better understanding of how exactly this separation occurs. Ollman highlights four broad aspects of alienation: the separation of people from the fruits of their labour, the separation of people from their activity, the separation of people from each other (estranged from each other on the basis of gender, race, ability, immigration status, and ultimately class), and the culminating dehumanizing effect of alienation (ibid, pp.131-152).
Multiplied across all of society, this culminates in the alienated social, political, and economic structures we are all too familiar with: the division between leaders and led that makes for vertical organization, between people and their collective decision-making that relegates politics to the state, and between genders and people with different migratory statuses, allowing certain groups to pass the extra burden of reproductive work onto others. The common end of all these processes is to divide people, create dependency, and promote accumulation. It is also important to note that, while each is a widespread phenomenon, alienation is something we experience on an emotional level and in our everyday lives. It is the feeling that we go on living our everyday lives as the products of a history over which we have no control, keeping history running without understanding it, consumed by a scarcity of free time, apathy, and rotten culture (The Situationists, 2006, pp.70-71). Furthermore, the make-up of capitalist cities structures this isolation and feeling of powerlessness (Tafuri, 1976), through the spatial separation of labour from community, by turning spaces of convocation into spaces of consumption, and by displacing popular control over spaces into the realm of bureaucracy. The city thus becomes “both a technology of power through which the process of alienation is achieved and an abstract space within which the experience of alienation is lived” (Wilson, 2011, p.1004).
Autonomy must be understood in opposition to alienation: regaining appreciation for and agency through the interconnection of society (Ollman, 1976), appropriating social space (Wilson, 2011), infusing power through society instead of unaccountable groups, organizing everyday life in a way that is appropriate to one’s own social life (Lefebvre, 2009, p.146), the “transfer creative initiative from an isolated elite to the people as a whole” (Ross, 2015, p.59), and ultimately making this everyday life into the time when we collectively create history. Alienation and dis-alienation are ultimately questions of social relations: Will our connections with each other remain masked by structures of command, articulations of power, and the divisions that order society, leading to the further isolation of people from each other and to accumulation by elites? Or will we relate to each other in an emancipatory, horizontal, redistributive, and collectively-empowered way?
Using the concept of alienation as a touchstone, my argument will contain three movements. The first is the movement of an ever-widening “no,” from autonomy as a self-critique of alienation within everyday organizing forms such as the party and trade union; to a critique of how alienation is perpetuated through articulations of power such as the state and borders and gendered exploitation articulated through wages; to the way alienation shapes all of class society. This first movement exposes how autonomy is complex, as it is both a rejection of power as it is imposed upon us and also a critique of how we collectively do the work of reproducing alienated social relations. Freedom from alienation is therefore not as easy as “escaping” the state, capital, or patriarchy.
Second, this ever-widening “no” is complemented by an ever-widening “yes.” This is autonomy’s proposal to refuse alienation at work, to refuse it in unwaged domestic work, to take control of how we articulate and reproduce society, to build a commons, to reverse the global dispossessing and alienating project of colonization, and ultimately to fight for life beyond capitalism. This second movement shows that autonomy is indeed a positive proposal in line with others on the left and not simply a call for rejection.
Third, there is the movement from theory to practice, from abstract formulations of alienation and dis-alienation to their concrete exercise by social movements. Zapatista autonomy, as well as examples from Paris, Berlin, and El Alto, Bolivia, show that autonomy is not utopia, that people are indeed using non-alienating organizing forms to build life beyond capitalism. Throughout it all, I will continuously engage with the critiques of these ideas and practices, recognizing the validity of some while exposing the mischaracterization of others. It is true that autonomy’s project is not an easy one: Its history is beset by violent reactions ending in defeat and in cooptation and commodification. Despite these setbacks, autonomous organizing sets solid foundations from which we can institutionalize and federate popular power, building movements that can mount a structural challenge to capitalism. Finally, I will conclude with strategic ways we can continue dis-alienating our social relations and build life beyond capitalism. Every alternative starts small, in fits and starts, but the seeds are also all around us, ready to be nurtured into something greater.
Autonomy as a critique of alienation
Autonomy is perhaps most widely recognized for its critique of ways socialist strategy has increased alienation rather than combatted it. Since autonomy is also on the left, this is largely a comradely self-critique. “For those of us who continue being socialists and Marxists, it’s necessary to reflect on what failed in the experiences of actually-existing socialism,” writes López y Rivas (2011, p.104). This includes a critique of how vanguardism came to supplant popular initiative, how the state-party closed democratic spaces, how taking power from above led to “socialism by decree,” and mistakenly considering “internationalism” to be limited to the socialist states’ foreign policy (ibid). In each of these examples, political power is alienated from the people, concentrated in unaccountable groups, and then used to discipline those same movements. The writers of the Situationist International journal – a publication that inspired later thinking on autonomy by bringing together revolution and everyday life – offer a laundry list of all the anti-democratic and anti-revolutionary actions of Soviet-inspired socialists, including how socialist bureaucracies acted to destroy worker self-management (The Situationists, 2006, pp.160-168), how peasant anti-colonial uprisings were converted into nationalist, militarist projects (ibid, pp.221-222), and how the largest French unions acted against their membership to prevent a general strike during May 1968 (ibid, pp.232-235). The Situationists illustrate a broad tendency of the left, associated with 1968, that saw the bloody stain of Stalinism and asked how such a disaster came to pass. This is the common root of much of autonomist thinking. Women who experienced sexism in movements, people of colour subject to racism, indigenous people who were told that socialist industrialization would bring them progress, queer and disabled people who were ostracized – all these people who were made to be less than their comrades understood how alienation can be perpetuated by people who have a critique of capitalism.
Moreover, apart from perpetuating alienation within our groups, organizations like unions that were won at such great cost can be made into vehicles to better integrate labour into alienating work. As Tronti – an early autonomist in Italy who was much more supportive of communism than his contemporaries the Situationists – writes, “A trade union … without the political organization of the class, succeeds only in attaining the most perfect form of integration of the working class within capitalism” (1966, “Social capital”). This was surely the case once labour laws were passed to limit workers’ ability to go on strike, allowing business unionism to deliver a compliant labour force to capital (Aronowitz, 2003, pp.76-91) The lesson is to avoid getting caught up in organizing forms or a belief in the infallibility of the left and to instead focus on the politics of and relationships between the rank-and-file who make up a given union, party, or political group. The critical question is whether our unions, parties, social services, or community organizations are pushing against the alienation that makes work into profit, collaboration into a political machine, health into a more efficient labour force, and culture into distraction. It is true that none of these limitations will be overcome immediately and we must tolerate aspects of alienation within our movements as we work to reduce them. The point is to be open to self-criticism, to possibly finding that the ways we organize are reproducing forms of authority and obstacles to liberation.
Second, autonomists continue this scrutiny of organizing forms to level a substantial critique of the state as an alienated political form. A driving force here is reckoning with how the Russian Revolution devolved into Stalinism. How did the struggle that began on International Women’s Day in 1917 and that succeeded in overthrowing the tsar, ending Russian participation in World War I, and establishing workers’ control over the economy give way to forced collectivization, slave camps, abolishing unions, Stakhanovite speed-ups, rescinding the constitution’s commitment to abolishing the state and classes, and purges of all party members with historical memory of the revolution? Dunayevskaya is not commonly associated with autonomous thinking, yet she is similar to the Situationists in finding the roots of the Stalinist counter-revolution in reformism and bureaucracy (1975, ch.s 9-14). Since the turn of the century, socialists looking to be elected and to establish new, state-run social services emphasized training managers for this task. Once socialists were running the entire government in Russia, this strategy pitted bureaucrats against the workers who had seized control of their workplaces and major infrastructure. Would the bureaucrats coordinate the economy and government, imposing Communism from above, or would workers’ councils collectivize and democratize administration? Ultimately, this is a question of alienation: would the socialist movement find ways to organize power that allowed it to remain in the broad mass of society, or would they seek to channel power towards representatives and experts, tasked with acting ‘in the name of the people’? The history of Soviet bureaucracy winning out over workers’ councils and concentrating power in the state set the stage for, and was further perpetuated by, Stalin’s tyranny. In a similar vein, the Situationists made a general critique of bureaucracy as an alienated political form, arguing that it makes politics into a spectacle that leaves the masses passive, turning politics into empty attendance (The Situationists, 2006, pp.68-75). While Stalin was dead and gone, they drew attention to the thriving practice of self-proclaimed socialists across the world drawing power away from democratic spaces and into concentrated state and party structures (The Situationists, 2006, pp.185-224).
Autonomy’s first “no” is this critique of alienated political forms, the way the socialist movement was limited – and even accommodating to capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism, and other oppressions – by bureaucratizing and failing to promote participatory democracy and egalitarianism. Until now, I have largely framed this critique on the level of the inter-personal and organizational manifestations of alienation that we encounter in our everyday lives. This is the alienation of relegating our political agency to an expert, being pitted against others on the basis of identity, or feeling a sense of ennui. Autonomy’s second, wider critique is of articulations of power – the way organizational structures, arrangements, policies, and processes are pieced together into a project to structure society in a certain way. Articulations allow for the generalization of alienation. For example, Mezzadra and Nielson (2013) – who draw from varied leftist traditions, including on notable autonomist authors such as Tronti, Federici, and Hardt and Negri – explain how borders bring many forms of alienation together as to articulate forms of governance, a political and economic territory, and a specific sort of labour market. More than simply functioning spatially as walls, borders utilize visa processing times to regulate the speed of workers’ movement. They regulate the qualities of the labour force by determining who is sought after, who can only work temporarily, and who can only work informally and with the constant fear of deportation. By separating, classifying and ultimately alienating people in countless ways, borders constitute different groups of people with different sets of rights, all at the service of capital accumulation. Contemporary agricultural and care work in North America, based on the highly-exploited labour of temporary migrants, attests to a complex articulation of borders on a global scale.
Another example of articulation is the way the state articulates labour-power. Fortunati writes in the Marxist-Feminist tradition, but her work sheds important light on this question. She observes that by the end of the 19th century the Industrial Revolution was increasingly killing off the very people who created its wealth (1995, pp.168-175). Bosses were indifferent to whether the children, women, and men working for them died on the job or whether their wages allowed for basic health and hygiene, making Victorian cities into hellholes and lowering life expectancy. Unmoved by the moral outrage of the satanic mill, state officials did begrudgingly accepted that if trends kept apace they would be left without a successive generation of workers to sacrifice their lives for profit. Government officials recognized they were required to step in and pass the necessary regulations to keep people from dying prematurely and ultimately to articulate the reproduction of labour-power as well as articulating capital. Apart from legislation, this articulation was achieved through a sexist alliance among government, unions, and workers to force white women back into the home to stabilize the reproduction of this segment of the labour force. The state played a key role in bringing together aspects such as the “family wage,” public education, public health, expanded domestic consumerism, and an ideology that naturalized female domesticity, all of which culminate in the stable reproduction of the future generation of workers. Despite the fact that she did not write in the autonomist tradition, by fleshing out the concept of articulation, Fortunati helps us understand the widening critique of power that is so important to autonomy. Autonomy’s critique goes further than denouncing how the industrializing states stepped in to support the long-term interests of capital. This intervention involved the articulation of patriarchy (an alienating social division) and the expertise of social workers and public health officials (those invested with alienated power) to shore up alienation at the workplace.
A third, more general example of articulation is the way the state works to alienate politics, making collective decision-making and action that is embedded in social, moral, material, and historic considerations into the removed, circumscribed, and unaccountable practice that is governmental “politics.” Again, we can look to a non-autonomist Marxist scholar for an explanation. Poulantzas (1980) explains how exactly the state articulates this alienated form of politics. He emphasizes that articulation – as the piecing together of a project – is always carried out against others promoting conflicting projects. The state must therefore internalize conflict in order to shape it in a certain way. For Poulantzas, this means the state must “condense the relationship of forces” (Pt. II) by bringing conflicting groups under its umbrella and delegating different state institutions to each of them. This is why state programs like social security exist, which are run by one section of the state and despised by others within it such as the Treasury. Another example is the way in which conflicts over who gets to be part of our society become policy disputes and legal challenges between government-funded social service agencies and government-funded border control. This points to how the state form pulls social conflicts into the political terrain, assuring they will not spill over and disrupt the underlying economic system. It achieves articulation through both alienation and accommodation.
The concept of articulation therefore gives us a better understanding of how power functions. In the same way that alienation exposes forms of oppression beyond workplace exploitation, articulation exposes forms of power beyond everyday experiences. It does so in a more nuanced way than simply proclaiming ‘the state is power.’ It shows how power is structured, institutionalized, and overdetermined, thereby multiplying the accumulation it allows. Nonetheless, the state remains an important articulation for autonomists, who critique it an alienated political form. Autonomy’s critique of the state is frequently caricatured as a blanket rejection, but I hope I have shown it to be a more nuanced position. Moreover, there are many points of convergence between autonomy and the wider left in this regard. Even Saint Marx, after reflecting on the Paris Commune, concluded it was necessary to abolish the state (Ross, 2015, ch.3). The all-important question, however, is what is to be done if the most pervasive form of political organization in the world today is dedicated to articulating alienating borders, alienated labour-power, and alienated politics? As critics of bureaucracy emphasize, we cannot simply win control of the state and throw all its machinery into reverse, disarticulating what bureaucracy was created to articulate. Neither can we simply ignore or escape the state’s vast coercive and ideological power as we focus on building popular power outside of it. So, while both autonomists and thinkers from the broader left (such as Fortunati and Poulantzas) may agree that the state will not ultimately deliver us liberation, there remain many disagreements about what to do about this today, tomorrow, next week, and next year.
However, before we move on to autonomy’s proposals for “what is to be done” about the state and in pursuit of freedom in general, we will consider a third, even broader, critique of alienation made by autonomists – their critique of how society is ordered into classes and how these classes are reproduced. ‘Class society’ is the broadest organization of alienation, the way society is divided between ‘who does the work’ and ‘who reaps the benefits.’ In a slave system this often means utilizing racial distinctions to alienate people of their bodies, freedom, and the fruits of their labour. In a feudal system classes are articulated through the dispossession of the land and alienation of a portion of what is produced on it. Under capitalism classes are divided between those whose products are alienated in exchange for wages and whose who accumulate the profit. All of this is broadly critiqued on the left. What autonomy adds are, first feminists’ attention to the centrality of gendered oppression in articulating class and, second, the way this process implicates all of us in the reproduction of class society. This is a key point, as it brings self-critique back in and shows that autonomy is more than a simple rejection of the ways power is imposed on us from without. It is also a critique of the ways we become active agents in reproducing alienated power relations.
Again, I will begin with ideas from Marxist-Feminists before turning to how this critique was taken up by autonomists. Writing in post-war Italy, Fortunati (1995) begins this line of reasoning by showing how wages are used to achieve double exploitation. Feminized domestic work carries out the labour of reproduction: the work of feeding, clothing, healing, and humanizing people so they can continue going to work day after day, as well as the long-term work of educating and socializing the next generation of workers (Bhattacharya, 2017). This work is fundamental to capitalism, because without a replenished supply of workers there is no profit to be made. Yet in the “traditional” household (which I will problematize shortly) only the male worker receives wages while the female reproductive worker is offered a portion of the male’s wage, under his discretion. This amounts to two unequal exchanges: the exploitative relationship where waged workers are paid a wage inferior to the amount of surplus value they produce and the further exploitation of unwaged reproductive workers who are “given” a portion of the wages in exchange for reproducing labour-power (the next generation of workers) that allows surplus value to be produced in the first place. Two workers are exploited using one wage (Fortunati, 1995, p.8), with those doing the most fundamental work being exploited the most. This double-exploitation is quite profitable for the boss, and it is achieved by using sexism to alienate the working class against itself: between the worker whose labour is regulated by a contract and the worker dominated through a marriage agreement; between those who cooperate at work and through their unions and those who remain isolated in their homes; between those whose work is recognized and are urged to do it in the name of dignity and those whose work is naturalized and are urged to do it in the name of love. Wages and sexism are therefore mobilized to achieve a certain ordering of society, an ordering which “frees” men from reproductive work while orienting life outside the factory walls towards greater accumulation of profit within it.
Fortunati’s explanation of how patriarchy forces unwaged workers to reproduce labour-power is ground-breaking. Nonetheless, Third Wave feminists have rightly critiqued the assumption of the sole, male wage earner and emphasized how poor women and women of colour frequently do low-waged productive work, waged reproductive work (as “the help”), and unwaged reproductive work. Autonomists acknowledge Marxist-Feminism’s brilliant analysis as well as these problematizations to develop a more complex critique of class society. For example, Federici looks towards neoliberalism and the contemporary international division of labour (2012), observing that class is articulated globally via colonial and neo-colonial projects. Structural adjustment policies that destroy socialized reproductive services, paired with wars leading to displacement and land expropriation, create situations where the world’s poor must emigrate to survive, often ending up in the Global North working in reproductive industries (as home healthcare providers, children’s caregivers, agricultural workers, those preparing food, clothing manufacturers, and home builders). Federici then observes, similarly to Mezzadra and Nielsen (2013), that migration regimes articulate this global movement of labour, converting the Third World into an immense “homeland” regulated by a modern pass system (2012, p.70). She concludes that “The new phase of capitalist expansionism that we are witnessing requires the destruction of any economic activity not subordinated to the logic of accumulation, and this is necessarily a violent process” (ibid, p.76) since “structural adjustment generates war and war, in turn, completes the work of structural adjustment” (p.77). Instead of laying the foundations of a future Communist utopia, we see that capitalism is destructive and predatory (Federici, 2012, p.91), reordering society by using colonialism, sexism, and racism to destroy less-alienated, non-capitalist social relations and create new ones subordinated to the accumulation of profit.
Patriarchy, wages, the state, migratory regimes, and a host of other factors converge to articulate class society, to structure capitalism’s mode of alienation. Wages (a form of alienated value) are gendered to divide between those whose work is deemed more and less important. Schooling (an alienated form of knowledge transfer) socializes students into roles in class society. Children are also disciplined into accepting the notions of sexism, love, and marriage that perpetuate this class society. These forms of alienation generate consent, and there is also the daily, material work of feeding, cleaning, entertaining, and re-humanizing that allows class society to keep chugging along. The key point is that, while it may be articulated through the state, patriarchy, hegemony, borders, et cetera, it is those who are most oppressed by this system that are made to do the most work to sustain it. As Fortunati observes, it is the workers themselves who reproduce labour-power for the boss. As Federici’s “new international division of labour” highlights, this involves a great deal of imposition, coercion, and violence, but we also have agency in the matter. We do the work of acting as a ‘class against ourselves.’ Through the three critiques outlined above, autonomy “questions capital as form of human organization” (Bajo Tierra Ediciones, 2011, p.9). With class society autonomy returns to self-critique, asserting that we cannot just pursue the ‘no’ of ‘freedom from’ division and imposition. We must also articulate our society in a liberatory way instead of doing the work of articulating alienation. In this way autonomy joins the rest of the left in critiquing capital as a way of organizing our social relations and then, crucially, asks what other organizing forms are and how they can be developed.
In the next section I will move from a negative argument about autonomy’s critiques to a propositional argument about the alternatives it promotes. Capital organizes humanity through alienation, and autonomy aspires for us to organize ourselves otherwise. It looks towards life outside of capitalism. I will argue below that, if capitalism is stricken with contradictions between labour and capital, re/production and extraction, use and exchange value, the common and the private, alienation and dis-alienation, then autonomy pushes for the victory of one side over the other. It means seriously engaging with how we emerge from capitalism’s dialectic into a new set of contradictions and tensions that are less violent and dehumanizing. Instead of being a pure and idealistic “essence,” autonomy is the long and troubled process of developing non-capitalism as a practice (Almendra, 2016).
Autonomy as a project for life beyond capitalism
I will move from autonomy as a critique of alienation to autonomy as a proposal for life beyond capitalism by engaging four schools of thought: Operaismo, Autonomous Feminism, the commons, and decolonization. Each integrates other, non-autonomist schools of thought into its analysis, and each makes proposals for how we can organize ourselves and articulate power in non-alienating ways. Recognizing that autonomy must be a process, that it is impossible to immediately jump from capitalism to non-capitalism, each school of thought highlights different principles, aspects of social life, and strategic avenues that will get us there. For Operaismo (which draws heavily from Communist thought) this is self-valorization and dis-alienated production. For Autonomous Feminism (closely related to Marxist-Feminism) it is a proposal for dis-alienated reproduction. For the commons (our most genuine example of the autonomist tradition) it is a more specific, material, and local proposal for how to coordinate our collective efforts and keep the value we create within our communities. For decolonization (rooted in thinking on indigenous sovereignty and resurgence), it is a more historically-situated project than the others, aimed at reversing dispossession and re-territorializing. Over the course of the section there is therefore a movement towards a broadening autonomous proposal that integrates many proposals form the wider left. With each school of thought, the project for autonomy becomes deeper and also more concrete. The four successive proposals complement autonomy’s ‘no’ with a ‘yes’ that establishes principles and processes for life beyond capitalism – ideas whose practical application I will then turn to.
Operaismo is a theory with very specific historical origins in Italian social movements. Katsiaficas recounts the momentous series of events, beginning with the Hot Autumn of 1969 when a quarter of the country’s labour force went on strike, occupied their factories, or committed sabotage; to the 1976 Historic Compromise when the Italian Communist Party formed a governing alliance with the centrist Christian Democrats and led the charge to quell social unrest; to ultra-leftists’ kidnappings of the politicians which provided a pretext for massive police repression of the movement in the late 70s (2006, ch.2). During the early ascendant period labour, women’s, and student movements were united in an increasingly radical alliance that did not seek “dignity,” “respect,” or “freedom of speech” but instead voiced a general critique of alienation by rejecting work, the family, and authority as such. Then, as the Communist-led government effectively drove a wedge between labour on the one side and women’s and student movements on the other, radical thinkers increasingly rejected the Communist Party’s authoritarianism, the economic determinism that supported it (Cleaver, 2000, pp.47-52), and their support of a Fordist production model that used capital-intensive automation to discipline the unruly labour force (Dunayevskaya, 1975, p.273). The actions of the Italian Communist Party and the unions supporting it against workers’ direct action and women’s and student movements is precisely the motivation for the critique of alienating organizing forms on the left discussed in the first section.
The insurgency of radical workers and their split with the electoral left are the inspiration behind Operaismo’s proposals for autonomy. This process brought Operaismo from its Communist roots to its “unorthodox” conclusion that workers have the most agency (above the vanguard party or capital). As with the critiques outlined in the last section, these proposals began with refusal, rejection, and resistance to alienation. This begins with the recognition that, while the division of labour and mechanization are usually lauded for the way they increase production, an equally important function is how they perpetuate alienation by subverting labour to capital. Marx lays out this argument in his “Fragment on Machines” in the Gundrisse (1977), observing that an immense amount of human collaboration and ingenuity goes into designing and producing each component of every machine, yet the machine effectively masks this collaborative achievement and casts it as its own. Instead of workers using their skills to create and then to operate machines, it appears as if the machine has all the skills and “the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages” (Marx, 1977, p.692). It appears as if all value is produced by the machines, creating a plethora of commodities that workers-cum-consumers get the privilege of purchasing, instead of workers recognizing that they create all value and that machines are merely a culmination of past labour. In other words, machines are “dead labour” while workers are “living labour.” Marx and Operaistas highlight the “domination of living labour by dead labour” as a key mechanism by which waged workers are alienated of their value. Workers are convinced that value comes from capital, and this discipline is perpetuated through an alienating division of labour, where each is subverted to their particular machine. Ultimately, “Capital, which disorganizes and reorganizes the process of labour according to its growing necessities of the process of valorization, presents itself already as a spontaneous objective potential of society which self-organizes and as such develops itself” (Tronti, 1966, “Factory and society”). Workers’ power is totally effaced – they are merely given a chance to participate in the self-perpetuation of capital.
It is important to note that this critique of the domination of living labour by dead labour was not shared by organizations like the Italian Communist Party, who instead held that industrialization is always a positive process since more highly-developed production will eventually be put to the service of communism. This is one aspect of the tension between autonomy and socialism and a reason Operaismo began the movement away from traditional Communist thinking and towards the “something else” we now call autonomy (although Operaistas seldom used this term). Operaista thinkers began to question this assumption as they saw radical automotive workers in northern cities rejecting the notion that jobs in more capital-intensive, mechanized factories were somehow more “dignified” than their former employment in rural southern Italy and instead rejected “work” altogether (Aureli, 2008, pp.21-31). Operaismo sought to amplify this sentiment, calling on workers to refuse to be dominated by dead labour and to refuse work. Refusing the alienation that makes workers into a class-against-themselves is the first step towards becoming a class-for-themselves. Tronti writes that “The growing rationalization of modern capital must find an insurmountable limit in the workers refusal to political integration within the economic development of the system. Thus, the working class becomes the only anarchy that capitalism fails to socially organise” (1966, “Social capital”). The strategy of refusal centres this “anarchy” – the fact that capitalists can control how they will articulate alienation through their management, division of labour, and use of dead labour, yet they cannot control how workers will feel about it (Cleaver, 2000, p.66). As long as there is alienation there will be resistance. This leads to Operaismo’s key assertion: that instead of seeing capitalism as the defeat of living labour by dead labour, it is workers’ rebelliousness that has always forced capitalism to transform, to rearrange production in search of new ways of controlling an uncontrollable labour force. For example, workers’ struggle for an eight-hour workday is what caused a fundamental shift in capitalism, as bosses moved from a strategy of accumulating greater profits by extending working hours and paying employees (increasingly children) lower wages to a new strategy wherein the agreed to a limited workday and instead accumulated greater profits by integrating machinery (Tronti, 1966, “Factory and society”). Workers’ refusal is the motor force of capitalist development, driving a back-and-forth wherein workers increasingly increase the quality of their subjective composition by coming together in refusal, while capital reacts by transforming the technical composition of the labour process (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013, pp.95-103; Wright, 2017). Despite how effective this technical re-composition may be in re-disciplining workers, it is fundamentally a reaction to workers’ protagonism, to their agency in seeking dis-alienation.
As in the discussion of articulation above, Operaismo recognizes that capital utilizes mechanization and the division of labour to articulate the working class, to bring workers together in such a way as to better discipline, alienate, and exploit them. (1) Yet this is only possible if workers are mystified about the source of value. Operaismo’s proposal is to de-mystify the production process so that workers can regain control of their cooperation (Aureli, 2008, p.28). Refusal is the first step in de-mystification. If workers refuse “work,” meaning they refuse to be articulated by capital, then they refuse to believe that capital creates value on its own and that they should meekly support it. By refusing “work,” they refuse to accept that all labour must go towards creating capital (Negri, 1991, p.150). They refuse to participate in alienation. The next step after refusal is an affirmation of self-valorization: “the independence, the autonomy of working-class valorization” (ibid, p.185). Self-valorization is the assertion that labour is the source of all value, and workers should control how and to what end this value is created. Workers should come together as to control and share this value, instead of giving it to a boss who then wields workers’ cooperation as a weapon against them. It means articulating ourselves instead of being articulated by dead labour. Self-valorization is therefore both the ideological process of de-mystification and the organizing process of workers coming together to assert their power. For Negri, self-valorization is the doorway to “Marx beyond Marx” (1991, ch.9), the assertion that moves us from the critique of capitalism to life beyond capitalism. He also represents a bridge between Operaismo – a source of many autonomist ideas, albeit one that seldom uses the term “autonomy” – to an explicitly “autonomist” school of thought.
Yet the side of this bridge called “Operaismo” has its limitations. Its negative appeal for “refusal” is much more central to its analysis than the positive proposal for self valorization. On the other side of the bridge, Negri’s call for self-valorization remains vague and overly theoretical. Undoubtedly those who create value should control it, using it to enrich our communities instead of strengthening the boss’s power over us. Yet we are still far from a concrete plan for how to do this. Furthermore, as shown in my repeated references to “workers,” Operaismo narrowly focuses on factory workers, who tended to be white males unconcerned with reproductive labour and whose industrial jobs have since been radically altered by neoliberalism. Mezzadra and Nielsen critique this homogenizing tendency of Operaismo, to see the working class as only factory workers (2013, p.103). Caffentzis goes further, saying this amounts to a “recapitulation of Marx’s ‘forgetting’ of slaves and women” (1987, p.190). Operaismo deepened the critique of alienation, but not enough to include gendered, racialized, and migratory forms. Despite these shortcomings, the argument that workers’ resistance to alienation causes capitalism to reactively re-articulate itself still stands. Indeed, the workers’ insurgency of the post-war period forced capital to articulate a new, globalized division of labour that has very effectively used dead labour to discipline living labour. Beyond simply off-shoring factory work, this involved a reaction to women’s, student, indigenous, Black and Third World resistance that has caused immense changes to reproductive work and the myriad ways alienation is woven into our everyday lives. Refusal and self-valorization notion towards “life outside capitalism,” but a more robust autonomous strategy demands we further develop our understanding of how exactly this “life” is reproduced.
The second school of thought I will outline is Autonomous Feminism, which follows Operaismo in moving from a critique of alienation to a call for refusal and a proposal to build an alternative. It also follows Operaismo in that it began with a non-autonomist critique of traditional Marxism that was later developed into explicitly “autonomist” thinking. Yet Autonomous Feminism also significantly widens its scope beyond Operaismo’s narrow focus on the factory, using the concept of reproduction to consider how alienation in society at large is articulated to support alienation within the factory. This then leads to the proposal that we take control of our social cooperation.
Autonomous Feminism also began in Italy and shares many theoretical foundations with Operaismo. So, to describe it I will begin with another key assertion of Operaismo, that the struggle between workers and capital leads society itself to increasingly become organized like a factory. Tronti looks to England, observing that the state legislated the eight-hour workday in favour of capitalists’ long term interests (but against their immediate interests), as to establish the minimum stability needed to prevent people from dying of overwork and indigence (1966, “Factory and society”). The social movement for the eight-hour day had effectively forced the state to begin taking more responsibility in shaping society in capital’s favour. Society outside the factory walls had to be made to better support work inside them. As Federici writes, “at a certain stage of capitalist development capitalist relations become so hegemonic that every social relation is subsumed under capital and the distinction between society and factory collapses, so that society becomes a factory and social relations directly become relations of production” (2012, p.7).
As we move from Operaismo to Autonomous Feminism by way of Marxist-Feminism, Fortunati (1995) continues this line of reasoning by giving more attention to life “outside the factory walls” than Tronti does. She observes the full extent of how the state acted to make society into a factory, beyond simply limiting the workday, including greater control over the “means of production” of the labour force (that is, by legislating how women use their wombs), expanded social services to discipline future workers and their mothers, and public education to socialize the next generation of workers (1995, pp.172-176). Furthermore, Fortunati does much more than lend examples to Tronti’s argument. She joins her Marxist-Feminist contemporaries in elaborating a previously-untheorized aspect of Marxist thought by showing how the value production taking place in the factory is wholly dependent on reproductive labour, since there is no commodity production and socially-necessary labour-time without the reproduction of labour-power. It takes an immense amount of collaboration and labour to do all the things that allow workers to show up in the first place, ready to do the job, yet this is often ignored by political economists who write it off as ‘domestic.’ This insight expands Operaismo and Marxism in general in various ways, showing that the capital-labour relationship functions very differently in productive and reproductive contexts: Whereas dead labour may dominate living labour at the workplace, this exploitation is also spatially bound to the factory, temporally bound to the workday, and regulated by labour law. Reproductive labour, on the other hand, is not bound to the home, is an around-the-clock job, and is not legally regulated. Whereas mechanization mystifies waged workers into thinking value comes from “dead” capital investment instead of living labour, “naturalization” convinces some women (and many more men) that it is “natural” for women to do unwaged domestic work instead of recognizing how reproducing individuals is both value production in itself and the basis for all further value production at work. We must de-mystify ourselves regarding both exploitation and the ways sexism structures the very foundations of the economy.
On the flipside, Fortunati’s argument goes on to inspire the explicitly autonomist thinking of authors like Federici. Fortunati shows that “self-valorization” means recognizing we have both much more expansive power than just the wealth that waged workers produce and are also much more enlisted in maintaining the status quo. It is both an appreciation for all it entails to create the humans who make the world go ‘round. And an acknowledgment that those doing reproductive labour create and re-create our societies and their orientation towards alienation and the accumulation of wealth. This is a simple yet profound insight for autonomy, since it shows that refusal and rejection are insufficient. If the people on the bottom are made to do the most to shape society, they must shape it differently instead of somehow ‘escaping.’ Autonomous Feminism therefore continues with Operaismo’s attention to the broad social relations of class struggle (e.g., how workers’ insurgency forces innovations in the division of labour; how dead labour is used to discipline living labour) by expanding our purview to consider social relations in the community and inter-generationally. Crucially, if the objective of self-valorization is for those creating value to control how it is used, Autonomous Feminism shows us the importance of controlling and channeling the value created when we nurture, re-humanize, educate, and socialize each other. Autonomy is therefore the ‘freedom to’ shape society differently and not just ‘freedom from’ alienation.
Autonomous Feminism applies self-valorization to the work of reproduction, but the assertion that ‘we make society and can make it differently’ is easier said than done. How can an understanding that the everyday work of reproducing our communities is the basis for the wealth of society become real control over this wealth? The explicitly “autonomous” feminism we know today also began with a proposal for refusal through the “wages for housework” campaign (Federici, 2012, pp.5-8). Campaign organizers reasoned that, if unwaged work makes all waged work possible, and if the wages themselves are what gives the secondary, productive worker control over the primary, reproductive worker, then we should look to these wages as a key tool in articulating and naturalizing the chain of exploitation. For example, Federici observes that sexuality becomes work for unwaged house-workers who are expected to show their gratitude for the share of their partner’s wages “given” to them by ensuring their sexual satisfaction (ibid, pp.23-27). This exposes a general tendency under capitalism, many times achieved through the ordering function of wages, for more and more social relations to become relations of production. This convinced the organizers of the wages for housework campaign that most Socialists’ stock reply that ‘women will overcome their gendered oppression in the home by going out and getting a union job’ was insufficient. It had nothing to offer poor women who were already forced into low-paying jobs, in addition to doing all the housework. Nor did it offer relief for all the emotional, interpersonal, affective labour many women do, which is another previously-undertheorized category feminists brought to light. The call to “go find a job” is therefore simply a call to add exploitation at the workplace to affective and reproductive exploitation at home.
The wages for housework campaign sought to bring waged and unwaged workers together in a common struggle through de-naturalizing unwaged reproductive work, since the demand for wages is an opening to explain how there cannot be production without reproduction (Federici, 2012, pp.28-40). Their immediate goal was a collective social wage through free social services, as this would directly support the poorest women (ibid, pp.54-62). Despite being attacked by non-feminist Socialists and liberal feminists, the campaign successfully raised awareness through concrete actions for material gains. Yet Federici later reflected on the campaign’s limitations: First, capitalism responded to women’s insurgency against unwaged reproductive work by once again using wages to split the movement, as higher-class, whiter, better-educated women were increasingly integrated into the white-collar workforce (albeit with pay significantly lower than males doing the same work) while women of colour remained at the lowest rungs of the labour market and still working second shifts at home. Second, wealthier double-income families were increasingly able to pay for reproductive work, especially as neoliberal structural adjustment programs have impoverished people around the world, led to wars causing mass displacement and loss of land, and generally converted the Third World into an immense “homeland” of people forced by their lack of migratory status to seek work in the Global North under the most precarious conditions. This is the “new international division of labor,” in which women from the Global South support capital accumulation in the metropoles through their sparsely-paid reproductive work (ibid, pp.65-75).
This all goes to show that autonomy needs a stronger proposal than refusal, wages, or free state-run services. The Autonomous Feminism we find in Federici’s writing emphasizes the incredible power of all those who do the daily work of recreating our social world, and it reminds us that those doing the work have the power to do it differently. This is a key lesson for autonomy: that we can believe reproductive work is “natural,” that earning higher wages means more power, and that our children have no alternative but to repeat our lives of drudgery; or we can use our power to reproduce the social world to create new forms of social cooperation. Like what is proposed by self-valorization, autonomy proposes that we take control of our social cooperation. Feminist autonomy is the assertion that we can reproduce freedom instead of reproducing servitude. Federici’s proposal for how to do this is similar to those of other autonomists in that she advocates turning away from the state as the means to resolve our problems. She says we must go beyond “wages for housework” and its demand for free public social services, especially given neoliberalism’s turn towards austerity, privatization, and accumulation by dispossession (2012, p.12). Instead of trying to wield an alienated political form against alienation, we must turn to each other and create new forms of social cooperation. Instead of creating a society at the service of the factory, we must embed the factory in a rich social fabric. We must look to the primary work, processes, and relationships – so often relegated to the background – that will lay the foundations for life outside capitalism. Autonomous Feminism therefore takes autonomy from critique and rejection to a positive proposal. Given just how important reproduction is, how do we articulate non-capitalist reproduction?
“The commons” is the heading I will use for the third school of thought. Operaismo moved from a critique of dead labour to a proposal for self-valorization; Autonomous Feminism moved from a critique of the gendered, waged subversion of reproduction to production to a proposal to control our social cooperation; and literature on the commons moves from a critique of dispossession and class society to the proposal that we build a commons. In doing so, it makes autonomy a more local, material project by providing concrete ways to dis-alienate our lives. Of the four schools of thought I engage, it is also the one that best represents the core of contemporary autonomist thinking.
Mezzadra and Nielsen emphasize that the commons is not only the common land, water, and biological reproduction that have been ravaged by enclosures under capitalism, but also “methods of sharing” as expressed in communal logics, infrastructures of distribution, and methods of social organization (2013, pp.277-284). Hardt and Negri – the most popular and polemical exponents of autonomy and the commons today – expand on this, writing that the commons is the shared capacity to think, feel, relate, and love (2009, pp. 280-295). It is neither the property of private entities nor the state’s public domain. Most importantly, producing the commons is a fundamentally different process than producing commodities, which are subject to the logics of scarcity and exclusivity, producing the commons further increases our creative capacity instead of depleting it. Instead of a quantitative growth in exchange value that leaves workers feeling qualitatively depleted (and in need of the humanization that reproductive labour provides), creating the commons is a qualitative effort of social composition (ibid). While reproduction is usually the vicious cycle and draining task of replenishing people who are strained and sapped on the job – leaving reproductive workers in greater need of their own reproduction – the commons touch off a virtuous cycle where it is less necessary to do draining waged wok to survive and where reproductive work in the commons strengthens the capacity to reproduce outside capitalism. Ross (2015) provides an excellent example of how all this looks in real life, as she poetically describes how the Paris Commune released “communal luxury” – the overflowing abundance of creative work freed from the strictures of commodity production, the fusion of labour and art.
“Commoning” is therefore the opposite of alienation, requiring “a profound transformation in our everyday life, in order to recombine what the social division of labor in capitalism has separated” (Federici, 2012, p.144). Alienation evicts people from the land, separates workers from the fruits of their labour, divides productive cooperation into siloed and competitive tasks, pits bosses against workers, waged male workers against unwaged reproductive workers, and citizens against immigrants, and ultimately impoverishes people’s sense of humanity in the quest to subvert cooperation to the accumulation of capital. Commoning is the integration of communities and the land, work and its social function, communities across difference, and the weaving of a more human, loving, and cooperative social fabric.
Commoning is also a fundamentally local, heterogeneous process, instead of the homogenizing project of capital. Linebaugh (2008) – a member of another widely-read group of autonomist thinkers, the Midnight Notes Collective – illustrates this by pointing out how the common political and legal rights of the Magna Carta were based on the economic, reproductive commons enshrined in the Charter of the Forests. The two documents were established together in 1217, and the Charter of the Forests spoke to a long local tradition of common access to the forests and the ensuing rights to the fuel, materials, medicine, and food. Linebaugh likens the two charters to the United Nations Declarations on Human Rights, observing that economic, social, and cultural rights are the basis of political rights. The commons of the Charter of the Forests were a long-established practice, and the people only demanded it be formalized in a legal document after the same conflicts that forced the king’s recognition of rights such as habeas corpus. However, lest we think shared access to the forest is the extent of this commons, it was also shared understandings of the productive, political, and redistributive processes by which all members of the collectivity should engage with each other as to sustain this shared resource. It was economic practices embedded in social ones. Hardt and Negri emphasize that such local commoning processes are animated by an ethics of love: whereas capitalism, privatization, and alienation are driven by an individualist fear of poverty, love is the celebration of shared wealth, the production of dis-alienated inter-subjectivity, the creation of life (2009, pp.179-188).
Yet sustaining the commons is much more difficult than falling in love, as the history of enclosures attests to the vast profits to be gleaned from stealing what others have cooperated to create and nurture. Indeed, all of class struggle under capitalism can be boiled down to a conflict between the private and the common, since wealth can only be created socially while it must become private capital if the system of value creation, profit, reinvestment, and greater value creation is to function (Harvey, 2014, pp.53-61). Who dispossesses the common wealth from whom is the heart of class division. This was just as fundamental during European primitive accumulation via enclosure as in the colonies, as under contemporary neoliberalism. Federici explains how a central objective of those colonizing Africa was to separate women, the traditional bedrock of food sovereignty, from their common land and farming practices as to generate dependence on the market and corral what food production remained into subsidizing the miniscule wages paid to male workers (2012, pp.127-132). This leads her to conclude that the commons are what allows us to reproduce community instead of the need for wages forcing us to reproduce labour-power, writing “the ‘commoning’ of the material means of reproduction is the primary mechanism by which a collective interest and mutual bonds are created. It is also the first line of resistance to a life of enslavement, whether in armies, brothels or sweatshops” (ibid, p.144). Dispossession of the common is what forced us to do the work of reproducing alienating social relations instead of reproducing life beyond capitalism.
The commons’ positive proposal for autonomy is to dis-alienate our social relations by creating self-managed spaces (Wilson, 2011) where we practice new forms of cooperation. A very concrete proposal is to proliferate self-managed cooperatives in order to expand the commons (Lefebvre, 2009, pp.142-150; The Situationist International, 2006, pp.160-168), and Hardt and Negri go a step further by proposing a proliferation of forms of cooperation (for example, survival techniques commonly lumped under the label of the “informal economy,” the collaborative development of digital resources, codes, and platforms, and the information on social practices produced by these platforms). The challenge is to find ever more social arrangements that can disassociate cooperation from predatory arrangements that suck value from it (2009, pp.131-149). As Hardt and Negri (2009), Federici (2012), and Mezzadra and Nielsen (2013) all observe, meeting this challenge requires the formation of a common subject, of communities explicitly dedicated to commoning, in resistance to all the ways our cooperation, its fruits, and our common spaces are corralled into profit-making, and in celebration of all the creative excess that escapes it. In this way, every instance of the commons is a cellular form of society beyond capital (de Peuter & Dyer-Witheford, 2010, p.44). Each commons is an example of dis-alienated social relations, a way of reproducing non-capitalism, a testament to the incompleteness of enclosure, and a victory against class society. Autonomy’s project is therefore to expand and deepen the commons, meaning our level of autonomy is a measure of the extent to which we have removed aspects of our lives from capitalism and succeeded in creating non-capitalist relations. This extends my positive definition of autonomy: along with being a project for self-valorization and for the reproduction of non-capitalism, autonomy is an expansion of the commons that moves us beyond class society. It is freedom from capitalist alienation and the freedom to achieve historicity (Touraine, 1981) – the power of the many to shape our own society.
Before moving on to the fourth school of thought concerning decolonization, I will mention some critiques of the proposals outlined above. Following Thwaites Reyes’ assertion that autonomy demands “freedom without conditions, without constraints, without restrictions, action according to one’s own will and thinking without limits” (2011, p.145), the critique of alienation and proposal of communalism risks devolving into a condemnation of everything and appeal for utopia. Indeed, rejecting all the evils of class society and seeking to overcome it is quite an expansive project. Autonomy’s detractors highlight the tendency of people who adopt this position to make outsized claims, while others merely read the titles of books on autonomy, such as Change the World Without Taking Power (Holloway, 2002), and critique their caricatured understanding of what is actually a nuanced argument. Aureli, for example, makes autonomy into a stand-in for his issues with postmodernism. He characterizes theories grouped under the label Autonomia (centred around the work of Negri) for an alleged abandonment of class antagonism and disarming of the left due to their supposed rejection of all labour unions and leftist parties, culminating in a “self-destructive critique of all institutions” (2008, p.79). While I have endeavored to situate the critique of unions and parties in a historical context, I agree that Aureli’s further critique of Autonomia’s overly-academic “hyper-futurism” and “unrestricted desires” has some basis (2008, pp.8-10). For example, after reading Harney and Moten’s work on the “undercommons” (2013), their revolutionary slogans about “revolution without politics,” “falsifying the institution,” the impossibility of representation, “fugitive Enlightenment,” and celebration of upheaval all seem enticing, but the reader is left at a total loss for how exactly to go “beyond the beyond.” Much of Bey’s work reads the same way (2003), more like revolutionary poetry than strategic proposal. Hardt and Negri’s arguments are more thoroughly-argued, yet they fixate on immaterial labour (the production of knowledge, language, codes, information, affects, and ultimately new cooperative arrangements), arguing the centre of political-economic gravity has shifted from material to immaterial production (2009, pp.131-149). It is an enormous claim to assert a shift towards post-material production, and one which Federici rebukes by observing that care work (commonly associated with immaterial ‘affective labour’) involves a complete engagement whose physical, corporeal, and technological aspects cannot be separated from emotional ones (2012, p.122). Furthermore, I would question whether Hardt and Negri make such sweeping claims regarding immaterial labour from having mistaken the movement of centres of industrial production to the Global South for their disappearance. This belies a problematic tendency in literature on the commons to jump immediately into celebration of its theoretically-enticing aspects without giving attention to the unequal, ongoing history of whose commons were sacked and who is doing the occupying, commoning, and cooperative-making today (A. J. Barker, 2012).
Another troubling aspect of Hardt and Negri’s thinking is their assertion that, in moving from the exploitation of material production to the predation of autonomous, immaterial cooperation, “Capital thus captures and expropriates value through biopolitical exploitation that is produced, in some sense, externally to it” (2009, p.141) and that Marx’s Law of Value is no longer an adequate measure of economic activity (ibid, pp.312-321). The labour insurgency that inspired Operaismo, the women’s insurgency that inspired Feminism, and decolonial revolts all caused capitalism to profoundly alter its accumulation strategy by rolling out neoliberalism, but it is quite another thing to assert that this mutated the fundamental, metabolic processes of capital circulation. In sum, vague celebrations of revolt and overstated claims expose autonomists to accusations of lacking theoretical rigor. In a more practical vein, autonomy can lead to the same pitfalls of business unionism, liberal feminism, or black capitalism in charting a course for ways more superficial aspects of the social relations of production can be modified to protect deeper structures of accumulation. For autonomy, this means reducing its project to the flexible, hip, minimally-bureaucratic workplaces associated with the tech sector, which make greater use of sub-contracting, precarity, and entrepreneurial self-branding (Bohm, Dinerstein, & Spicer, 2010, pp.19-21; Boltanski & Chiapello, 2018; A. Ross, 2004). Instead of pursuing freedom from class society, autonomy (especially its “immaterial” variant) becomes more isolating work unbound by a workday, hidden under a design-savvy veneer. In this way autonomous projects can play a similar role as do NGOs in allowing the neoliberal state to off-load social service provision while debt and dependence on foundation funding limit the ability of these autonomous projects to be mobilized to resist the powerful (INCITE!, 2007; Petras & Veltmeyer, 2001).
In light of these critiques, I would remind readers that in any school of thought there are people making overstated claims, and any form of resistance can be coopted into buttressing the status quo. We should look to the best autonomy has to offer and make comradely critique in the spirit of further development. Armed with the most incisive, well-reasoned arguments available (some of which come from autonomists, many from elsewhere) the most important step is to apply them in ways that are both practical and radical. Pursuant of this, I will briefly outline a fourth school of thought – indigenous autonomy – emphasizing how it exposes the lack of attention to colonialism and land in the prior three proposals and also orients us towards concrete, inspiring practices of autonomy. In this way decolonization completes the bridge that began with Operaismo emphasizing refusal and grasping at self-valorization, followed by Autonomous Feminism broadening in scope to include reproduction, and then to the commons offering concrete was to reproduce outside capitalism, but without giving historical attention to how this land has become privatized. Decolonization is a body of thought much more rooted in questions of indigenous struggle than in explicit questions of autonomy, yet there are important overlaps between the two that points us towards autonomy as an actually-existing practice and more than a potential project.
Colonization is first and foremost a question of territory. Coulthard defines colonialism as a set of hierarchical economic, gendered, racial, and governing relationships that dispossess indigenous peoples of their land and self-governing authority (2014, p.7). Colonization is therefore a project of dispossession, of the “conquest, enslavement, robbery, and murder” of primitive accumulation (Marx, 1992, pt.8). Because territory is both land and the people who are its stewards, colonization accomplishes the dispossession of land through genocide as well as dehumanization (Fanon, 2008), the systematic production of trauma (T. Alfred & Corntassel, 2005), the imposition of colonial governance structures (T. Alfred, 2009), and through regimes of knowledge/power that produce disciplines of control (Tuhiwai Smith, 1999). Dispossession of land is therefore accompanied by the imposition of social relations allowing value extraction. Returning to the concept of alienation, we can understand colonization as the violent, original, and ongoing scission that allows further deepening of alienation. Through colonization, societies in which economics and politics are embedded in and at the service of social and ecological reproduction are transformed into ones where people are thrown off the land, forced to access wages to survive, forced to collaborate in extractive economies, politically disempowered, socially isolated, and traumatically alienated from their sense of humanity. This is not to say that pre-colonial life was a utopia, but that across the world colonial dispossession has touched off processes of deepening alienation. Having lost control over the social space and natural metabolism of reproduction, the colonized are put at the mercy of the forces critiqued in the first section: authoritarian organizations, articulations of power such as the state, systems that orient reproduction towards capital accumulation such as patriarchy, and ultimately class society.
This leads us back to the critique of the state, which has been the pre-eminent organizing form for coordinating colonization. Villoro (1998) – who serves as an important bridge between thinking on indigenous sovereignty and explicitly autonomist ideas – exposes how the nation-state’s project of internal colonization violates the core principles of liberalism. He argues that a “nation” is a cultural community with a sense of belonging, a common project, and a territory. Liberal philosophy holds that this sort of belonging entitles a group of people to constitute a state. Yet the world is replete with nations without states, and most states do not represent single nations. This discrepancy means that state formation is a process of forming a nation where none existed, engaging in a project to form a homogenous people with homogenous rights by erasing previous group membership. This homogenizing project involves uniform money, measures, political administration, markets, law, education, and language. This is a process of colonization: eliminating pre-existing nations, peoples, and groups, unifying a territory, and elaborating a political, legal, intellectual, and cultural project to perpetuate it. This is an alienating project, as people must be divided in order to be brought back together on a different basis. Meanwhile, the nationalist myth that the nation-state was formed through an act of self-constitution by a people with a common culture, project, and territory opens the door for actually-existing nations to demand their autonomy. (Villoro, 1998, pp.13-62)
The project for autonomy is therefore a project to re-territorialize dispossessed land, elaborate economies of integral social reproduction instead of extraction, to build self-governance, and to re-humanize what has been alienated. Across Turtle Island, indigenous thinkers have looked to their nations’ histories of resistance, ways of knowing, and political, economic, and cultural practices to elaborate a programme of “resurgence” (G. R. Alfred, 2009; Simpson, 2008, 2017). While they do not use the language of “autonomy,” those writing on resurgence problematize autonomist thinking in important ways. The scant attention to land (much less anything else material) in Hardt and Negri and the broader inattention to indigenous decolonization in the three schools of thought presented in this section (with Federici as a notable exception) belie a troubling disconnect. Autonomists critique ever-deeper articulations of power and propose radical alternatives to capitalism without recognizing those who have survived the most violent and broadly-articulated projects of colonial capitalism and who have distilled vitally-important knowledge in the process. Decolonization centres the inspiring experiences of those who have moved towards dis-alienating their land and social relations.
While more writing takes up questions of decolonization, indigenous sovereignty, and resurgence, when “autonomy” is recognized on the non-indigenous left, it is all to often reduced to the slogans of Zapatismo and does not bring to bear their material, territorial project of decolonization. I would argue that autonomist thinkers must bring the former to bear on their analyses. While it is racist to write off indigenous struggles for resurgence based on the assumption they are pre-capitalist, exclusively cultural, or simply not applicable to non-indigenous struggles, neither can we simply treat indigenous decolonization as a recipe to be replicated by non-indigenous autonomist movements. Such cultural appropriation and “moves to innocence” (Tuck & Yang, 2012) only perpetuate colonialism. Between rejection and appropriation, there is the complex process of building bridges between the knowledge of those who have survived colonial annihilation and those who wish to resist their enlistment in supporting colonialism. Examples of non-indigenous, autonomist writers building such bridges are Bookchin (2007), who elaborates a theory of social ecology, beginning with the observation that class society stems from a dialectical tension between social groups’ drive to dominate each other and the drive to dominate the natural environment, leading to a historical tension between authoritarianism and mutual aid. Zibechi (2012) looks to Abya Yala (Turtle Island’s neighbour to the south) and theorizes practices of “territorialisation”: how people create spaces where they can control their everyday lives through femininizing, domesticizing projects in whole-community education, “informal” production without a division of labour, assembly government, and collective work. As I will discuss further below, communities in urban peripheries provide practical examples of dis-alienation through these territorializing projects.
Up until now, I have dealt with autonomy as an idea: as critiques of alienation and as the concepts that can guide projects for life beyond capitalism. In this way, I have moved from autonomy as a ‘no’ to autonomy as a ‘yes.’ Yet theory alone will not create life beyond capitalism. It will not dismantle its articulations of power and elaborate the material structures that allow us to reproduce ourselves in non-capitalist ways. This demands practice, but where to begin? Under the umbrella of “autonomy” I have grouped a vast array projects, including self-management, social reproduction, the commons, dis-alienation, social ecology, and territorialisation. All these ideas are potentially overwhelming, yet thankfully practice collapses it all into concrete processes and contexts. If autonomy is a proposal for life beyond capitalism, let us now turn to one of the most successful contemporary autonomous projects for lessons on how this can be practically accomplished.
Zapatismo and the practice of autonomy
The Zapatistas are engaged in one of the largest and most stable autonomous projects in the world today, and the term “autonomy” is perhaps more associated with them than any other contemporary social movement. They are best known for the uprising on January 1, 1994 that decolonized of hundreds of thousands of acres of land, yet their efforts to re-communalize through varied and robust structures of self-government and countless cooperative projects remain under-appreciated. Most importantly, this success shows that the concepts elaborated above can indeed be applied practically: the commons are built through collective landholding and cooperative production on this land; this bounty supports autonomous reproduction through the Zapatistas’ schools, hospitals, and media, as well as nested levels of self-government that work through the quotidian problems of collective reproduction; and self-valorization is guided by a set of traditional practices and principles of “good government.” Zapatismo makes autonomy’s dreams for life outside capitalism into physical steps. Their advances are within their own geography and calendar, but they can serve as inspiration as we chart a course in our own contexts.
Yet before we can appreciate the scope of the autonomy they have built, I would like to address the connotational baggage summoned on the left when “Zapatista” is uttered. The first tendency is to reduce Zapatismo to a complete and unrelenting rejection of electoral politics, stemming from their critiques of centre-left candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) during the 2006 Mexican presidential campaign (Roman & Velasco Arregui, 2008). This caricature defines autonomy in its narrowest sense, simply as rejecting electoral politics, and it alleges that the Zapatistas are doing the right a favour by rejecting all political parties. Yet they ignore the Zapatistas’ close relationship with AMLO’s centre-left party after the 1994 uprising, how they were thoroughly betrayed by them at both the state and national levels (including attacks on Zapatista communities by groups supported by the PRD party), as well as AMLO’s track record of collaborating with Carlos Slim on gentrification projects and seeking policing advice from Rudy Guiliani while he was mayor of Mexico City. Most importantly, they ignore how autonomy has radically improved the standard of living of hundreds of thousands of Zapatista support bases, in a way no political party can boast of. Instead of supporting the “least bad” candidate, the Zapatistas have consistently urged their supporters vote or abstain as they wish while being sure to engage in a similar process of deep, long-term political action by building autonomy in their own spaces (Moisés, 2015a).
A second, and much more pervasive, tendency is to confuse Zapatista autonomy with the slogans, buzzwords, and principles of the groups outside Chiapas who raise their banner. Writing in this vein characterizes Zapatismo as a cornerstone of the alter-globalization movement and celebrates their shared commitment to anti-vanguardism, use of poetic revolutionary communiques instead of arms, celebration of diversity, critique of neoliberalism, and use of direct democracy (Dellacioppa, 2009; Khasnabish, 2010). This is all well and good, but it comes exclusively from a discursive analysis of Zapatista texts and gives no attention to their actual organizing projects, to the practical, material gains of autonomy. It is easy to encourage direct democracy but much more difficult to organize educational, agricultural, and political systems that utilize it. This tendency therefore ends up giving much more weight to “autonomy as a critique of alienation” than “autonomy as a project for life beyond capitalism.” Having read such accounts of Zapatismo and alter-globalization, detractors then impute their critiques of the alter-globalization movement onto Zapatismo as well, alleging the movement’s idealist principles amount to a defeatist political isolation through a refusal to build coalitions or to think practically about how to confront capitalism and the state. Again, these critiques are made without attention to the astounding ways Zapatista autonomy has changed the lives of its members.
So, what exactly are the Zapatistas doing? Fernandez (2014) defines Zapatista autonomy as the collective process of building justice on recuperated land, which can be understood as the opposite of all that was official, state-sanctioned “justice” before the uprising. In the pre-uprising plantation society, “justice” was the will of the elites who owned the land and therefore controlled the lives of all those living on it. It was the enforcement of extreme, violent alienation. Similarly to a slave system, through the 1980s Chiapas plantation owners would beat, torture, and kill indigenous people accused of “crimes,” upheld a “right” to rape indigenous women prior to allowing them to marry, leased groups of chain gangs workers out to politicians and other elites, fostered inter-generational debts, demanded a portion of families’ domestic agricultural production, restricted male education and forbade it to women, and would have any person who traveled to the capitol to complain jailed on fabricated charges. The Zapatista elders who recount these conditions repeat that “justice” was essentially the power of those who owned land to control those who lived from the land (ibid, ch.1). While the uprising ended the worst abuses of plantation life, the judicial system continues to operate more like a marketplace for purchasing governmental sanction. Government justice was deployed to traumatize and destroy the social fabric, to justify the exploitation of indigenous labour, to keep people from education or effective rights, and to maintain their submission to authoritarian state-level and local government. Similarly to Operaismo’s observation that alienated, dead labour is used to control living labour, justice was the institutionalization of the dispossessor’s power wielded against the dispossessed.
Against this, Zapatista autonomy is a moment within a long tradition of indigenous self-government. Four fundamental aspects of this practice that they have inherited and developed are the community assembly (which indigenous liberation theology organizers worked to democratize), the cargo (meaning a role, but also a “burden” to carry, exercised at the service of the community, without pay, and often at considerable personal cost), the “consultation” (more of a community discussion towards consensus than an electoral referendum), and collective work (commonly for building irrigation, roads, and schools for the benefit of the entire community) (Klein, 2015, ch.7). Counterposed to official justice, these traditional practices institutionalize self-valorization – they formalize the mechanisms by which the power of the community is deployed and made accountable to that community. They are tools for dis-alienation. Yet such tools have no value in and of themselves, Instead, the value they socialize comes from the 531 square miles of collectively-held land the Zapatistas recuperated during their 1994 uprising (Núñez Rodríguez, et al, 2013, p.45).
Zapatista autonomy is essentially the practice of living together on this recuperated, collectively-held land. It is the slow process of building anticapitalist social relations in this liberated space, the practice of living together in the commons. A key aspect of this process is the self-government the Zapatistas have created on the village, municipal, and regional level. Self-government is a cycle of consultation through community assemblies, proposal, agreement, implementation, rendering of accounts, and modification that is repeated continuously, and in every one of the hundreds of Zapatista communities (which the Zapatistas contrast with Mexico’s “bad government” by calling theirs “good government”). In this sense, autonomous government is the facilitation and implementation of community agreements (EZLN, 2013a).
Returning to the norms that guide self-valorization, the Zapatista mantra is that good government must “lead by obeying.” As Fernandez shows through her extensive transcripts of interviews with Zapatista support bases (2014, pp.105-205), the authorities who do the facilitating and implementing are elected to cargos in a manner totally contrary to conventional, alienated politics. Candidates do not campaign and are instead nominated by peers at community assemblies based on neighbours’ consideration of the candidate’s moral authority and adherence to the seven principles of Zapatista good government. (2) Each community, municipality, and zone has its own nominating process, based on their historic practice and geographical conditions. At the local level, positions include the Agent, whose focus is conflict resolution, a Commissioner who attends to land and agricultural issues, and local coordinators for education, health, and cooperative projects. At the municipal level there is a governing Council, an Agrarian Commission, and an Honour and Justice Commission, as well as coordinating teams for health, education, and cooperatives. On the most general level of the five Zapatista zones, each has a Good Government Junta with 24 to 36 members. On all three levels there is gender parity amongst authorities, who always work as a team with their co-representative, treasurer, and secretary instead of each individual having a specific position. Literacy and fluency in Spanish are not required, but abstention from alcohol is. Once chosen, there is a ceremony where a mutual promise is made: authorities vow to respect the will of the community, and community members vow to participate in the collective work the authority administers. This is followed by a party where outgoing authorities are celebrated, and the new ones are welcomed. Once on the job, authorities receive no payment for their service, though their fellow community members aid them with their agricultural and domestic responsibilities and money from cooperative projects pays for their transportation costs. There is no re-election after the three-year term, and because the work is unpaid few wish it were otherwise. If the assembly disapproves of an authority’s work or book-keeping, they may be immediately recalled. Each of these aspects is diametrically opposed to the conventional political system, as one serves to perpetuate alienation on dispossessed land and the other reverses it. This practice of self-government is one example of dis-alienated politics, where people work through the minutiae of implementing arrangements that keep power decentralized, accountable, and embedded within social frameworks. Having reversed dispossession, it is one-way people have found to live together on the commons.
Having recuperated the land and developed self-valorization principles and self-government processes for working it, Zapatista autonomy then elaborates projects that allow for non-capitalist reproduction. This means staying healthy, socializing, politicizing, and acculturating their children, getting news and media, and exchanging goods in order to feed, clothe, and transport themselves without needing wages to achieve it all. The projects that allow this reproduction include a system of primary and secondary education, taught in both Mayan languages and Spanish by Zapatista education promoters using a curriculum set by the community; a system of clinics and hospitals that, in addition to general and preventative medicine, includes dentistry, pre-natal care, midwifery, herbal medicine, bone-setting, and surgery; a number of cooperative banks that give loans at 2% interest, including banks dedicated to starting women’s cooperative projects, banks for agricultural projects, banks for medical expenses, and banks for veterans and widows; radio stations transmitting music, news, and political education; and a plethora of cooperatives dedicated to pursuits such as livestock, manure production, general stores, coffee production and distribution, transport of goods, passenger vans, warehousing, baking, butchers, poultry, pork, rice, ironworks, beans, corn, tortillas, and boot-making. Make no mistake: Zapatista families still engage with capitalism, yet each autonomous aspect of their reproduction makes them less dependent on exploitation for survival and opens further opportunities for living outside capitalism. (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, 2013a, 2013b, 2013c, 2013d)
All said, Zapatista autonomy is unheard of in both its scope and duration. The project began with the formation of the EZLN in 1983 and has grown by leaps and bounds since they definitively broke with all political parties in 2001 and formed the Good Government Juntas in 2003. Because the incremental flowering of their autonomy lacks in shock value, it is vastly under-reported even in alternative media and thereby under-appreciated on the left. Although the Zapatistas have not published an overall accounting of their total membership, it is surely larger and more longstanding than the Paris Commune of 1871 or the Oaxaca Commune of 2006. In the Oventic caracol, which is only one of five regions, there are 52 health clinics, 158 schools, 8 agroecology centres, and 3 radio stations. The schools have 510 teachers and coordinators with 4886 students; there are 284 agroecology promoters; and the radio stations have 62 DJs and coordinators. The total number of authorities across the municipal governments of the region is 268. Again, this only represents one-fifth of Zapatista territory, and all these positions are unwaged.
The practical conclusion is that autonomy begins with commoning: overcoming private property and collectivizing the land. Zapatista elders observe that, by owning the land, the plantation owners also owned those living off the land. They consider autonomy to be the process of developing alternative customs and knowledge now that they have dispossessed the landed elite (Fernández, 2014, pp.105-107). Land is the foundation of the agricultural cooperatives that allow Zapatistas to reject ill-intentioned government aid and to feed their teachers and good government authorities. It is where their schools, clinics, and self-government offices are built. It is where their radio transmitters emit from. It is what feeds their self-defence forces, who maintain the unilateral cease-fire of January 12, 1994. It is what produces the wealth that is redistributed through their cooperative banks. If autonomy is the freedom to produce and enjoy the common wealth, this autonomy must be tangible. From this material basis, autonomy flourishes as people develop means of organizing collective work, resolving disputes, educating the next generation, redistributing produce, and staying healthy that progressively deepen all that living on collective land requires from day to day. This is how value is circulated in non-alienating ways that strengthen the community’s capacity to reproduce itself outside capitalism. It is a practical example of decolonization, of political and economic power remaining embedded in the social and in territory.
Autonomy must produce value that people can feel, taste, and use, and it must work through all the tedious problems that come with this. The process of dis-alienating is not easy. Interviews with Zapatista good government authorities are replete with examples of working through problems. In fact, more than a structure of responsibilities, self-government emerges as the process of working through problems through debate and experiment, trying out solutions, finding new problems, and so forth. Indeed, the Zapatistas added an entire new, regional level of self-government (the caracoles) in part as a solution to the problems of municipal authorities in coordinating with each other and in ensuring the accountability of non-governmental organizations (Marcos, 2003a, 2003b). Women’s participation (or, more specifically, men’s prevention of women’s participation) is another problem whose solution has fundamentally altered good government. Debate on how to overcome sexism has opened discussion on how to revise the 1993 Women’s Revolutionary Law and make it into a reality (EZLN, 2013c, pp.24-31), the creation of banks for women’s cooperative projects (EZLN, 2013a, p.19), training in skills such as accounting, radio transmission, and land surveying (EZLN, 2013c, pp.20-21), and more systematically integrating women into the autonomous healthcare system as herbalists, bonesetters, and midwives (EZLN, 2013c, pp.22-23). Nonetheless, Zapatista women openly critique their male comrades for continuing to discourage their political participation and failing to support it by taking on domestic tasks (Klein, 2015, ch.s 6, 8). Finally, with each Zapatista family farming their personal plot while also supporting dozens of program coordinators and good government authorities who cannot tend to their own fields, as well as doing collective work in the many cooperatives listed above, dividing up work and the fruits of this labour is a textbook of its own (EZLN, 2013a; Moisés, 2015b, pp.176-177). Apart from these internal challenges, the Zapatistas continue to confront the external aggression of land invasions by organizations whose clientelist relationships with political parties has allowed them to form paramilitary groups and easily obtain title for territory seized through violence. Nonetheless, working through these problems is how autonomy comes to be the practice of freedom, how people find ways of relating to each other, so they can build and enjoy a common wealth. The Zapatistas’ success shows that autonomy’s critique of power and proposed alternatives for life outside capitalism can indeed be actualized in practice.
Yet how are those of us who are not indigenous peasants accustomed to assemblies, cargos, consultas, and collective work going to build autonomy? Living in cities, we are confined to “the place of absolute alienation” (Tafuri, 1976, p.1) in the way its grid maps private property, its commercial spaces are centered while its reproductive spaces are marginalized, and how it generates massive stress and precarity. Ouviña observes that the Zapatistas’ land allows them to create new productive relations and to enjoy them collectively, while organizations in cities do not have their own geo-political territory, as urbanites live side by side with their landlords and rely on the countryside for their survival. The state is less present and largely repressive in rural Chiapas, while it garners a great deal of consent in cities. Finally, traditions of mutual aid and a collective memory persist in Chiapas while city-dwellers tend to be transient, individualist, and with dispersed locations of work and reproduction (Ouviña, 2011, pp.256-268). This helps explain why the Zapatistas’ efforts to initiate confederated autonomous networks bridging Mexico’s cities and countryside have largely failed to take root. Evaluations of such efforts, including the Zapatista National Liberation Front (Dellacioppa, 2009, pp.59-90) and the Other Campaign (Sixth Commission of the EZLN, 2006) point to the practical problems of convoking longstanding rural organizations with a strong sense of collective identity, mass membership, and respect for collective process together with recently-formed urban collectives whose memberships is usually in the dozens and who are more accustomed to shouting down elites than with building community.
Nonetheless, there are inspiring examples of urban autonomy. Although they did not use the term “autonomy,” the most famous example is the Paris Commune’s glorious 72 days – showing that, given a cataclysmic war that allows working people to run the owners of private property out of town – people can coordinate collective projects such as polytechnic public schools, libraries, workers’ cooperative, artist-run museums, and community self-defence brigades (Ross, 2015, pp.39-66). Moreover, instead of being a poor and depressing attempt to collectively “make do” during a catastrophe, the Commune was an overflowing of dis-alienated creativity, a flourishing of “communal luxury.” Nearly one hundred years later, the events of May 1968 once again showed the possibility of students seizing the spaces of theoretical production, workers seizing the spaces of commodity production, and everyone governing these using councils instead of the authoritarian power structures critiqued in the first section (The Situationists, 2006, pp.225-289). Occupy included an explicit appeal to autonomy and was another instance where people were able to seize urban space and begin practicing self-government – albeit without a material commons to sustain it. Despite the brevity of each, the practical functioning of social life verging beyond capitalism is their greatest legacy. As Marx wrote, “The great social measure of the Commune was its own working existence” (Marx, 1988, ch.5).
Yet everyday urban life is far removed from Paris in 1871 or 1968. Instead of brief glimpses of dis-alienation, we are much more accustomed to the unstoppable force of money remaking our neighbourhoods through gentrification, police impunity, and democracy being limited to power plays between short-sighted political parties. These are the forces the German autonomists called Autonomen sought to “subvert” during the 1980s through direct actions to establish and protect squats, info shops, and the few other footholds of collectivism they could carve out (Katsiaficas, 2006, ch.5). Their subversion was frequently put on the defense against police, fascists, and young urban professionals, leaving Autonomen unable to gain the stability needed to confront patriarchy within the movement, federate separate squats and radical spaces, or deepen their autonomy through the cooperative and self-government structures that have given the Zapatistas such success. Autonomen surely shared the critique of alienation and sought to self-valorize but could not consolidate the commons necessary to reproduce themselves in non-capitalist ways.
This leads some to conclude that autonomy is misguided, too idealist, and destined to remain a series of brief, isolated, and ultimately pathetic instances that are easily stamped out. My response is that alternatives are always small and limited before they are large and sustained, and that we should look outside the strongholds of the Global North for more inspiring examples of non-capitalism. Apart from rural Chiapas, there are many urban peripheries across Latin America where autonomy is thriving. For example, many were surprised when the people of El Alto, Bolivia barricaded the capitol and caused the government to fall in October 2003, without the leadership any labour federations or leftist parties. This was possible because the same communal structures that these indigenous residents used to build utility infrastructure, organize their marketplaces, run schools, and coordinate celebrations could also be mobilized into mass resistance to defend their urban commons against privatization (Zibechi, 2010, pp.11-31). Social life in urban peripheries such as El Alto, a burgeoning suburb that hardly existed a generation ago and whose growth was not subject to “urban planning,” is frequently described in a deprivation-oriented language of informality and clientelism (Castells, 1983, pp.173-212). Yet Zibechi (ibid) highlights how El Alto’s community assemblies institutionalize reciprocity, collective ownership of common space, and a face-to-face community control in a manner that resists bureaucratization. Instead of allowing power to be centralized and alienated from the community through the mechanism of “democratic” representation, these autonomous structures continuously disperse power throughout the community in a way that cannot be represented or removed.
Practical autonomy is caught somewhere between these three points: the slog of organizing “in the belly of the beast,” so often reduced to defence of small urban autonomous spaces and to a critique of how representative democracy and vanguardism separate power from the community; the flash of short-lived events like those in Paris or during Occupy that alter participants’ perception of the possible but that are quickly met with violence; and the slow, steady re-territorialisation in places like Chiapas and Bolivia, where current and former-peasants build community power while being ignored by both the state and a left who considers them too exotic or indigent to take notice. Yet in each of these examples autonomy is the practical, material process of keeping politics, economics, justice, education, and production embedded in the social instead of allowing them to be alienated into the purview of unaccountable institutions. This begins with a commons – recuperated land, elites fleeing the city, a series of squats, displaced peasants left to urbanize on their own – and is deepened as those involved elaborate cooperative production, self-government, and a clearer intention of their project. In doing so, people provide practical examples of self-valorization, of reproduction that affirms society instead of capital, of the commons, and of decolonization. But more than anything they show us it is indeed possible to collectively live better. They show us that life beyond capitalism is not a distant utopia. The seeds are with us here and now, already germinating, sprouting, and blossoming.
Conclusion: towards a strategic conception of autonomy
Autonomy is a “no,” a critique of alienation as it is wielded by hierarchical organizations, the state, and classed and gendered society. It is a “yes,” a proposal for self-valorization, for reproduction dedicated to life instead of accumulation, for the commons, and for decolonization. It is also a concrete practice, developing really-existing non-capitalisms. The “no” and “yes” of theory and the examples of practice all have limitations. Critiques of power can remain unaccompanied by a historical analysis, much less a proposal for action, as with blanket denunciations of unions or political parties. Proposals can remain limited in scope (as with Operaista workerism), undertheorized (as with immaterial labour), get outflanked by the transformation of capitalism (as with the “wages for housework” campaign and the new international division of labour), or appear too radical and exotic for many to support (as with decolonization). On the other hand, practical examples can appear to have brought on too much violence (as with the Paris Commune, Autonomen’s street fighting defence of squats, or the eviction of Occupy camps), or their starting points with land reclamations seem impossible under a strong state (as with Chiapas, Mexico and El Alto, Bolivia). In short, there are many reasons to doubt autonomy, to settle for using the least-bad of various alienating options, and to retreat to a realism that seeks better accommodation within capitalism. While autonomy is accused of being idealist, its realism lies in that life outside and beyond capitalism is all around us, and that there is hope for broadening and deepening these alternatives. But make no mistake, these efforts take many generations and an enormous effort to come to fruition. Autonomy and its project for life beyond capitalism is no quick fox. This is where strategy comes in, as its role is to keep the dream alive and to focus it into daily actions through which we can continue moving just a little closer. To paraphrase Eduardo Galeano, we’ll never reach the horizon, but we keep looking towards it as to keep walking (1995). To conclude I will draw out four points that can guide these efforts.
First, “self-valorization” is a fancy way of saying we must bring large numbers of people together in an appreciation of the power of collectivity. Self-valorization emphasizes that we already collaborate on an enormous scale, especially in our productive and reproductive activity, but we do so under the impression that we only come together at the will of the powerful. Our interconnected actions, collaboration, and humanity are made to seem separated into isolated pieces so they may be re-directed towards accumulation for the few. Autonomy’s critiques of alienated power and proposals for life beyond capitalism aim to dispel this misconception, albeit in academic language that often fails to resonate with most people. Zapatista slogans such as “everything for everyone, nothing for ourselves,” “leading by obeying,” “building a world where many worlds fit,” and the seven principles of good government make the collective struggle against alienation more explicit. The bottom line is that autonomy-building begins with organizing. We must build struggles that bring people together, that begin with the small victories that expose our power, and we must be intentional about why we are doing it all. This first step is simply overcoming isolation by fighting together, learning about power by confronting it, and appreciating our own power in the process. There are countless ways of doing this, including fighting for stable jobs, against evictions and the closure of social services, to protect our neighbours from deportation, to reclaim our community spaces, for good food and integral health, for free transportation, to empower survivors against sexual assault, to educate people to be agents of change instead of a mere “skillset.” Autonomy does not have to begin with a high-risk land reclamation, squat, barricade, or expulsion of the government, but instead with any of these quotidian struggles. The important part is to bring people together and experience our collective power while maintaining a focus on the broader struggle these specific actions are part of.
Second, in addition to growing our numbers and being intentional, this organizing must deepen our collectivity. It must build the commons. As stated above, this means recuperating the natural commons, the space of reproduction, the land that was privatized through enclosure and colonization, to lay the foundation for capital accumulation. The commons are also the means of production – which is exemplified as much by a “tools library” or open-source coding as by worker-run factories – as well as the means of reproduction, exemplified by community gardens, cooperative daycare and housing, and community arts programs. Finally, there is the social commons – ways of collectively managing the commons through mutual aid, building networks of reciprocity, and by working through the endless disputes, inconsistencies, and conflicts that arise in the process. The social commons are formalized into novel organizing forms and self-government, such as assemblies that spin off subcommittees as needs arise, local currencies, and community land trusts. These forms are also constantly besieged by attempts to turn collaboration into vehicles for accumulation. It is therefore important to remember that these various commons are ways to keep value circulating within reciprocal social networks instead of being privately accumulated. This circulation of value must be spatial and material: there must be places we can go to relate in non-alienating ways and to meet our basic needs without needing to access wages. Zapatismo shows that recuperating land is an excellent foundation for the commons, as the fruits of this land are redistributed to feed teachers, health promoters, and those in self-government. Yet collectively holding land is not an end in itself. It is our reproduction that counts, and the commons allow this reproduction to happen on our own terms instead of being at the service of accumulation. Again, it is important to be intentional about what exactly our “own terms” are, especially since one group’s commons can be established through another group’s colonization.
Third, reproduction is more than the ways we are raised, nourished, socialized, and re-humanized. It is a question of the social relations that are formed in this process. Critics of the “social factory” note all the ways reproduction is oriented towards creating workers, those who will support existing relations of production through their training and acceptance of discipline, individualism, and consumerism. Yet we can also reproduce people who are socialized into collectivity and who are versed in the social, affective, and political technologies of deepening it. We can raise successive generations of labour-power or successive generations of social change agents. Beyond just socializing our youth, this reproduction involves a constant re-articulation of society, either as one dominated by private property, nationalized property, or the commons. Borders articulate this society by reinforcing spatial, temporal, racialized, gendered, and class divisions (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013). Extractive, anthropocentric logics articulate this society by treating the non-human world as a store of potential profits (Bookchin, 2007). Wages articulate it by ordering society in a way that obfuscates and therefore more heavily exploits gendered, unwaged productive and reproductive efforts (Fortunati, 1995). The state articulates it by forming a political apparatus wherein conflicts can play out without affecting the underlying relations of production (Poulantzas, 1980). Alternatively, there are articulations that are constantly drawing new relations into the commons, that centre co-reciprocity with the land, that recognize the value of all reproductive work, and that are institutionalized into confederated networks of deepening autonomy. Indigenous resurgence, Zapatismo, and the territorialisation of urban peripheries provide examples of such articulations, but there are many more possibilities. The point is that we must build intentional collectivities; we must keep value circulating within them; and we must create virtuous cycles where this all leads to more reciprocal social relations. It must be a material process as well as a social one. This is the progressive path leading to non-class society, to life beyond capitalism.
Fourth, “reproducing reciprocal social relations” sounds vacuous and overwhelming, so our task is to make it concrete. This requires that we institutionalize our organizing, commons, and reproduction. Institutions are commonly authoritarian arrangements that discipline people by only dispensing of resources according to compliance with unaccountable policies, processes, and roles. In this way they are machines for articulating alienation, but it is also possible to formalize the articulation of dis-alienation. Such liberatory institutions must be open, accountable, and constituted by conflict (Hardt & Negri, 2009, pp.355-361). If traditional institutions are the formalization of how government leads and the people obey, liberatory institutions formalize the ways the people lead and the government obeys and carries out their will. This is easier said than done, and Zapatismo is replete with examples of how autonomous institution-building is the process of working through disputes over collective work and using these problems to more intentionally shape social relations. For example, the community assembly is the forum for discussing how the families of unwaged school teachers are saddled with the extra work of feeding them, finding ways the broader community can better support autonomous education, and tasking leaders with carrying out these agreements. It is where disputes over which family uses which piece of collective land or how to handle divorce are discussed. Municipal self-government is tasked by Zapatista women with implementing programs to educate males on sexism and open spaces for more involvement by women. Regional self-government allows the Zapatistas to mediate for disparities between zones with richer and poorer land, that receive more and less lefty tourists, or that are more or less subject to invasion by paramilitary groups. It is also the forum for winning the hearts and minds of non-Zapatista neighbours by allowing them to resolve disputes through free, impartial Zapatista conflict resolution instead of risking their fate in the corrupt official justice system. (3) These institutions are constantly attending to the daily problems of shaping social relations within the common, and they are always being modified in the process. Outside of Zapatismo, autonomy is institutionalized through student and workers councils (The Situationists, 2006, pp.270-282), the moderated forums through which open-source code is developed, federations of indigenous ayllus in Bolivia (Zibechi, 2010, ch.6), community land trusts, rank and file, workers of colour, and women’s caucuses in unions, municipal organizing alliances, and any other form for coordinating collaboration and resolving disputes. Understood in this way, autonomous “institutions” are synonymous with justice: they respond to problems by intentionally, collectively shaping our social relations and material collaboration in ways that deepen autonomy.
Ultimately, the value of these strategies must be born out in practice. Autonomy insightfully illustrates what is wrong with our current, dominant social arrangements and what a better way of organizing humanity might look like. Yet it is not a recipe for success, especially since the process of dis-alienating and re-communalizing our relations is profoundly local, depending on who is there, our history of conflict and collaboration, the space it plays out in, and the resources we are working with. In this way, a final aspect of autonomy’s definition is that it is an aspiration. It is a cause to fight for – the certainty that there are many better ways for us to organize ourselves than via capital, that our world is pregnant with such alternatives, and that we are called to become the collective midwives who will welcome them and nurture their growth.
End notes
1: For an excellent discussion of Canadian postal workers organizing against this sort of re-organization, see Huot (2016).
2: The seven principles are obey, don’t command; represent, don’t supplant; go deeper, not higher; serve, don’t serve yourself; convince, don’t conquer; build, don’t destroy; and propose, don’t impose (EZLN, 2013d, pp.73-74).
3: These examples come from the frank evaluations offered by participants in Zapatista autonomy. Interview transcripts were published in four textbooks as part of the Zapatistas’ experiential learning program called “the Little School” (Escuelita): Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (2013a, 2013b, 2013c, 2013d).
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Stuart Schussler 