Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces, by Raul Zibechi
published in 2010 by AK Press, Ramor Ryan trans.
personal notes in preparation for a grad school comprehensive paper on autonomy
Zibechi theorizes the concentrating power of the state and dispersing, non-State power through the example of the uprising in El Alto, Bolivia in October 2003. During this insurrection the government breaks down, people barricade the city, councils begin operating, and all this happens without the existing grassroots organizations taking the lead. He theorizes this pre-existing social organization in everyday life by outlining the tactic of dispersion, which is a means of building non-state power (the strategy), as manifest in the 2003 insurrection. This is how revolution happens, how new worlds are born, which is contrary to what Garcia Linera and social movement theory lead us to believe.
Dispersion
This is power exercised through everyday social relations (kinship and territorial networks), and it disperses official authority because it happens through a contrary logic and also because it’s directed explicitly against this authority during insurrection. It disperses because it’s power-through-society and therefore cannot be represented. Whereas difference limits governing (which demands homogeneity), it builds dispersive power (by creating more localized, face-to-face structures). Dispersion is a force from below, while representation/concentration/State power disperse community from above.
This all leads to a different sort of power- ‘non-state power.’ 1) We can understand it as the mirror image of state power: one is static and stable, the other discontinuous (coming in and out of formal existence) and mobile; imposing and codifying social relations of capitalism versus the overflowing of social relations and difference; built on a foundation of private property and capital accumulation versus communal property and redistribution; imposition of representatives versus rotating authority; clientelism versus mutual aid; disperses community via repression, economic compulsion and the integration of social movements versus repudiation of leaders. Ultimately, the culmination of state power is that it actively creates class relationships (you can see this happening with every item in the list), whereas non-state power creates social relations of emancipation.
2) A fundamental aspect of non-state power is that it remains rooted in everyday life and isn’t separated from society. That is, power remains dispersed throughout society. We see this with the lack of representation and bureaucracy.
3) Economics also isn’t separated from politics, so non-state power is also about the collective management of shared resources. It is agreements about how and where markets will happen, building and managing utilities, and creating and managing the education system. This is something the context of El Alto demands, as the informal economy requires community agreements, the lack of private space or private security demand these be addressed collectively (eg leisure in plazas). Also, the informal economy lends itself to collectivity as it’s not Taylorist (which is the economic logic that compliment’s the state’s concentrating and representative political logic): there’s no alienated production and there’s no internal division of labor or separation between management and production.
4) Non-state power comes from a communalizing process: of assemblies becoming more and more local, of reciprocity, of communal ownership, and of dynamic manifestations of Aymara and union council traditions. This communalizing process is fundamentally domestic and feminine.
Insurrection
When non-state power has been dispersed into everyday life, these social relations can easily (‘spontaneously’) be mobilized for insurrection against state power. These are moments when everyday relations of domination are revealed and the same structures that organize a celebration are used to engage in decentralized, consistent, flexible street actions that paralyze the state. Instead of concentrated, one-way communication, there is inter-communication between all parts of the non-state power. He gives many examples of these street actions, how they move from the plaza assembly to dispersed actions, and then mass actions, and how this was possible without leaders precisely because of a long historical process wherein clientelistic structures were defeated.
Social movements
He critiques social movement theory generally and Garcia Linera specifically for promoting a pro-state logic. It begins by only seeing ‘association’ and not community, instead focusing on structure, cohesion, program, definition of strategic objectives, intensity of mobilization, institutional solidity, and homogeneity. Strategically, the theory is all about how to appeal to state institutions, and it’s obsessed with the articulation of power needed to do this. This articulation and building of forces is proto-State concentration of power- it’s tomorrow’s discipline. It’s goal is a passive revolution that better integrates the population into the state (which Garcia Linera is very frank about). Anything that doesn’t fall into this schema is considered ‘spontaneous.’ This sort of thinking culminates in vanguardist strategy. The experience of CONAIE serves to critique this sort of thinking. It analyzes social movements from above and from the outside, seeking to integrate them into a bureaucracy that regulates private property; the supposed goal of a pluricultural state is impossible since all states concentrate power; so we’re either being counter-power and dispersing or being power and concentrating, but we can’t be both; this concentration happens via the homogenization needed for ‘nations’ to interlocute with the state, the creation of a professional class of NGO officials, legal requirements on associations, bureaucratic administration, and ultimately clientelism.
Against this, an Aymara ‘state’ would be an articulation of its many powers, not separate from their communities, coming into existence and dissipating as needed. The Kataristas theorized this as the relations of family to ayllu, one ayllu to another, an ayllu to it’s region, and an ayllu to the environment. These sort of dispersed, everyday, non-state social relations are what create new worlds. And ‘revolution’ is precisely this- the birthing of already-existing alternatives from within a collapsing bourgeois society. Seen this way, revolution isn’t an arrival but the setting-free of a latent power through self-activity, through emancipatory social relations built through their practice.
Autonomy
He presents a cluster of concepts that you can relate to autonomy: dispersion, non-state power, the everyday, communalization, self-activity. They’re defined in distinction to concentration, state power, separation of politics from society, bureaucracy, Taylorism, social movement, and ‘spontaneity.’ What’s unique to his formulation is that it’s based in a concrete experience (it’s the theorization of a practice), that this concreteness is also in the importance of how the urban space and economy of El Alto foment autonomy, and that collective management of shared resources is key. It’s also important to think of different logics of power, because ultimately this is what autonomy is (apart from being a practice, a strategy, and an organizational form)- a way of conceiving power. He gets at this in the parts on social movements and Garcia Linera- how they have fundamentally different conceptions of power. We can call it autonomy, non-state power, the common, or whatever else, but it comes down to fundamental disagreements about ‘politics’ and ‘the social’ / social relations.
One important condition is counter-acting state power’s dispersion of community. He writes about the ‘dispersal machine’ of the insurrection, counter-acting authority both in their actions and in their way of organizing. So you have a novel conception of class struggle, as conflicts over how organizations will build and exercise power, and frequently playing out as either insurrection or chastising leaders for ‘corruption.’ In seeing this as a revolutionary alternative that’s latent in society, he doesn’t see many limits to it. But, reflecting on my own context, I’d say we’re limited to the extent to which we’ve been colonized by a mentality of individualism. It’s also important to note that he includes many concrete examples of how this looks in practice (keeping with the relentlessly strategic nature of Zibechi’s thought).
Schools of thought
In relation to self-organization or self-management, he writes about ‘self-activity.’ All of these seem to get at attempts to keep power, politics, economics, justice in the realm of the social instead of being institutionalized in ways that compel us to participate without guiding them. Many people (like the Situationists, for example) write about ‘separation’ in general. Here, Zibechi has a bundle of concepts with separation, concentration, representation, and institutions that perpetuate it. Autonomy is more specific than this discourse, in positioning itself within Marxism and in relation to other strategic orientations. But the core question is how do we build popular power within capitalism, against the state, and what thinking against and beyond class looks like.
Decolonization is strong here, as indigenous principles, ethics, and customs are the heart of non-state power. He risks romanticizing the El Alto uprising, assemblies, and the like, but there’s also a lot to respect. And it fits in with the broad theme of separation, as colonization was the imposition of social relations allowing for the extraction and accumulation of wealth, of a political system that can manage and maintain this extraction.
Relation to other concepts
A lot of the book is a theorization of the state. He observes that the state is fundamentally the separation of politics from society, the successful destruction of face-to-face political structures in favor of ‘representation’ (which is a pretty way of saying ‘removal’). Some may say this is too broad, but if you consider the state against pre-colonial and ongoing non-state politics, the distinction definitely holds. The state does this so it may create class (which is an extension of Poulantzas- the state is the condensation of class struggle, but it also creates class difference through this process; it’s not just a reflection of already-existing difference). And, like Gramsci, he also sees the state colonizing civil society by cooptation, ‘corruption’ (in reference to the class struggle mentioned earlier), and generally fomenting state-like social relations in civil society through NGOs. As Zibechi describes elsewhere, this is something left governments are particularly adept at. It’s also important to recognize that, if we play into it like CONAIE did, we’re facilitating passive revolution. So, for Zibechi, the state isn’t a condensation (Poulantzas) or an articulation (Mezzandra) as much as a sort of social relation and logic of power. Another fundamental aspect is that the state is built on the foundation of private property (also a social relation), whereas the non-state is built on communal property. Autonomy and non-state power mean joining politics and society by weaving politics through the social fabric, as people manage collective resources.
Concepts
Dispersion, revolution, autonomy, spontaneity, social relations, political culture, territorialisation, bureaucracy, difference, feminism, social movements, everyday life, vanguardism, class, class struggle, movement-relevant theory, historicity, indigeneity, passive revolution, NGOs, dialectics
People
Garcia Linera, Felix Patzi and Pablo Mamani, Clastres, Guha, Silvia Rivera, Skocpol, Kymlicka, Macas
Stuart Schussler 