Organizing for Autonomy: History, Theory, and Strategy for Collective Liberation PDF
Preview Organizing for Autonomy: History, Theory, and Strategy for Collective Liberation
Advance Praise “The old world is collapsing all around us, and communism is in the air. Organizing for Autonomy asks us to breathe deeply of that air, to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our comrades, and to plot the way forward to- gether. Its cohesive analysis and ambitious vision point toward the North Star and offer a militant strategy for how to get going. It is not a roadmap to the new world, but no matter. After all, communism is not the desti- nation, it is the path itself.” —Geo Maher (George Ciccariello-Maher), author of Spirals of Revolt and Decolonizing Dialectics “CounterPower offers a deeply thoughtful analysis that is rooted in peo- ple’s everyday struggles to end oppression. At a time when the criminal failures of capitalism endanger the entire planet, Organizing for Autonomy is rich with revolutionary possibility.” —Barbara Smith, cofounder of the Combahee River Collective and Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press “Capitalism got us into this mess. Organizing for Autonomy advances the conversation about how we can achieve a different—and better—way of living, in a world without bosses.” —Steve Wright, author of Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism “In the new phase of history, and of struggles, which is opening up now, it’s essential to keep alive the link with the history of the Left, and to sum this up critically as a guide to future practice. Organizing for Autonomy is a great contribution to that task. That the capitalist system and its polit- ical apparatus are degenerate and parasitic, founded on a racist-imperialist infrastructure, has been true for a long time. But now, suddenly the COVID-19 crisis and racist killings have exposed these realities in excep- tional and unprecedented ways. It’s clear that the people’s only means of survival is to generate new structures of militance and of care, emerg- ing from within communities themselves, which can become modules of a just social order. The tools proposed in these pages—notably social investigations—are exactly the methods which can be explored in this historic cause. CounterPower offer us an important and extremely topical publication to further our struggle.” —Robert Biel, author of The New Imperialism and The Entropy of Capitalism Organizing for Autonomy: History, Theory, and Strategy for Collective Liberation CounterPower © CounterPower This edition © 2020 Common Notions This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ ISBN: 978-1-942173-21-2 (print) ISBN: 978-1-942173-39-7 (ebook) LCCN: 2020930516 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Common Notions Common Notions c/o Interference Archive c/o Making Worlds Bookstore 314 7th St. 210 S. 45th St. Brooklyn, NY 11215 Philadelphia, PA 19104 www.commonnotions.org [email protected] Cover design by Josh MacPhee / Antumbra Design Layout design and typesetting by Morgan Buck / Antumbra Design Antumbra Design www.antumbradesign.org Printed in Canada by union labor on acid-free, recycled paper. [add union bug and FSC/recycled logo] Organizing for Autonomy History, Theory, and Strategy for Collective Liberation CounterPower Brooklyn, NY commonnotions.org To the communards: past, present, future. Acknowledgements This book is the collective product of the cognitive, emotion- al, and communicative labor of many comrades, spanning nearly a decade of political praxis. CONTENTS Introduction 1 The Specter That Haunts Us 1 Guerrilla Theory 3 From Counterpower to Communism 5 Outline of the Book 7 Chapter 1: The Weapon of Theory 9 1.1: Power to the People 9 1.2: Partisan Social Science 12 1.3: Social Investigation 15 Decoding the hidden transcript 18 1.4: A World of Sciences 21 Against reductionism 23 Matter in motion 25 Being human as praxis 30 Institutional boundary and spheres of social activity 34 Chapter 2: Imperialism and Revolution 47 2.1: The Imperialist World-System 47 Empire as a world-producing force 47 Dominant centers, dominated peripheries 57 The ecological rift 62 Resurgent fascism 65 2.2: Revolutionary Situations 67 The dangers of assimilation 70 Chapter 3: Envisioning the Commune 73 3.1: Abolition 74 The abolition of class society 81 3.2: Communism at Point Zero 83 Free love and free partnerships 86 A psychedelic transformation of everyday life 87 Polyculturalism and intercommunalism 90 3.3: Commons 94 Communal habitations 98 Education for autonomy 102 3.4: Communal Administration and Coordination 105 Councils 108 Communes 109 Stewardship of the commons and collective enterprises 111 Federated councils of workers and consumers 113 Communal participatory planning 115 Liberating collective labor 121 Social provisioning, remunerative justice, and factors of consumption 124 Negate the state 127 A communal participatory polity 130 Conflict resolution and restorative justice 134 Communal defense and security 135 3.5: The World Commune 136 Chapter 4: Building the Commune 141 4.1: Organized Autonomy 143 Organs of counterpower 145 Defending the area of autonomy 159 Create two, three, many parties of autonomy! 162 From united front to system of counterpower 181 4.2: Protracted Revolutionary Struggle 186 A path to liberation 186 Phase one: laying the groundwork 188 Phase two: the emergence of territorial counterpower 194 Phase three: insurrectionary rupture 195 Phase four: direct transition to communism 197 A continuous revolution 199 Conclusion 203 Summation 203 The Question of Program 204 References 207 Index 223
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