Politics, Ideology Revolution

The (Anti-) Politics of Autonomy: Between Marxism and Anarchism

Christian Garland

Abstract

Marx famously said that the emancipation of the proletariat must be the work of the proletariat itself; almost ever since, there has been a persistent current of Marxism — that has, in common with anarchism and in antagonism toward its own dominant orthodox tradition, stressed the need for autonomy.

This emphasis on ‘autonomy’ can be seen two fold: both in terms of the action of the exploited and oppressed themselves as an anti-political, self-valorizing agency for achieving revolutionary social change, and as prefiguring new non- hierarchical social relations beyond the world of the present. This paper will aim to critically examine the concept of’autonomy,’ specifically the similarities between unorthodox Marxisms and anarchism, rather than the all-too-frequently emphasized differences.

The Greek origin of the word, comes of course, from ‘auto’ (self) and ‘nomos’ (law), meaning self-determination, and it is this original meaning that we can see in the context of the theories of anarchism and certain forms of Marxism, namely that any social subject must create and define the terms of its own collective existence. The Greek origins of the word ‘anarchy ’ or ‘anarchia’ (‘without ruler ’) bare striking similarity to the notion of an autonomous political practice which resists hierarchical forms, and seeks to become a ‘self-creating’ agency both acting and existing ‘for itself’ whilst seeking to push beyond the present form of society in subverting and undermining it. In the course of the paper, we will seek to identify some substantive claims of critical and libertarian currents of Marxism as they exist in relation to some of those made by anarchism, and the overlap that these two traditions share.

A Theory of ‘autonomy’

Marxism — at least in its unorthodox forms has in common with class-struggle anarchism, a self-defining emphasis on the need for anti-hierarchical and anti-state practice, and the need for ‘autonomy.’ This emphasis on ‘autonomy’ can be seen two fold: both in terms of the action of the exploited and oppressed themselves as an antipolitical, self-valorizing agency for achieving revolutionary social change, and as prefiguring new non-hierarchical social relations beyond the world of the present.

A brief survey of the currents loosely and very broadly grouped under the tag ‘autonomist’ brings together an array of seemingly disparate lines of thought, whose links could be seen as somewhat tenuous. There is also the frequent objection from purists in either Marxist or Anarchist camps that they remain utterly separate and irreconcilable philosophies whatever apparent surface similarities they seem to share. Without a long digression into Marx’s own consistency in his belief in the autonomy of the revolutionary social subject, we find in his famous quote on the Paris Commune that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes”[172] no less than his admiration for the insurrection’s far-reaching measures taken under extreme duress, the recognition that the state does not hold any neutrality in the field of class struggle. This quote taken from The Civil War in France, in which he also speaks of the Commune as carrying out the “destruction of state power,” gives a suitably antagonistic, anti-political turn for any attempt to define a theory of Marxist autonomy, and one completely at odds with the orthodoxies of Marxist-Leninism.

Following Marx, we find in Rosa Luxemburg’s belief in revolutionary spontaneity and mass action, a powerful counterforce to the Leninist obsession with a disciplined, hierarchically organized party following the dikats of a central committee. Luxemburg’s belief that the proletariat remains “capable of self-direction in political activity”[173] anticipates later ‘autonomist Marxism’ and class struggle anarchism remarkably well, as do other Left Communists such as Anton Pannekoek, Otto Rhule, and Karl Korsch. Indeed, as Otto Rhule argued the notion of a political party seeking to institute social revolution, either by seizing power or via electoral mandate is nonsense; we might add however, one that nearly ninety years later, still lingers among many who consider themselves revolutionaries. This is not to argue against any form of organization, or oppose efforts at collective social transformation with an ideological mode of identity-thinking that endlessly repeats the same single concept; but it remains important to explain the significance of ‘anti-political’ practice from the standpoint of a theory of ‘autonomy.’ In contrast to the Orthodox Marxist tradition, autonomist Marxism, i.e. non-Leninist Marxism, and revolutionary anarchism, i.e. class struggle anarchism demand at all times, as Benjamin Franks[174] shows, a consistency between means and ends, and this ‘prefigurative’ ethic can be seen in the anti-political practice of both. It is helpful to list some examples here:

• Autonomist Marxism and class struggle anarchism oppose both the standard route to achieving ‘political power’ and the traditional goal of political action embodied in the state-form. However, this is not to say they propose merely passive withdrawal, in the hope that the state will weaken and rather more hopefully ‘wither away’ as a result. Instead these tendencies can be said to constitute a forceful and dynamic counter-power or ‘anti-power ’ aimed at subverting and undermining the power of capital and the state in every form.

• Further specific examples of such ‘anti-politics’ could include the rejection of electoral campaigning — except, and not uncontroversially by some for propaganda purposes, rejection of bourgeois legality, and rejection of the demand for nonviolence at all times and in all instances against the forces of capital and the state. Leninism is notable by contrast, for employing and advocating means which are almost without exception, overwhelmingly reformist, legalistic, and nonviolent, and which completely replicate the world of party politics.

• We can also observe in the anti-Leninist rejection of ‘playing the game’ of instrumental politics and the duplicitousness and shameless opportunism this frequently demands, a shared contempt between class struggle anarchism and autonomous Marxism for ‘working within’ a system they seek openly to destroy.

An anti-political practice

A definition of ‘autonomy,’ that is ‘self-government’ or ‘self-determination’ remains a defining element of both autonomist Marxism, and class struggle anarchism. By this, we mean the ‘autonomy’ of the social subject or the capacity of this same subject for self-determination and self-governance, together with the recognition that such a practice is a goal of both communism and the inveterate antagonism to hierarchical power and the state shared by autonomist and anarchist thought. Against the popularly accepted notion of a state of such political ‘anarchy’ being a chaotic and brutish Hobbesian struggle of each-against-all, anarchism proposes the capacity for cooperative and rational organic social harmony, the result and goal of autonomy, self-determination and self-government. This form of society can be seen in the efforts to create new forms of living and ways of acting in the present that aim to open up alternative non-hierarchical and anti-authoritarian pathways. Indeed the libertarian emphasis on autonomous practice as a mode of being, can be seen as a further development of Marx’s observation that communism is not merely a ‘program’ waiting to be put into practice, but is present as a tension and force forever threatening capital with its own historical becoming. Autonomous practice seeks its own self-creating criteria to further accelerate such a becoming which would signal the disintegration and supersession of capitalist social relations. We can list below some examples of such a practice:

• Autonomous practice strives for the encouragement of egalitarian and anti- hierarchical organization, and methods that are careful to avoid reproducing the hierarchy and inequality of instrumental political practice and which aim to at all times challenge their emergence. Despite what Lenin may have believed, freedom is not and never has been a bourgeois or middle class virtue, but is the defining and enabling means and end of an authentic revolutionary practice.

• Examples of such autonomous practice include efforts to immediately communize resources and subvert and destroy the laws of value, price, profit — in effect the market itself. The 1970’s self-reduction campaign in Italy is the most obvious example of this in which besides mass squatting and wide- scale rent strikes as a solution to housing need, thousands refused to pay full price or indeed anything at all, for essential services such as electricity, gas, water, and transport. A no less important example, particularly in a UK context, would be the 1989–90 mass nonpayment campaign which defeated the Poll Tax.

Both these particular examples, Italian self-reduction and the anti-Poll Tax movement are useful in defining ‘autonomy’: we can see in such autonomous action the revolutionary social subject, the proletariat acting as a class for itself, by refusing and seeking to surpass the category of proletarian altogether. It is also possible to see in such actions, the essential need and desire for freedom and social equality explicitly demanded by the refusal of conditions of exploitation, and hierarchy imposed by capital and the state.

Anti-Leninist Marxism and class struggle anarchism share the same determination to bring an end to exploitation and oppression in every form, and the same commitment to preventing their reappearance. There is a distinction to be made here between the rejection of political power as such and the forceful ‘anti-power’ which resists and opposes it; autonomous Marxism and revolutionary anarchism do not seek to assume state power but nor do they seek to ‘tolerate’ it. Just as Makhno’s army fought a civil war against the White Army, the Ukrainian bourgeoisie and landowning class, Petliurist nationalists, and the Bolsheviks whilst endeavoring to create free communism, they also realized that this was not possible while the multiple fronts of reaction retained any influence or power. Such a recognition that autonomous action for self-emancipation by the exploited and oppressed themselves cannot succeed while the state exists, nor can any process of communization occur without the subversion and supersession of capitalist social relations in all their manifest forms: wage labor, money, value, etc. Indeed this remains a key ingredient of the revolutionary substance of Marxism and anarchism. In the words of Gilles Dauve:

“The proletariat is not the working class, rather the class of the critique of work. It is the ever-present destruction of the old world, but only potentially; it becomes real only in a moment of social tension and upheaval, when it is compelled by capital to be the agent of communism. It only becomes the subversion of established society when it unifies itself, and organizes itself, not in order to make itself the dominant class, like the bourgeoisie in its time, but in order to destroy the society of classes; at that point there is only one social agent: mankind.”[175]

Autonomy then, as a theory can be seen to embody the practice of new non- hierarchical, non-exploitative social relations in which human beings’ capacity for freedom and cooperation is recognized and encouraged, instead of frustrated and blocked by other more powerful interests in an unending competition for material, and indeed psychological and emotional survival: the war of each-against-all that is late capitalism. The theory of autonomy, which is a key component of the Marxist and anarchist traditions we have identified in this paper, recognizes men and women as ends in themselves, and not as instrumental, functional means to an end imposed and demanded by forces external and alien to their own needs and interests. This theory rejects and seeks to combat such an objectification of the human subject both for the end of an alternative, qualitatively superior form of society, and the revolutionary process of achieving it. As such, autonomous action seeks to challenge and subvert existing oppressive social relations of exploitation and hierarchy whilst setting itself the task of not reproducing these same social relations including the complete rejection of the Leninist notion of the proletariat and other oppressed groups as being incapable of recognizing their own interests or taking offensive action to advance them.

It has been argued in the course of this paper, that the ‘anti-politics of autonomy’ remain of key significance for both autonomous Marxism and class struggle anarchism. The exact forms this autonomy may take are necessarily not fixed by either tradition; what remains an insuperable imperative however, is the same belief in the necessity for ‘autonomy,’ both in terms of the view they take of human subjectivity and agency, the sort of society they envision, and as the guiding principle for any anti-political revolutionary practice.

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