6: Autonomous zones

Revolution in the real world

Perhaps the most influential argument leveled against anarchism is that it just isn’t realistic. Even among those who feel an idealistic attraction towards the prospect of a nonhierarchical society, it can be difficult to square this vision with the real world. After all, we’re not on the cusp of a revolution: there are few countries in the world today (if any) with anarchist movements capable of becoming mainstream any time soon. Can we really be sure that revolution is going to happen in our lifetimes? What if it were never to happen? It’s worth asking… Of course, many of us feel the imminent potential for widespread or even global upheaval, especially when we’re young. As we grow older, though, we often shed that youthful optimism, perhaps becoming disillusioned, burnt out even. This is no doubt a big problem. And yet it’s entirely avoidable.

Maybe we’ve been tricked into looking at it the wrong way, approaching the issue exactly as the statists do. If the goal of your program is to assume control of the state, its success will be determined by its degree of implementation nationwide. Most people tend to think of anarchism, too, as a project that sticks to national boundaries; on this level, it can be dismissed as unrealistic, given that it’s far from being the most popular movement in most countries. Yet such logic is really of little use to us. Anarchy isn’t just another option – along with socialism, liberalism, conservatism, and fascism – on the menu of authoritarian ideologies. Statists might be our enemies, but they’re not our rivals: we don’t want what they want. That means evaluating our own prospects in a completely different light, one that refuses to play the same all or nothing game focused around achieving national hegemony. In short, anarchy – real anarchy – is achieved within any territory, no matter how big or small, in which the authority of state and capital has been deemed null and void. We don’t need to wait for the revolution to realize our dreams; we need only take the necessary practical steps, establishing our lives outside the grip of centralized control.

Looking at it this way, the uncompromising nature of anarchism is soon redeemed by the fact that – on the level of quality, not quantity – it can be implemented in full even within the current historical context. A perceived lack of widespread support is no excuse for inaction: instead of waiting on large numbers to begin living wild and free, all we need is a bit of determination. And without taking that chance, no less, we risk relegating anarchy to the realm of abstraction, never to actually experience what we’re fighting for. Hakim Bey provides some solid inspiration:

Are we who live in the present doomed never to experience autonomy, never to stand for one moment on a bit of land ruled only by freedom? Are we reduced either to nostalgia for the past or nostalgia for the future? […] To say that ‘I will not be free till all humans (or all sentient creatures) are free’ is to simply cave in to a kind of nirvana-stupor, to abdicate our humanity, to define ourselves as losers. (Temporary Autonomous Zone, 1991)

The beauty of an autonomous zone is that it opens up a rupture that lasts, already encompassing the whole of everyday life. Potential candidates include squats, occupied universities, protest camps, wildcat strikes, communal gardens, free parties, travelers’ sites, and even rainbow gatherings. Familiar examples include the territory of the Zapatistas and the MOVE communes in Philadelphia. Or you could think of Freetown Christiana in Copenhagen, at least before it made the gradual push towards legalization. The Kurdish territory of Rojava, former Syria, should be added to the list, depending on whether one agrees the state and capital have actually been dismantled there. Moreover, some of the largest autonomous zones around today are the least overtly political; this includes the Zomia of Southeast Asia, as well as many interior regions of sub-Saharan Africa, which managed to escape subjugation of the years despite incorporating millions of inhabitants. Similarly, any non-civilized tribes still scattered around the globe inhabit autonomous zones, even if their communities fall within the theoretical boundaries of whichever nation state. All untamed areas of wilderness are last examples.

In Europe, perhaps the largest recent example of an autonomous zone was the ZAD (zone à défendre) of Noter-Dame-des-Landes. This started out in 2009 as a single-issue campaign, with the illegal occupation of the land – approximately 2,000 hectares of it, 14km across at its widest point – being applied merely as a means of blocking the construction of an airport outside of Nantes, France. Yet what was once a tactic soon became an end in itself: within that vast, lawless zone, a large number of rural communes were set up, each of them utilizing the opportunity to experiment with genuinely autonomous ways of living. The authority of French law was made meaningless there, and private property was squatted out of existence; strictly speaking, the ZAD, which had been lovingly described by one local politician as “a territory lost to the Republic,” couldn’t even be referred to as a part of France any more. Perhaps this project – defined not only by its audacious victories against state invasion, but in equal parts by its abundant vegetable plots, medicinal herb gardens, numerous bakeries, and pirate radio station – even embodied the intensity of anarchist revolution, only realized for now on a smaller scale. At the beginning of 2018, the Macron regime finally announced it would scrap its plans to develop the area, admitting defeat to the land defenders; yet the ZADists attempted to stay, airport or no airport. Compared with an ambiguous tradition of eco-defense campaigns, in which most victories merely return us back to square one, the ZAD offers a clear idea of what taking a step forward in the struggle against power could look like.

Back to the theme of total liberation, autonomous zones can be used to demonstrate that even the most uncompromising of visions is hardly utopian. There’s no need to feel overwhelmed by the breadth of what we’re fighting, stressing over which issues to prioritize: any successful autonomous zone opens up the time and space necessary to call everything into question. Especially with more rural projects, we can overcome our alienation from one another in combination with overcoming our alienation from the land. Along with opening up the possibility of experimenting with vegan horticulture outside of a capitalist context. The best insights of anti-speciesism, deep ecology, and social ecology – far from being relegated to the confines of pure theory – are invited to bloom in combination with one another, already fully manifest in the real world. We need not swallow the association between realism and compromise. We just have to start off more modestly.

What if, hypothetically, you could see into the future, and discovered that the revolution was never to occur? Would the struggle still be worth it? The realization of autonomous zones offers one good reason to know that it would. Our prospects are not so bleak that, only after generations of thankless sacrifice, perhaps the earthlings of some prophesied age will finally be free. The joy of insurrection – which, in essence, is surely but the joy of unflinching defiance – must permeate everything we do. The desired quantity might escape us for the time being, but the necessary quality can be realized now, before revolution – before insurrection, even. All in all, then, we have at least one method for taking the struggle forward: inhabit territories, outside and against the system, whilst striving to dismantle all hierarchies within them. That’s no complete strategy, but it certainly offers a solid foothold.

Zones of resistance

At a glance, it might seem as if a tension is arising here. Whilst insurrectional methods attack power, perhaps autonomous zones attempt instead to slip away, seeking inner peace in a world defined by catastrophe. This is exactly the idea you get with Hakim Bey, whose autonomous zones are defined by their insistence on disbanding rather than risk confronting the state. It goes without saying that leaving Leviathan to it as it decimates the planet isn’t an option for most of us; thankfully, though, such defeatism isn’t an inherent feature of autonomous zones altogether. On the contrary, these experiments, aside from offering essential places of immediate refuge, are just as indispensable for going on the offensive.

Opening up an autonomous space sets a rallying point for comrades to find each other, share resources, and combine projects, all of which is vital for launching the attack. Rather than dispersing ourselves amid the social terrain, there’s much to be said for focusing our efforts within strategic locations, thereby increasing our chances of having a tangible impact. It’s no coincidence that the Italian anarchist movement of the 1970s and ‘80s was defined not only by its formulation of the insurrectionary tendency, but also by its vast network of squatted social centers. Moreover, the anarchist movements of Chili and Greece – among the strongest worldwide at the moment – are distinctly grounded in certain rebellious neighborhoods. The Exarcheia quarter of Athens is itself something of an autonomous zone; it’s a no-go area for the police, and in general maintains an atmosphere of intolerance towards the projects of state and capital. The ongoing emphasis on insurrection in Athens would be unthinkable without it, and the same can be said of Villa Francia in Santiago. Especially once a resistance movement really starts to pick up the pace, it soon becomes clear that its ambitions can only advance as far as its material base supports. Here we can think of the separatist movements in Ireland, Kurdistan, and the Basque Country as important examples.

No less, the mere existence of an autonomous zone is enough to do real damage to the state, relinquishing its control over a territory. Yet this will only be the case insofar as its inhabitants refuse to seek permission in the process of seceding. The prospect of legalizing a commune warrants utmost caution: the price of avoiding physical confrontation here is not, as with Bey’s zones, invisibility, but instead indistinctiveness from the system as a whole. Whether temporary or permanent, what makes a zone autonomous is the fact it escapes the authority of the state – that is, refuses to recognize its servants or laws. Strictly speaking, inhabiting such a zone isn’t a matter of committing crime, which implies breaking laws to which you’re ultimately subject, but instead of extricating yourself from the legal framework altogether. The offer of legalization might sound like a victory, but this is only one of power’s most cynical tactics: a few minor concessions will be granted, but these are ultimately a small price to pay for subsuming our lives back into the economy, transferring real struggle into something symbolic.

During the early ‘80s, for instance, the squatting movement in Berlin was one of the strongest in the world; yet the spearhead of the state’s repressive campaign wasn’t brute force, but instead integration. Many squats were invited to become legal – to submit to the rule of law and market – which split their interests from the rest of the movement. That deprived any more combative projects of the solidarity needed to successfully resist evictions, and they soon found themselves getting picked off one by one. Had none of the squats decided to legalize, however, the state may well have been forced to capitulate in the face of such an uncompromising movement.

With this in mind, an obvious worry arises: it might seem ridiculous to take a stand against the might of the modern nation state, particularly in a more or less symmetrical conflict. But the picture isn’t quite that simple. In much of the Global North, at least, the liberal paradigm compels the state to play by certain rules when repressing dissent, and that offers us a fair degree of leeway. The repressive forces always prefer to engage with riot police rather than the army, “nonlethal” methods rather than just going in and killing everyone. That owes not, of course, to any heightened sense of benevolence on the part of our dear rulers, but instead to their need to destroy otherness in a way that avoids exacerbating social tensions even more. You might say that, following the death of God, the state is on its last legs; rather than clinging to the pretense of enacting the divine will, it has reinvented itself in secular form, claiming instead to represent the will of the people. This leaves power forever at pains to maintain a democratic veneer, with which it attempts to conceal its ugliest, most volatile of secrets: the fact that liberalism is just another form of authoritarianism. It would indeed be a damning realization that, beyond being expected to play out the most miserable of lives, even those attempting to peacefully defect will forever be sought out and crushed, dragged by their hair back into the embrace of this cage-society. Any successful autonomous zone damages the territorial integrity of the state, which is why it would never be tolerated willingly; when met with fierce resistance, however, a regime might well be forced to hold back, facing a greater risk of destabilization by committing the violence necessary for an eviction.

This is no fairytale: in 2016, one French government minister admitted that, for fear of a localized civil war breaking out, there would be no new attempt to evict the ZAD of Noter-Dame-des-Landes. Which just goes to show, rather than whining about the contradictions inherent in liberal democracy, we could instead be taking advantage. Either we’ll make the most of the state’s softened capacities to strike, or else provoke it into revealing its true nature. In both scenarios, there’s something to be gained.

Having said that, not everyone wants to live behind a barricade forever – something important to consider. It’s a funny thing that possibly the single biggest factor killing participation in the struggle isn’t repression, but parenthood. Either that, or at least the need to find a bit of safety or stability, which everyone needs once in a while. These issues need to be addressed if we’re going to extend the possibility of autonomous living beyond the easy grasp of those in their twenties. It’s often forgotten that, besides increasing our capacities as militants, revolutionizing the struggle means broadening out meaningful involvement in ways that allow much greater numbers to participate. The case for illegality, whilst indispensable, cannot dictate a uniform approach: as always, a diversity of tactics is necessary to surge forward. The essential ingredient is merely that legal and illegal projects maintain strong ties with one another, thereby providing communes on the front-line with the support needed to go further, all the while maximizing the level of involvement achieved by safer options.

To return to the main point, the ZAD of Noter-Dame-des-Landes should be visited one last time. In April 2018, the Macron regime committed 2,500 gendarmes, backed up by tanks and drones, to its latest attempt to crush this unruly project. That was a striking thing, because the plans to build an airport there had already been abandoned, yet this time the invading force was more than twice as large as during Operation Cesar – the attempt that failed during 2012. Apparently this chapter of the ZAD had been deemed all the more dangerous in the lack of a single-issue to limit its scope. The failure of a flagship project is, no doubt, a headache for any government; something immensely worse, however, is a practical method – indefinitely reproducible – for destituting its rule altogether. Zadification proceeds as such: occupy a locale with potential; promote material self-sufficiency; defend like hell if attacked; reoccupy if evicted. The ZAD shouldn’t be idealized, as if it offers some pristine utopia. But what cannot be denied is something quite simple, something that makes all the difference: it works… Contrary to popular wisdom, there’s nothing inevitable about the system of death. Defection is always possible! And such a window of opportunity is something any state must set out to mercilessly destroy, lest it risk its very foundations – both material and ideological – being seriously undermined. As of yet, though, our enemy has surely failed: whilst the mother-ZAD is, after almost a full decade of flagrant autonomy, nowadays mired in the drab business of legalization, as many as fifteen additional ZADs have sprung up around France since the first was established.

It was previously said that we might no longer know what a revolution would look like, and this problem continues to define our era. Given an age in which power has no center, there’s reason to quit holding out on that coveted grand soirée in which the world is remade in a day or two. Perhaps revolution is less a definitive event, and more an ongoing process – something with obvious peaks and troughs, for sure, yet without a clear beginning or end. By promoting the multiplication and expansion of autonomous zones, we’re granted a tangible means of furthering that process, and also of measuring our success. In order to make anarchy viable on a large scale, we need to start off more modestly, immediately infusing the terrain with practical, accessible alternatives to Leviathan. Only by living autonomously now do we develop the skills, experiences, and affinity necessary to proceed further. Waiting only teaches waiting; in living one learns to live.

There can be no distinction between construction and destruction here: by ceding a territory from the state, you’re going on the offensive. Every autonomous zone undermines the normality of total control, revealing the state for the military occupation it really is. Fighting communes tear holes in the social fabric, eking out further space in which we can finally breathe, inviting the rest of the population to take a stand. In particular, it’s difficult to imagine the possibility of larger autonomous zones – autonomous regions – as being possible except off the back of insurrection. The moment of upheaval temporarily dislodges power’s grip on a region; the construction of autonomous lifeways within it makes the rupture permanent. Starting off more modestly, and becoming as ambitious as the situation allows, there might well come a day – a day we surely still know in our hearts – in which the insurrections and revolutions have become indistinguishable.