Trayectorias de la autonomia

Paths of Autonomy

"Paths of autonomy"? When asked to speak on this subject, I was a bit dismayed. The "paths," in question I take to be the historical trajectories of various struggles for autonomy. By "autonomy" I understand the quality or state of being self-governing, or self-determining, and by "self" I understand not the self-originating, self-determining, rational individual constructed by Enlightenment liberal humanism, but rather a diversity of self-defined collectivities made up of social individuals. Given these understandings, "paths of autonomy" embraces a great deal. Such paths — created by people's struggles to be autonomous from this or that institution, regime, nation state or social system — have been many and diverse. Of central interest must be how those people struggled, what they achieved and the insights and limitations of their thoughts about their actions. At the same time, neither their actions nor their thoughts can be adequately understood without a clear view of the actions and arguments of those against whom they struggled. Finally, and most importantly, of course, we want to know all these things to be able to judge the relevance of this history for our current struggles. The subject seems unspeakably huge, sweeping through much of known human history and across the face of the earth. Even if we limit our attention to bottom-up struggles for autonomy within the capitalist era — as I proposed to do — a serious, thorough treatment of the histories of the many paths of struggle could certainly fill a multi-volume encyclopedia. In what follows, therefore, I provide only a brief sketch of the history of such struggles for autonomy and of the thinking of those engaged in them.

As a prelude, we should keep in mind that the resistance of people like us to such subordination and the battle for autonomy began long before capitalism! Our struggles for autonomy today, against the efforts of the managers of capitalism to subordinate the amazing variety of our traditions, customs, desires, habits and other relationships to their uniform set of rules for organizing the world are only the latest chapter in a long, dignified and what should be an honored history. Our ancestors fought against ancient slavery, feudal bondage, indentured servitude, cultural genocide, gender, racial, and ethnic oppression long before our more recent forbearers began fighting against capitalism. Instead of being dismayed by the degree of success capitalists have achieved, we should take heart by remembering how, in the long sweep of historical retrospect, they are only the latest would-be eternal masters of our world — and as our ancestors defeated all the earlier would-be overlords, so too are we, or those who come after us, likely to defeat these. The imagination and creativity of our species have proven to be almost boundless and have, ultimately, broken free of every earlier attempt to constrain and harness them to a singular, hegemonic way of being.

That said, because methods of domination have differed over time, so too have our struggles for autonomy from domination. So while we can draw inspiration, energy and sometimes lessons from the entire long history of those struggles, the part most relevant to our own situation concerns those fought against our own would-be masters: the policy-makers and managers, or functionaries, of capitalism. Although the history of such struggles is relatively short compared to the much longer historical battle for autonomy, it provides the richest history of efforts and ideas upon which we can draw for our own purposes today.

Starting with their earliest efforts, everywhere, and in every period, where the functionaries of capital have sought to impose the capitalist organization of life upon society people have resisted. Sometimes that resistance has come from above, from existing ruling classes whose power to dominate and exploit has been organized differently with different sets of rules. But it is not from their resistance that we have the most to learn; it is rather from the legacy of struggles from below that we can draw.

The early capitalist accumulation of wealth and the power to control the means of production, subordinate people to their labor markets and endless work may have reasonably been called "primitive" — they were, after all, just learning how to impose their new methods of exploitation — but the struggles of those upon whom these new conditions were forced were rarely new, or "primitive". Such a label has been, primarily, the result of judging past efforts in the light of later more "modern" efforts — and has often reflected considerable ignorance of earlier times. As more and more research has expanded our knowledge and understanding of those early struggles, the more we have come to recognize how sophisticated they often were, how their forms and methods drew upon existing networks of cultural ties, practices and communication or crafted new ones using the most modern, available tools. The same has continued to be true throughout the history of capitalism as it has been spread across the face of the earth, as its functionaries have sought to impose their new rules on more and more of us, to subordinate our lives to their way of being. Resistance and experimentation with alternatives have continued, building on past experience and inventing new methods.

Misrepresentations and Blindness

Unfortunately, both the heralds of capitalism — quick to trumpet its successes — and its detractors — equally quick to lament and condemn its victories — have either obscured or been blind to the efficacy of people's resistance, to their creativity in launching new initiatives in the wake of momentary defeat and to their ability to combine the old and the new to elaborate alternatives to capitalist ways. With respect to capital, it has generally been in its interest to misrepresent or hide from public view the capabilities of its enemies. Those who have resisted its impositions have been represented as backward, ignorant, underdeveloped, and as bandits, barbarians, savages, delinquents, and criminals. Such characterizations have been integral to its discourses in which all resistance, or alternatives, to its own policies have been denigrated, dismissed and attacked. Nowhere has this been more obvious — or demonstrated so thoroughly by scholars — than in colonial discourse. But the same has been true throughout the history of capitalism, everywhere.

At the same time, on the other side of the barricades, as it were, lamentations about the brutality of capitalist rule, from accounts of the "bloody legislation against the expropriated" to denunciations of colonialism and imperialism, have often amounted to paeans to capitalist power and too quickly dismissed resistance as so futile as to barely warrant attention.

Think, for example, of the doctrine of the proletarianization of the peasantry, long held by orthodox Marxist historians and anthropologists. That doctrine prevented many from recognizing either the depth, or the successes, of rural resistance to capitalist efforts to decimate communities and reduce the survivors to the status of readily available cheap labor. Certainly, in many areas resistance failed and many communities have been dispersed and destroyed. Yet, here we are, several hundred years after the rise of capitalism and six years into the 21st Century, and not only have a vast array of indigenous peoples survived and continue to resist, but in many areas we must recognize how the self-organization of those peoples has been generating a veritable indigenous renaissance. Not only has this renaissance been renewing long standing challenges to capitalism and posing a multiplicity of alternatives but it has been doing so in ways that have resonated among other kinds of people in struggle. Here in Mexico , for example, we no longer need to study Guillermo Bonfil Batalla to recognize the existence of "Mexico Profundo" or search for primordial indigenous essentialisms; we have only to follow the activities of the Congreso Nacional Indigena and the Zapatista "Other Campaign." In the Andes , to cite another example, we no longer need to go into the tin mines of Bolivia or the Altiplano of Peru to discover the emergence of a pan-Andean movement; we have only to follow the activities of the Congreso de la Coordinadora Andina de Organizaciones Indígenas and take notice when and where the Wiphala is flying.

Think, too, of all those analyses of crisis in capitalism that have dwelled solely upon so-called "internal laws of motion" considered one-sidely in terms of the interactions among businesses — analyses of disproportionality, of over-accumulation, of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and of under-consumption. Virtually every traditional variation of these theories have either failed to recognize our struggles or take them into account. They have been formulated with no regard to how our struggles against capital may have been determinant in the evolution of these tendencies to crisis; they have never questioned how our struggles for autonomy from the mechanisms of capitalist domination may have ruptured those mechanisms and precipitated wider problems. Yet, for the last thirty years we have lived in a period of generalized crisis clearly brought on by an international cycle of interlinked struggles that have indeed ruptured capitalist reproduction in virtually every dimension. The neoliberalism we resist today is the capitalist response to the crisis of Keynesianism we brought on yesterday.

Think of the old theories of imperialism, often built on those one-sided theories of crisis and focused on the capitalist search for markets, for cheaper raw materials and for more profitable investment outlets. Nowhere in any of these theories did our struggles play a role except as by-products, as resistance to our victimization. Yet, rarely has it been clearer than today how our struggles in some areas have driven capital foraging around the earth for easier pickings. From "runaway shops" to "outsourcing" business has been desperate to pit those among us who are weaker against those among us who are stronger. And who has not noticed how quickly our strength has been growing where it has been thought weakest, as in China where workers in both rural and urban areas have been revolting against the savage enclosures and exploitation to which they have been subjected in order to undermine our strength elsewhere.

Finally, think of the arrogant political theories of self-aggrandizing intellectuals and professional politicians who have argued that we poor victims should subordinate our feeble struggles to their leadership, pretending to alone have the insight to lead us to an understanding of our own real desires and needs beyond mere economic, gender, racial or ethnic demands. Such leaders — whether social democrats or would-be revolutionaries - have long told us how they alone could formulate policies that would bring both an end to capitalism and the construction of a socialist path to communism. Yet, for more than a century now such "leadership", even in full control of the state, has proved powerless to formulate or implement effective policies to transcend capitalism. Worse, they have formulated and imposed policies that actually strengthened the accumulation of capital in brutal ways. As a result, struggles for real autonomy have proliferated and grown, crafting diverse currents of resistance, creativity and imagination that have either swept away those architects of socialism, or left them talking to themselves as the tides of history have flooded past.

Awakenings

Fortunately, here and there, from time to time, there have been those who have recognized the strength of people's resistance, appreciated their creativity, sometimes joined their efforts and sometimes added their written words to the angry cries from below. The red threads of such recognition and appreciation of the ability of people not only to resist victimization but to take the initiative and fight for better, freer, more self-determined lives have run through the entire history of opposition to capitalism. A few of those threads have been theoretical, others can be found in critical commentaries on various revolutionary periods and episodes.

For example, in Marx and Engels' work — up to and including the Communist Manifesto (1848) — we find analyses of the fundamental autonomy of the working class (e.g., living labor) vis-á-vis capital (e.g., dead labor) — although such analyses existed alongside arguments that workers should support bourgeois struggles against absolutism in Europe. The later position was abandoned in the wake of their experiences in failed 1848 Revolution in Germany and thereafter they argued for autonomous worker struggles. On the other hand, both in Marx's very brief analysis (1851) of the role of the peasantry in France during the 18th Brumaire, and in Engels' book-length analysis (1850) of the German peasant rebellions of the early 16the Century, we find decidedly superficial analyses of a realm of struggle beyond both of their experiences.

As their most substantial treatment of peasant struggles, Engel's book, The Peasant War in Germany deserves comment. Just as a variety of earlier communalistic social movements had previously challenged feudal powers, so too did the peasants, miners, soldiers and clerics who rose up in 1525 against enclosure, taxation and repressive authority and who conceived egalitarian "communist" alternatives. On the one hand, Engels celebrated this struggle as an anticipation of the eventual transcendence of capitalism. On the other hand, as he later admitted, his own preoccupation with economic forces led him to downplay the role of religion in those struggles — among both peasants and their major spokespersons, e.g., Thomas Müntzer, the theologian who joined, fought and died with the rebels. While even today we still have little or no testimony from the hundreds of thousands who rebelled, we do have new research and Müntzer's own letters that reveal how the desires of the time to create autonomous egalitarian communities were steeped in religious visions drawn from the New Testament. We also, of course, still have, among us, various autonomous Christian communities, e.g., the Amish, the Mennonites and the Hutterites, some of whom engage in similar egalitarian and communal practices.

First in the Grundrisse (1857) and then in the first volume of Capital (1867) Marx was able to work out a much elaborated theoretical analysis to support the conclusion that the working class had the autonomous power to overthrow capitalism and create a new world. This new work buttressed his much earlier vision in the 1844 Manuscripts that the communism of present struggles could lead to communism beyond capitalism. He also provided historical analyses of how workers struggles had driven down the length of the working day and had so repeatedly contested the capitalist organization of labor as to drive technological change and reduce socially necessary labor time. Even by the late 1860s, however, his and Engels' analyses of peasant struggles were no more elaborated than they had been almost two decades earlier. In Marx's later writings, however, alongside his appreciation of the moments of autonomous struggle within the Paris Commune (1871), we also find, in his letters (1881) to one of his Russian translators, Vera Zasulich, that his studies of available materials on peasant life and struggles in Russia led him to conclude that the autonomous self-organization in the peasant mir, or commune, might provide "the fulcrum for the social regeneration of Russia" and "an element of superiority over the countries enslaved by the capitalist system."

As for the history of autonomous struggle in the great revolutions of the 20th Century — those that took place in Mexico , Russia and China - time and space allow only the briefest remarks. First, it has been clear for some time that each of those great events depended far more upon the uprising of peasants — either recent rural-urban migrants to newly built factories or those still toiling in the countryside — than on the actions of any well-organized political party. Indeed, in each case it was the seizure of power by such parties that led to the re-subsumption of worker and peasant gains to the accumulation of capital. In Russia and China this was achieved via the creation of a "socialist" state, and the subsumption of the Marxian critique of capitalism to the Leninist program of engineering the socialist "transition". As a result, the official accounts, whether by such as Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin or Mao, or by later historians hired to craft and re-craft the histories according to the changing policies of the party-state, have all had to be subjected to critical, independent historical research. What that research has revealed, unfortunately, has been the brutal reality of the socialist, or, more accurately, the state-capitalist repression and exploitation of precisely those peasants and workers who had made the revolution. Such critical assessment must also be applied to their more literate and vocal opponents, such as the anarchists who participated in the revolution but were ultimately repressed. While in general Russian anarchists, like the Populists, demonstrated a much greater awareness and appreciation of peasant and worker capacity for autonomous self-activity than the Bolsheviks, their attitudes and strategies were also mixed. We can look back and appreciate Pyotr Kropotkin's detailed analysis of "mutual aid," but one can only wince at Mikhail Bakunin's assurances to Sergai Nechayev that the old Czarist regime could be overthrown by a handful of strategically situated professional revolutionaries.