Autonomies

“Which side are you on?”, asks a famous american labour song. Perhaps the answer to the question, taken as a question with revolutionary implications, has never been simple, contrary to the illusions of hindsight and/or ideology.

This seems to be particularly so for anarchists at a time of seeming spreading insurrections. If anarchists are present in many of the latter, they “dominate” none; from Hong Kong to France, from Algeria to Chile, anarchists are nowhere the majority and anarchism is nowhere the reigning ideal of the rebellions.

What to do then as an anarchist? (We here ignore the diversity of “positions” that go by this name, for the sake of simplicity).

What follows are two possible (and, we believe, uncertain) answers to the question. The first is the transcript of a radio interview with Tomás Ibáñez in which he addresses critically the participation of anarchists and libertarians in the protests surrounding the Catalan independence movement. Ibáñez’s evaluation is essentially negative, for the ideological and historical reasons that there is nothing emancipatory in “national” liberation and because the current nationalist movement of Catalonia is an essentially State centred, hierarchically organised movement (even recognising its diversity) which denies political autonomy.

“That no one decides for you.” This is one of the great anarchist principles which loudly shipwrecked in the current libertarian drift in Catalonia. And it shipwrecked because this principle has to be renounced if one wishes to participate in the gatherings convoked by the leaders of the procès and in the struggles which they promote.

And yet however much we abide by this principle of political autonomy, it is not always a simple matter to abide by it when anarchists are (often invisible) “minorities” within larger social movements, and as minorities, they may often be “pushed” to actions which are not entirely in harmony with their beliefs.

(Perhaps the most notable historical example for anarchists of such “compromise” was the participation of anarchists in the republican government of spain during the revolution/civil war of 1936. See: Geoff Bailey, Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War).

Should they then exclude themselves from such movements because they cannot fully decide for themselves, anarchists may find themselves withdrawing from almost every uprising and social movement where such autonomy is not possible.

Ibáñez’s position is not an apriori one; he criticises the participation of anarchists in the Catalan movement because of nature of the latter. It is then for each to judge whether his evaluation of that movement sustains his judgement.

What is not clear however is how the principle of political autonomy can be held to in any categorical manner. Despite its centrality to anarchist thought and practice – and the anarchist can always retreat from political engagement when the principle is violated – political realities, past and present, appear to render any blunt application of the principle impossible. Any demand for absolute autonomy for anarchists in the current (and past) insurrections would most likely only exclude them from them, thereby consigning anarchists simultaneously to ideological purity and political irrelevance.

Any judgement of whether a social-political movement calls for or deserves the involvement of anarchists will always be contingent on particularities of events, and will thus be relative to circumstances, in other words and in some sense, “unprincipled”. This is essentially the position assumed by Peter Gelderloos, in the second essay that we share below.

The risk then of course is that we become so unprincipled that we lose ourselves, as Ibáñez so forcefully argues in the case of Catalonia.

Those of us who continue to have an ideological affinity – in this case, anarchism – are burdened by a 19th and 20th century political imaginary of “revolutionary vanguards”, whether in the form of labour unions or political parties. Anarchism has only very rarely assumed such a role – consciously or unconsciously -, and yet we are often tempted, at least in thought, if not in practice, to aspire to some kind of movement hegemony. Failing that, we sit at the sidelines, judging events which we can only read through ideological lenses, or we “do our thing” on a much smaller scale (e.g., urban and rural squats, parallel cooperative economies, cultural activities, media production, and so on).

Our times seem to very much be times of insurrection. What then are we to do when large scale insurrections erupt?