Autonomies

Woe betide us and the future of our ideas if we shouldered the responsibility of a senseless destruction that compromised the continuity of life!

Errico Malatesta

Revolutions do not happen at the behest of revolutionary organisations. As events – and history bares witness to this – they are fundamentally unpredictable, never the docile beasts of minority vanguards of militants, inseparable from the rebellions and insurrections that bring them to life, and pulled every which way by the complex, often contradictory motives which animate them and the chain of ensembles of events which constitute them.

If some speak of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, it can only be so named because it was the Bolsheviks who brought the revolutionary process to an end; it is a funeral baptism of hindsight.

Anarchists in no way comprise the majority of any society today; nor did they do so yesterday. And they have no passion for leading a revolution, which as a small minority would only mean the quick death of anarchists’ dreams of autonomy.

Dissidence and rebellion against oppression are forever born anew. The task of anarchists then is to engage with them – even initiate them if possible -, recognising always that they are but one voice among others, in movements which never fully incarnate anarchist means and ends. What is important then is the movement, the event, the “revolutionary process” itself. The task is then to feed it, sustain it, to render it ungovernable, for what is anarchy if not free life unchained, forever.

And in this process of revolution, to create – and no rebellion fails to create – ways or forms of life beyond the ruins of capital.

Just over a hundred years ago (Robert Graham reminds us with a post on his on his anarchist weblog), Errico Malatesta argued for very much the same. Even if our language is not his, what he wrote under the title “Revolution in practice” and published in Umanità Nova (1922) still resonates.