Autonomies

The question of rebellion/revolution is often posed in terms of the question, “what is to be done?” However, by so articulating any reflection-practice on radical political change, we are lead to consider revolution in terms of struggles between and for power.  For what the question forces us to consider is what is to be done against those who hold power unjustly and what is to be done after power is conquered by the revolution.  To so frame the matter though is to condemn all anti-capitalist politics to the logic of the very power that it seeks to destroy (with everything that this brings: presuppositions and demands of ideological consistency and purity, the need or desire for institutional, normative and legal compromise, the organisation of social life on the basis of law and obligation, and so on).  This is the reef upon which all revolutions have been broken, trapped by the siren calls of sovereignty and the conviction that freedom depends upon sovereign control.

But what if revolution were instead to be thought through the question, “how should we be or live?” Such a question creates an ethical (the ethical as a way of life, desired and loved) space within which one’s life can be divorced from power, a space within which autonomous forms of life can be structured independently of the destructive obsession for power.  In its place then emerges a politics of the concrete, a prefigurative politics that seeks to address needs and desires while simultaneously constructing a world of freedom. 

As regards autonomous or anarchist politics, it frees it from ideological neurosis and practical paralysis, which is to say, irrelevance.  It is not for the anarchist to organise the anarchist revolution exclusively with anarchists; it is not for the anarchist to struggle between the different types of anarchist thought and practice.  What is necessary is an understanding of oppression and the expansion and intensification of ways of being, forms of life, incompatible with it.

On one interpretation, the “occupy” movements that began with this century (I am thinking of Argentina, but precedents can be found further back in time) sought not to replace one power with another, but to destitute power altogether.    To quote from an older essay published with Autonomies:

“The multitudes in Tahrir, Sol, Syntagma, Taksim and elsewhere, withdrew from state authority not with the aim of making themselves into an opposing sovereignty, but to create forms of life beyond sovereignty. In these moments, the exception of the sovereign decision was suspended, identities already weakened were discarded and ways of being emerged that suppressed the divide between the disunited many and the constituted people. In the binding collective refusal of the anonymous many, a force without a name appeared, a paradoxical force born of weakness, the weakness of the politically non-existent who in retreating from sovereignty realise a form of politics in which the potential for permanent self-transformation is sustained at the heart collective self-creation.”

In continuity with this reading of recent political events and practice, we publish below an essay that was generously shared with us by its author, Inés Morales Bernardos, and that raises many of these same questions within the context of greece.  (The essay was originally published with open Democracy  07/04/2017)

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