Autonomies

Generalised self-management is simply the totality in accordance with which the councils unitarily inaugurate a style of life based on permanent and collective imagination …

Raoul Vaneigem

… power does not define itself only by its capacity to make itself obeyed, but above all by its capacity to command.  A power does not fall only when one ceases to obey it, or no longer completely so, but when it ceases to give orders.

Giorgio Agamben

A spectre haunts capitalism, the spectre of a people assembled.  From Tahrir to Puerta del Sol, from Syntagma to Zuccotti Park, from Taksim to the city assemblies of brazil, the social movements of our time resonate with protests whose forms of life are communities gathered without leadership, command or hierarchy; communities made in an ongoing self-creation.  Governed by principles of freedom (all may be introduced for debate) and equality (all may speak), the assemblies of our rebellions are open, horizontal and participatory.  Though born of protest, and often vehicles for the formulation of demands on State authority, they are far more than simple instruments for a counter or dual power, more than the ground of future constituent processes.  Through them, a people emerge, defined not by social position, function or ontology (class, sex/gender, ethnicity, race, etc.), to be accordingly judged revolutionary or reactionary, but by the autonomous self-making of a singularity that fractures and transgresses State and social identities.  With these last suspended, or destroyed, the instrumentalisation of the assembly for State centred politics is rendered secondary, is questioned and challenged, as it becomes the space and time for the shaping of new subjectivities, new ways of being in the world.