Autonomies

In the 1970s, Amedeo Bertolo engaged with newly emergent political concepts and movements which seemed both to recuperate older anarchist thought and practice, as well as to leave anarchism behind. For Bertolo, the concern was not to dismiss the new in the name of an older purity, but to confront the two in a mutually critical dialogue.

In the essay, “The subversive weed”, the concern is with self-management, a concept that came radically to the fore in diverse anti-capitalist and anti-statist struggles of the 1960s and 70s. If Bertolo’s reflection today seems dated, it is only seemingly so, for “self-management” has only given way to more current political forms: “horizontalism” (from the argentinian uprising of 2001), “caracoles” (from Zapatista Chiapas), “assemblies” (from the many “occupy” movements of 2011-2013). These conceptual shifts are more than merely lexical; they reveal significant changes in the spaces and times of struggle (e.g., from the industrial workplace to city squares and streets), and in their protagonists.

If Bertolo thought that anarchism had to come to terms with “self-management”, learning from and contributing to it, the same could be said of anarchism today in relation to other, more recent concepts. And if he thought this to be urgent, it is for the same reason that we claim the same: the history of anarchist struggles is far too rich to simply be forgotten. The loss would be enormous. And yet, this is not a wealth that can be taken for granted and preserved in some isolated enclosure. It needs to breath, to feed, to sustain itself, in contact with the world of those who continue to demand and create, in a multiplicity of ways, greater freedom and equality. Only in this manner will anarchism remain the stubborn weed that presses against order.

I believe … that the debate around self-management can be an important occasion for anarchists. If the demand for self-management is, in a certain measure, a “demand for anarchy”, it is not necessary to add a pair of slogans to our repertoire of words of order, but to extract from it indications for our action. If sociologists, economists, philosophers, psychologists, urbanists, increasingly use the self-management key for a quasi-anarchist approach to the human sciences and propose quasi-anarchist solutions to social problems, it is not enough for us to congratulate ourselves for the phenomenon, much less claim priority over the method. We must work seriously to propose ourselves as the point of credible libertarian cultural reference here and now … If politicians and bureaucrats and technocrats prattle on about self-management, or worse, are in the process of elaborating and realising partial or distorted versions of it, it is useless to shout out, “thief!” We must rather demystify their game with convincing arguments and exemplary struggles.