Autonomism: evading power

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Issue 272 of SOCIALIST REVIEW Published March 2003
Copyright © Socialist Review

Stop the war
STATE OF DISCONTENT
A mass movement's strategy towards the state is vital to its success, 
writes Alex Callinicos

(clip)

Autonomism: evading power

Counterposed to reformism within the anti-capitalist movement is a 
position that is apparently its opposite, renouncing not only a reliance 
on the existing state, but the very objective of taking power from 
capital. This is the position taken by the autonomist wing of the 
movement whose most famous representatives are the Italian 
disobbedienti. This takes its inspiration from some of the remarks of 
the Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos. For instance, he writes, 
'Perhaps, for example, the new political morality will be constructed in 
a new space that will not require the taking or retention of power but 
the counterweight and opposition that requires and obliges the power to 
"rule by obeying".'

One might regard this strategy as a pragmatic adaptation to the plight 
of the Zapatistas, whose 1994 rising in Chiapas (south-eastern Mexico) 
was rapidly surrounded by the federal military. Its survival has 
therefore come to depend on using the pressure of national and 
international opinion to constrain the Mexican state from mounting an 
all-out attack on the guerrillas of Chiapas. But more favourably placed 
autonomist intellectuals elsewhere in the world have championed a 
similar politics of renunciation.

For example, Toni Negri, co-author of Empire, in a widely circulated 
interview after 11 September 2001, argued for a strategy of 'exodus and 
desertion'. Negri has long advocated such an approach. He wrote in an 
Italian prison in the early 1980s, summarising his own previous 
development, 'Power was now seen as a foreign enemy force in society, to 
be defended against, but which it was no use "conquering" or "taking 
over". Rather, it was a question of its reduction, of keeping it at a 
distance.'

The most fully developed version of this theory has been put forward by 
John Holloway, a British autonomist Marxist based in Mexico, in a book 
whose name sums up its content: Change the World Without Taking Power. 
Holloway espouses an extreme form of Marx's theory of commodity 
fetishism, in which all the apparently objective structures of 
capitalist society are simply alienated expressions of human activity, 
based on the separation of subject and object, or as Holloway puts it, 
doer and done.

From this starting point Holloway draws two main conclusions. Firstly, 
any attempt to understand capitalism as a set of objective structures 
implies the abandonment of Marx's original conception of socialism as 
self emancipation. Accordingly, virtually the entire subsequent Marxist 
tradition is dismissed as 'scientistic' and authoritarian.

Secondly, dissolving the fetishistic structures of alienated human 
activity is 'a movement of negation', the assertion of what Holloway 
calls 'anti-power'. He tends to present this as the liberation of 
qualities that are denied by capitalism: 'That which is oppressed and 
resists is not only a who but a what. It is not only particular groups 
of people that are oppressed (women, indigenous, peasants, factory 
workers, and so on), but also (and perhaps especially) particular 
aspects of the personality of all of us: our self confidence, our 
sexuality, our playfulness, our creativity.'

But what does this mean more concretely? The answer is very confused. On 
the one hand, Holloway says that labour seeks to flee capital: 'flight 
is in the first place negative, the refusal of domination, the 
destruction and sabotage of the instruments of domination (machinery, 
for instance), a running away from domination, nomadism, exodus, 
desertion.' This takes us back to Negri's slogans advocating running 
alternative forms of cooperative production within the framework of 
capitalist economic relations. In Argentina, for example, his and 
Holloway's ideas have been used to justify the idea that the small 
network of factories abandoned by their bosses and taken over by the 
workers represents the beginning of a new post-capitalist economy.

On the other hand, Holloway remembers enough Marx to know that this 
strategy is fatally flawed, since it leaves most productive resources 
still controlled by capital, which can thus dictate the basis on which 
cooperatives can get access to credit and markets. 'As long as the means 
of doing [ie the means of production] are in the hands of capital then 
doing will be ruptured and turned against itself. The expropriator must 
indeed be expropriated.'

But when it comes to spelling out how this should be achieved Holloway 
disappears into speculative reveries about 'the dissolution of the 
thing-ness of the done, its (re)integration into the social flow of 
doing'. This fog of metaphysics can only be dispersed if one recognises 
that, even if they depend on human labour for their existence and 
reproduction, the structures of capitalism have an objective reality 
that has to be analysed and understood if we do want to change the world.

This is not because analysis is an end in itself. On the contrary, the 
point of taking seriously capitalism's objective structures is to 
identify the torsions and points of weakness they involve. Holloway at 
several points makes the good point against Negri that capital is 
vulnerable because it depends on the labour that creates it. But 
properly pursuing this insight requires a theoretical and practical 
engagement with concrete forms of working class struggle and 
organisation. Instead Holloway declares that 'we do not struggle as 
working class, we struggle against being working class, against being 
classified', as if one can abolish capitalist relations of production by 
pretending they aren't there.

full: http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/sr272/callinicos.htm

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