CounterPower - Organizing for Autonomy: History, Theory, and Strategy for Collective Liberation

The old world is collapsing all around us, and communism is in the air. Organizing for Autonomy asks us to breathe deeply of that air, to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our comrades, and to plot the way forward together. Its cohesive analysis and ambitious vision point toward the North Star and offer a militant strategy for how to get going. It is not a roadmap to the new world, but no matter. After all, communism is not the destination, it is the path itself. Geo Maher (George Ciccariello-Maher), author of Spirals of Revolt and Decolonizing Dialectics

CounterPower offers a deeply thoughtful analysis that is rooted in peoples everyday struggles to end oppression. At a time when the criminal failures of capitalism endanger the entire planet, Organizing for Autonomy is rich with revolutionary possibility. Barbara Smith, cofounder of the Combahee River Collective and Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press

Capitalism got us into this mess. Organizing for Autonomy advances the conversation about how we can achieve a differentand betterway of living, in a world without bosses. Steve Wright, author of Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism

In the new phase of history, and of struggles, which is opening up now, its essential to keep alive the link with the history of the Left, and to sum this up critically as a guide to future practice. Organizing for Autonomy is a great contribution to that task. That the capitalist system and its political apparatus are degenerate and parasitic, founded on a racist-imperialist infrastructure, has been true for a long time. But now, suddenly the COVID-19 crisis and racist killings have exposed these realities in exceptional and unprecedented ways. Its clear that the peoples only means of survival is to generate new structures of militance and of care, emerging from within communities themselves, which can become modules of a just social order. The tools proposed in these pagesnotably social investigationsare exactly the methods which can be explored in this historic cause. CounterPower offer us an important and extremely topical publication to further our struggle. Robert Biel, author of The New Imperialism and The Entropy of Capitalism

Organizing for Autonomy: History, Theory, and Strategy for Collective Liberation CounterPower

CounterPower

This edition 2020 Common Notions

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons

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ISBN: 978-1-942173-21-2 (print)

ISBN: 978-1-942173-39-7 (ebook)

LCCN: 2020930516

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History, Theory, and Strategy for Collective Liberation

CounterPower

Brooklyn, NY
commonnotions.org

To the communards: past, present, future.

This book is the collective product of the cognitive, emotional, and communicative labor of many comrades, spanning nearly a decade of political praxis.

How can we get free? How can we free ourselves, our communities, our environments, our societies? And what will this freedom look like? While the present moment holds incredible possibilities to organize for our collective liberation, there are powerful forces readily willing and able to summon all available weapons of repression to contain and suppress revolutionary movements. Our present civilization, argued Herbert Marcuse, always must defend itself against the specter of a world which could be free. It is our task to give this specter an earthly form.

The question of freedom is central to all revolutionary movements. It is at the root of everyday struggles against white supremacist colonialism, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, the authoritarian state, and every other form of systemic oppression. But we have to ask, again, what will freedom look like? Often, the realities we each face constrain the ways we can answer this question, so we ask it in pieces: How do we provide for each other? How do we protect, nurture, care, love, and create? How do we liberate ourselves from the hardships of enclosure, exploitation, and dependency that are imposed on our minds, bodies, communities, and environments? How do we free our sense of freedom, so that it is not a set of individual and extractive privileges, but is instead the grounding for a communal form of abundance?

Where we stand today is the result of centuries of struggle between forces of liberation and forces of domination. Governments and corporations pour toxins into bodies, minds, and environments, creating an unsustainable world of individualism, disposability, and extraction that festers with antiblack, heteropatriarchal, and settler-colonial violence. The powers that structure our civilization have brought the entire planetary system to the precipice of ecological collapse, while at the same time preparing the ground for resurgent forms of fascism that exploit ordinary peoples frustrations by fragmenting the oppressed with xenophobic and antiblack sentiments. Imperialismjustified under the guise of multiculturalism and sustainable developmentnow increasingly must contend with forms of right-wing nationalism and white supremacy promoting a vision of the future in which outsiders of any sort are walled off by frightened and insecure attempts to recreate a mythic past of white, heteropatriarchal bliss.

As an individual, it can seem almost impossible to confront such massive forces of global devastation and reactionary violence. In isolation from one another, as individualized consumers, workers, voters, and families, it is easy for avoidance and apathy to close in and keep us from seeing that, together, side-by-side, we can turn our faces toward the storm.

Revolutions are made not to get more (or, of course, less) of what we already have, Andr Gorz reminds us, but to get something altogether different which will put an end to conditions that are felt to be unbearable. We need analyses, visions, and strategies to guide us from this world to the next, based on an honest assessment of the material realities we face. Our valuesfreedom, equality, autonomy, solidarityand the histories of struggle past and present, can help us chart a path toward liberation.

This book is for those interested in building a movement for social revolution. The aim of this book is to outline a theoretical system that can guide revolutionary action today and tomorrow. Past and present revolutionary struggles have overthrown oppressive states, elevated living standards, built the power of the people, and gifted the world hope and inspiration. However, these struggles have faced immense opposition in their attempts to overthrow and abolish an oppressive social system. Whatever their shortcomings, there remain many important lessons to learn from our movement ancestors to broaden our visions and strategies of liberation and to develop a revolutionary practice capable of liberating all oppressed people, from the workplace to the household.