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

240 Pages·2020·1.077 MB·English

by  CounterPower

Advance Praise
“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 to-
gether. 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 desti-
nation, 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 peo-
ple’s 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 different—and better—way 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,
it’s 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 polit-
ical 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 excep-
tional and unprecedented ways. It’s clear that the people’s only means of
survival is to generate new structures of militance and of care, emerg-
ing from within communities themselves, which can become modules
of a just social order. The tools proposed in these pages—notably social
investigations—are 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
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a
copy of this license, visit creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
ISBN: 978-1-942173-21-2 (print)
ISBN: 978-1-942173-39-7 (ebook)
LCCN: 2020930516
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Organizing for Autonomy
History, Theory, and Strategy for
Collective Liberation
CounterPower
Brooklyn, NY
commonnotions.org

To the communards: past, present, future.

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

CONTENTS
Introduction 1
The Specter That Haunts Us 1
Guerrilla Theory 3
From Counterpower to Communism 5
Outline of the Book 7
Chapter 1: The Weapon of Theory 9
1.1: Power to the People 9
1.2: Partisan Social Science 12
1.3: Social Investigation 15
Decoding the hidden transcript 18
1.4: A World of Sciences 21
Against reductionism 23
Matter in motion 25
Being human as praxis 30
Institutional boundary and spheres of social activity 34
Chapter 2: Imperialism and Revolution 47
2.1: The Imperialist World-System 47
Empire as a world-producing force 47
Dominant centers, dominated peripheries 57
The ecological rift 62
Resurgent fascism 65
2.2: Revolutionary Situations 67
The dangers of assimilation 70
Chapter 3: Envisioning the Commune 73
3.1: Abolition 74
The abolition of class society 81
3.2: Communism at Point Zero 83
Free love and free partnerships 86
A psychedelic transformation of everyday life 87
Polyculturalism and intercommunalism 90
3.3: Commons 94
Communal habitations 98
Education for autonomy 102
3.4: Communal Administration and Coordination 105
Councils 108
Communes 109
Stewardship of the commons and collective enterprises 111
Federated councils of workers and consumers 113
Communal participatory planning 115
Liberating collective labor 121
Social provisioning, remunerative justice, and
factors of consumption 124
Negate the state 127
A communal participatory polity 130
Conflict resolution and restorative justice 134
Communal defense and security 135
3.5: The World Commune 136
Chapter 4: Building the Commune 141
4.1: Organized Autonomy 143
Organs of counterpower 145
Defending the area of autonomy 159
Create two, three, many parties of autonomy! 162
From united front to system of counterpower 181
4.2: Protracted Revolutionary Struggle 186
A path to liberation 186
Phase one: laying the groundwork 188
Phase two: the emergence of territorial counterpower 194
Phase three: insurrectionary rupture 195
Phase four: direct transition to communism 197
A continuous revolution 199
Conclusion 203
Summation 203
The Question of Program 204
References 207
Index 223