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Autonomy: Utopia Or Realpolitik”, Zizhiqu: Autonomous Regions, Edited by Hou Hanru, Published by Times Museum, Guangzhou, 2013

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Autonomy: Utopia Or Realpolitik”, Zizhiqu: Autonomous Regions, Edited by Hou Hanru, Published by Times Museum, Guangzhou, 2013 Week 11 Required Reading: * Ou Ning, “Autonomy: Utopia or Realpolitik”, Zizhiqu: Autonomous Regions, edited by Hou Hanru, published by Times Museum, Guangzhou, 2013. Autonomy: Utopia or Realpolitik Ou Ning Autonomy is a key word for anarchism. As for anarchism, Peter Kropotkin provided the following explanation in the 11th edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica: “The name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government — harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being.”(1) The term “anarchism” comes from the Greek “anarchos” (αναρχία), meaning “without ruler,” and this etymology points us to its core idea: that there is no need for a government, that a society can be maintained autonomously. The Chinese translation “wuzhengfuzhuyi”(which roughly comes out to “no-government-ism”) is not exactly imprecise, but after running through various historical contexts, particularly polemic disputes and conflicts with Marxism, the word has taken on a different meaning in Chinese society. Once Marxism became the mainstream ideology in China, anarchism was marginalized, its power diminished. The fact is, however, that many communists were anarchists at first, and in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, anarchism had many followers in China. Many of the assassination activities carried out against Qing dynasty rulers were done so under the influence of the anarchist doctrine known as “propaganda of the deed,” which pertains to the use of demonstrative actions to promote and mobilize revolution.(2) Such individual violent tendencies led society to reject anarchism and to equate it with violence, chaos, nihilism, the “collapse of morals” and “resistance against existing government” (rather than the separation from any government and engagement of autonomy that is advocated by original anarchism). As one of the most important human philosophical and political ideas of the past two centuries, anarchism has an extraordinarily diverse and complex spectrum, with the advocacy of violence accounting for only a small faction. For instance, the Christian anarchism of Leo Tolstoy (which inspired Japanese Shirakaba writer Saneatsu Mushanokōji’sAtarashiki-mura practice) and the Buddhist anarchism of Taixu (which was later spread by American poet Gary Snyder), both advocate non-violence. Many anarchists also set a very strict moral code for themselves. Among the many people who make up the intellectual tribe of the anarchists, Kropotkin can be seen as the epitome, and he is also the one who made the most profound contributions towards the construction of gentle social ideals in anarchism. At the time, Marxism was spreading the world like wildfire, and the anarchist pioneers Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin were no match for it in the battle of ideas. Moved by this Kropotkin resolved to draw from the philosophy of empiricism that was popular at that time in order to reconstruct the anarchist system of thought. In the 1902 book Mutual Aid, Kropotkin attempted to use the scientific methods of empiricism to refute the social Darwinist theory of the “struggle for survival” from the perspective of evolutionary history and demonstrate that mutual aid is a human instinct and the driving force behind social progress: “Neither the crushing powers of the centralized State nor the teachings of mutual hatred and pitiless struggle which came, adorned with the attributes of science, from obliging philosophers and sociologists, could weed out the feeling of human solidarity, deeply lodged in men's understanding and heart, because it has been nurtured by all our preceding evolution. What was the outcome of evolution since its earliest stages cannot be overpowered by one of the aspects of that same evolution. And the need of mutual aid and support which had lately taken refuge in the narrow circle of the family, or the slum neighbours, in the village, or the secret union of workers, re-asserts itself again, even in our modern society, and claims its rights to be, as it always has been, the chief leader towards further progress.”(3) The idea of autonomy in anarchism was established upon the foundation of Kropotkin’s theory of mutual aid — it is only because solidarity and mutual aid are human nature that lofty morals can be established, that production and economic development can be achieved through the direct exchange of labor and the bartering of goods (this economic model that avoids the use of currency has anti-capitalism in its DNA), and that the free energy of the individual can be released. There is no need for political agents (parties, governments or the state), no need for leaders, no need for authority, no force, no classes, no exploitation, no need for taxation and no need to rely on public services (that is to say there is no need for compulsory taxation in exchange for public services) when everyone shares “horizontal power” (all people participating together in shared decisions) and engage in “direct action” (spontaneous individual participation with no need for representation). Such ideas were often deemed utopian flights of fancy, lacking the “realpolitik” conditions for operation. In modern society, party politics, the taxations system and the state model are ubiquitous, with most people passively accepting this system’s plans for them all their lives, viewing its existence as inevitable. They have never imagined the possibility of a different society or different politics. One could say that in today’s mainstream society, the space for anarchism is very narrow, and anarchist autonomy has never been practiced on a grand scale. But anarchism does not demand a seat in mainstream thought. Its marginalized position is exactly the attitude it maintains: if an anarchist were to gain a seat in the university, gain recognition in academia or appear as a public intellectual on TV, that person would become a part of an organization or enter into a certain system, and this is against the principles of anarchism. They are more focused on action and practice, constantly refreshing their ideas within the possible social space and constructing their “prefigurative politics” (the prefiguration of future social and political modes). The Paris Commune of 1871 has been held up by anarchists as a model of autonomy. Though it only lasted for two months, it encouraged later anarchists to engage in the grassroots practice of autonomy. In the Twentieth Century, the Spanish anarchist union organization Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) played an important role in the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939 and engaged in many experiments in autonomy. Later, the Situationist International Movement promoted by Guy Debord, the May 1968 protests in France and the 1971 establishment of the Fristaden Christiania in Copenhagen all added to the theories and political practices of anarchist autonomy from different angles. The emergence of “neo-anarchism” was marked by the establishment of an autonomous base and guerilla operations by the Zapatistas deep in the mountains of Mexico in 1994. The movement against neoliberalism that arose in Seattle in 1999, the words and deeds of the French philosophical group Tiqqun (they once published a pamphlet entitled L'Insurrection qui vient under the name of the Comité invisible; one of their core members, Julien Coupat, was arrested in 2008 as a suspect in attacks against French railways), the Arab Spring which began in 2010, and the Occupy Wall Street movement which began in 2011 have all successively pushed the grassroots political practices of neo-anarchism to new heights. Two thinkers, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, have provided current theoretical support and academic summarizations of these movements that have emerged since the 1990s: “…the movements are immediately subversive in themselves and do not wait on any sort of external aid or extension to guarantee their effectiveness. Perhaps the more capital extends its global networks of production and control, the more powerful any singular point of revolt can be. Simply by focusing their own powers, concentrating their energies in a tense and compact coil, these serpentine struggles strike directly at the highest articulations of imperial order.”(4) The 2010 book Indignez-vous! by German-born French writer Stéphane Hessel directly catalyzed the Spanish Indignados movement, which together with the Arab Spring, influenced the occupation of Wall Street. Most contemporary neo-anarchists are activists who do not seek fame or honor, and maintain their distance from the social elites, though there are those among them who strive for innovation and dissemination of anarchist thought. Much of the noteworthy discussion on neo-anarchism in recent years has come from David Graeber. Graeber was born and raised in the United States, and had become an anarchist by the age of 16. He participated in the 2002 World Economic Forum protests in New York City, and helped to start the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, coining the term “we are the 99%.” Graeber was an assistant professor of anthropology at Yale University, and after missing tenure there, he moved to Goldsmiths College in London. Like Kropotkin, he had strong ambitions regarding the construction of anarchist theory. In the 2004 book Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, he attempted to use anthropological methods to prove that the autonomous ideals and economic modes of anarchism were feasible in the real world. People have always been doubtful that anarchism could become a real political model, asking, “Can you name me a single viable example of a society which has existed without a government?” When you raise the many examples of primitive tribal societies, they then ask about contemporary societies.
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