Autonomist Marxist Theory and Practice in the Current Crisis

Brian Marks1

University of Arizona School of Geography and Development [email protected]

Abstract Autonomist Marxism is a political tendency premised on the autonomy of the proletariat. Working class autonomy is manifested in the self-activity of the working class independent of formal organizations and representations, the multiplicity of forms that struggles take, and the role of class composition in shaping the overall balance of power in capitalist societies, not least in the relationship of class struggles to the character of capitalist crises. Class composition analysis is applied here to narrate the recent history of capitalism leading up to the current crisis, giving particular attention to China and the United States. A global wave of struggles in the mid-2000s was constituitive of the kinds of working class responses to the crisis that unfolded in 2008-10. The circulation of those struggles and resultant trends of recomposition and/or decomposition are argued to be important factors in the balance of political forces across the varied geography of the present crisis. The whirlwind of crises and the autonomist perspective The whirlwind of crises (Marks, 2010) that swept the world in 2008, financial panic upon food crisis upon energy shock upon inflationary spiral, receded temporarily only to surge forward again, leaving us in a turbulent world, full of possibility and peril. Is this the end of Neoliberalism or its retrenchment? A new

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Autonomist Marxist Theory and Practice in the Current Crisis 468

New Deal or a new Great Depression? The end of American hegemony or the rise of an “imperialism with Chinese characteristics?” Or all of those at once? This paper brings the political tendency known as autonomist Marxism (H. Cleaver, 2000; Midnight Notes, 1992b) to bear on the present crisis of capitalism. It is intended to speak to radical geography, which has thus far scarcely addressed this body of work (although see Watts, 2009; Radice, 2009; Chatterton, 2010). The paper will proceed by first explaining some of the tenets of autonomist Marxism and, where applicable, indicating how it diverges from other tendencies of radical thought in its conceptions of class, struggle, and crisis. The methodology of class composition analysis is described, as is the political importance of class recomposition and decomposition. Second, the contours of contemporary global capitalism and the working class are narrated from 1980 to the present conjuncture, employing class composition analysis to enlighten the historical-geographical transformations of American and Chinese class structures during this time. Recompositional and decompositional trends are identified in specific fractions of the class in both countries and the interrelated yet divergent character of their working classes’ “deals” with neoliberal globalization are sketched out. Lastly, the coming on and playing out of the current crisis is described in light of autonomist theory and practice, arguing that a global wave of struggles coincided with the peak of the 2000s business cycle, led by young, precariously employed workers in world cities who fought and often won defensive struggles against deepening marginalization and precarity. Where trends of class recomposition rooted in those struggles are pronounced, as in contemporary China where rural-urban migration circulates struggles and blurs class hierarchies, greater working class power is observed; places where class decomposition is more prevalent, as in the contemporary U.S., those divisions have facilitated the imposition of the costs of the crisis on the working class. Unpacking autonomy We begin by defining what autonomism means. The terms autonomist, autonomous, autonomia or autonomen correlate with a spectrum of political projects and trajectories, from earlier Left and Council Communists (James et al., 1986; Castoriadis, 1959/1988) through groupings of the 1960s and 1970s like Italian operaismo (Bologna, 2000; Wright, 2002) to more contemporary urban squatter, direct action, and anti-globalization movements (Katsiaficas, 2006; Bonefeld, 2008). Autonomist Marxism is defined here as a political tendency premised on the autonomy of the proletariat. Working class autonomy can be said to encompass three aspects: the working class’ actions take a multiplicity of forms autonomous from and not determined by capital; working class self-activity can be autonomous from organizations or representations of the class; and different fractions of the class are autonomous from each other, constituting a changing overall class composition (Zerowork, 1992). ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 2012, 11(3), 467-491 469

Working class autonomy in the reproduction and destruction of capitalism Autonomists don’t define the proletariat solely by its productive capacity or necessity to work given its separation from the means of production, rather they emphasize its potential to refuse work (Tronti, 1980), to deny its value to capital. The working class as ‘variable capital,’ an indeterminate value from a given amount of labor power, implies equally the capitalist ability to extract surplus through the labor process and the working class ability to disrupt or divert that transformation. Capitalist use of that variability yields profit; proletarian ‘variability’ brings crisis and looming oblivion to capital (H. Cleaver, 2000). Capital is an antagonistic social relation wherein the living, productive power of humanity is accumulated through the imposition of work. Capitalism reproduces itself insofar as it can capture these working class energies and transform them into labor productivity and is undermined to the extent workers can refuse work and reproduce themselves autonomously. Working class self-activity and organization Autonomist Marxism argues neither consciousness nor centralized organization are prerequisites to struggling against capital, nor for success in such struggles. Rather, means of action, theoretical concepts, and forms of organization can arise out of the creativity of the class as its various compositions circulate through and resist the capitalist labor process. This has been seen in cycles of struggle around the transition to capitalism (Linebaugh and Redicker, 2000; Federici, 2004), in industrial offensives like the 1930s and 1960s strike waves that arose amidst labor union conservatism (Glaberman, 1975; Brecher, 1984; Piven and Cloward, 1979, 115-53; Gambino, 1976; Georgakas and Surkin, 1998), or in coal wildcats, truckers’ strikes and gas riots against the 1970s energy crises (W. Cleaver, 1992; Midnight Notes, 1980, 25-31). In these cases, leadership in the form of representative institutions was absent or hostile to rank-and-file action, nor did such institutions achieve (effective) organization or consciousness-raising of the class – rather, struggles erupted out of quotidian events, took on forms conjured up out of workers’ immediate contexts, then spread widely through networks immanent to the organization of production and working class reproduction. Autonomists have a broad affinity with the Zapatista movement (Midnight Notes, 2001; Notes from Nowhere, 2003), which pioneered an anti-authoritarian, networked form of anti-capitalism that led to the alter-globalization movement of the 1990s and 2000s. While some radical geographers continue to argue “… there is no way an anti-capitalist social order can be constructed without seizing state power, radically transforming it, and re-working the constitutional and institutional framework that currently supports private property, the market system and endless capital accumulation” (Harvey, 2010, 16), autonomists reject such a prioritization of the seizure of state power. They cite the betrayals of working class movements by Left governments who collaborate with capital to impose fiscal austerity and recuperate struggles into a new matrix of capitalist control, or else violently repress Autonomist Marxist Theory and Practice in the Current Crisis 470 the working class when it refuses state capitalist exploitation guised as socialism (Red Notes, 1978; El Libertario, 2010). Autonomists also note the successes of many movements, like the Zapatistas, that have not seized state power as much as constructed their own social norms and forms of political power outside or parallel to the state (Neill, 2001; Lavaca Collective, 2007). The autonomist line is neither for nor against engagement with state power per se, rather it asks the broader (and more geographical!) question of how to “simultaneously reappropriate and hold places from capital while opening spaces for proletarian movement” (Midnight Notes, 1992a, 331) – how to secure the conditions for working class reproduction and mobility independent of capital, i.e. the creation self-reproducing movements (Federici, 2008) which, whether they articulate with or wage war on a given state apparatus, produce working class autonomy from the state and capital. Class composition and the circulation of struggles Class composition refers to diversity among workers related to the organization of production and has two aspects, technical and political. Technical composition addresses the division of labor in terms of wage levels and productivity, the organic composition of capital (the ratio of variable capital, or labor, to constant and fixed capital, or machinery, buildings, raw materials, energy), gendered, racialized, and nationalized differences in the workforce, the length of the work day, and the parceling of working time between unwaged, waged, legal and illegal labor. Political composition concerns the forms that struggles take for different groups in society and the degree to which they are synchronized – meaning if they work at cross ends or tend towards common demands relative to capital, not necessarily a formal unity or solidarity (Zerowork, 1992, 111-12). The barometer of class society is class recomposition and decomposition. Recomposition means the increasing concordance of action across a widening diversity of the class, occurring through the circulation of struggles, the transmission of forms of action and thought through the geographical and social diversity of the class. Cycles of struggle refer to chronological and geographical waves of working class action which may function independently of each other but act to reinforce, not negate, their strengths vis a vis capital. Decomposition means the opposite - the increasing division, weakness, and contradiction among sectors of the class, the blocking of the circulation of struggles, and their destruction, negation, or recuperation as new forms of capitalist power. Autonomists and crisis theory What do these ideas contribute to an understanding of capitalist crises? Autonomists place class struggle at the center of crisis theory and have brought this hypothesis to their analysis of the capitalist crisis of the 1970s (Red Notes, 1978; Midnight Notes, 1992a; Gambino, 1996). Some prominent crisis theorists (Aglietta, 1978; Dunford, 1990, 310-17; Boyer, 2000, 17; Jessop, 2000, 339; Brenner, 2006, 7; Arrighi, 2009) argue against struggle as the source the 1960s-70s crisis, holding ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 2012, 11(3), 467-491 471 that the internal workings of capital, specifically its increasingly unplanned and competitive nature and tendency towards over-accumulation, were the driving factors. These ‘objective’ factors are, for autonomists, rooted in the magnitude of struggles coincident with the inflection point of post-war capitalism circa 1973, their diversity of forms and their wide circulation. While radical geography is more germane to the role of class struggle in the geography of capitalism (see Peet, 1983; Harvey, 1989; Harvey, 1995; Smith, 1996; Peck, 2000; Harvey, 2005) including contra Regulation theory (Peck and Theodore, 2007), autonomism parallels critiques such as Herod (1997) and Gibson- Graham (2006) who write that radical geography often takes the perspective of capital over working class viewpoints in the production of economic space. World systems theory (Wallerstein, 2002) also acknowledges the importance of struggles in the course of capitalist development and the limitations of state-centered approaches to revolution. However, unlike autonomists, world systems theorists (Wallerstein, 2010, 133-5; although see exceptions like Tomich, 1990) see the source of capitalist crisis not in working class struggles, or even in the contradictions of capitalist production, but in long-wave business cycles resulting from the degree of commercial monopoly exercised by leading global firms and hegemonic states. Changes in class composition in the U.S. and China since 1980 The post-1980 regime of accumulation in the U.S. Next, we shall investigate the contours and transformations of class composition in two of the largest and most interconnected capitalist economies, the U.S. and China, from their emergence from the crisis of the 1970s to the peak of the 2000s business cycle. While recognizing the ubiquity and interconnectedness of working class struggles worldwide and their effects on the course of global capitalism, narrating all of those struggles is beyond the scope of this article. Rather, by focusing on class composition in two of the world’s major economies and their transformation through recomposition and decomposition, some of the salient features of contemporary global capitalism can be described and their relative importance to the balance of class power analyzed. The American working class experienced a long wave of recomposition from the mid-1930s through the mid-1970s driven by several interwoven cycles of struggle (Caffentzis, 2001). Industrial unionism in the manufacturing sector pushed up incomes through the forging of ‘wages/productivity’ deals in which employers traded higher wages for greater labor discipline enforced by the unions (Glaberman, 1975). Mass unionization narrowed the wage and organizational differential between skilled and unskilled labor while building up bastions of working class strength in industrial cities. The racial and inter-regional wage hierarchy was attacked by the outmigration of Appalachians and Southern African- Americans into Northern cities from the 1930s and rising international immigration after 1965. Despite being used as a weapon to push down wages and worker unity, Autonomist Marxist Theory and Practice in the Current Crisis 472 these new recruits to the industrial proletariat brought a greater militancy that not only accelerated the wage push but further undermined working class differentiation on the shop floor and across the nation. Civil Rights struggles circulated from cotton fields into auto assembly plants (Georgakis and Surkin, 1998), wildcat sabotage from Kentucky coal fields to interstate truckers’ strikes (W. Cleaver, 1992), anti-colonial resistance translated into grape boycotts and rent strikes – all served to recompose the class by raising labor’s share of the social surplus while narrowing gaps of material condition and political activity between its various fractions. In these same years unwaged workers launched struggles against unpaid labor (i.e. the welfare rights movement and a significant part of women’s liberation) that, while initially engaged by the state to expand the workforce and increase its reliability and productivity, led to the greater ability of many to refuse work and eroded the division in the class between waged and unwaged workers that served to keep their respective struggles separate and at odds (Carpignano, 1975; Caffentzis, 1992a). What these different threads of struggle accomplished was a serious crisis of capitalist command and state legitimacy in the U.S. measured crudely in the peaking of average real wages in 1973-4 and a simultaneous surge in strike activity. Yet, twenty years on, average wages were considerably lower, strikes fewer than 1/10th their former frequency, and private sector unionization, at just 12%, half its former rate (Caffentzis, 2001, 226). What had happened? Successive recessions between 1975-83 did much to slow down the wage push with higher unemployment while inflation watered down real incomes. The capitalist counter-attack of the last 35 years in the U.S. also gained momentum through accelerated capital mobility that unraveled the spatial ties between industrial location and union power (see Peet, 1983). Attacks on labor, heralded by the breaking of the 1981 air traffic control strike through the legalization of scab replacements, accelerated greatly in the following two decades, gutting the private sector unions and shattering the concentrations of working class power they constituted. Another decisive break with the 1970s crisis in the U.S. was the Carter/Volcker shock of 1979 and subsequent Reaganite cuts to social programs and labor rights in the early 1980s (Harvey, 2005). While these actions did bring down the wage bill significantly, interest rates and imposed recession crippled accumulation by dampening investment and consumption (Caffentzis, 1992a). Monetarist/supply-side plans for an investment-led recovery to boost stagnant labor productivity (H. Cleaver, 1995) gave way, following the failure of the Reagan administration to push through deeper cuts to social spending, to the ‘money for nothing’ regime of financialization, real estate, and speculation of the past twenty- five years. The U.S. profit rate would eventually recover to a long-term rate of 13.7% from 1980-2007, but profits remained significantly lower than the 16.7% average achieved in 1947-1973 (Bakir and Campbell, 2009, 337). ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 2012, 11(3), 467-491 473

Consumer spending boosted the end of the 1990s U.S. business cycle and was foundational to the entire 2000s cycle, which in turn fueled global expansion. But growth in U.S. median household income during the ‘Bush boom’ was actually negative (Leonhardt 2008). So where did the money come from? Financialization and debt. Growing indebtedness sustained living standards despite falling real incomes. The household debt-to-income ratio went from 60% in 1984 to 120% by 2005 (Kotz, 2008). The personal savings rate fell after 1980 from a long-term average of 4% to zero in 2005-07 (Rampell, 2009). American workers, fleeing south and west from the downsized rust belt towards the new centers of high-tech industry, finance, and construction, sought to compensate for their falling incomes at work by participating in the housing bubble, wresting from their rising equity a part of the surplus wrung from them on the job. In the mid-2000s close to 10% of American disposable income came from extracted equity, (mostly refinanced mortgages), boosting consumption despite falling wages (Weisbrot, 2008; Kotz, 2009, 313). These working class strategies of heightened mobility and seeking income outside of labor markets might have created new power for workers if appropriate forms of organization and/or collective action had been constituted around them (Midnight Notes and Friends, 2009); perhaps the unionization of mortgage holders to collectively bargain with finance capital, or the development of organizations and tactics suited to more unstable working conditions and a more mobile working class. By contrast, the few successful American labor struggles of the 1980s and 1990s generally reinforced class decomposition: The victory at UPS in 1997, for example, represented a brake on the smashing of unions seen in the 1990s in disputes like those in Decatur, Illinois, but this success by UPS’ relatively stable and secure workforce, necessarily so given its key role in the circulation of commodities for just-in-time production, was not well poised to circulate more broadly among American workplaces where large concentrations of workers had been dispersed and de- skilling drove turnover and wage reductions. The share of corporate profits in American GDP rose marginally while the share of wages and salaries declined markedly during the 2000s. Yet even at the peak of the boom in 2006, corporate profits’ GDP share only briefly touched the 10% average it achieved consistently for twenty-five years before 1970. While wages have fallen, overall compensation has remained steady (sustained by growing health care costs), meaning that while capital has taken a larger share of worker productivity, it has not been so successful in shedding the cost of reproducing the American working class (Greenhouse and Leonhardt, 2006). Growth in U.S. output per hour has increased since 1980, accelerating with increased investment in the 1990s business cycle. Productivity outpaced real compensation per hour throughout this period, with the gap widening after 2000 (Kotz, 2009, 309). American workers have been losing ground in the day-to-day class war of profits vs. wages. Autonomist Marxist Theory and Practice in the Current Crisis 474

Highly capital-intensive sectors (mining, transport, utilities and communications), making up 41% of constant capital but just 8% of labor in the U.S. economy, were the only sectors to not experience a marked fall in profit rates at any point from 1947-2000. While these sectors had low but steady profit rates (Dumenil and Levy, 2002, 450), positive change in non-financial profits since 1973 has centered on low organic composition sectors like construction, where a 40% real decline in hourly wages boosted profits after 1980 (Uctum and Viana, 1999, 1643). In these numbers we can see the decomposition and reformation of the American working class, from the hollowing out of the balanced capital/labor composition of Fordist manufacturing workers and their bifurcation into the software engineers and mortgage brokers of the high sectors and the retail cashiers and undocumented roofers of the low (following Caffentzis, 1992b, 234). China in the dynamic of contemporary global capitalism The flip side to American insolvency and financialization was globalization, the geographic relocation of production and capital flows – most notably and transformatively to Asia. If Fordism was Atlantic, then Neoliberalism is trans- Pacific, two of its strongest poles being the U.S. and China. This section will thus focus on understanding changes to Chinese class composition since 1978. The composition of the Chinese working class is divided between the 50% of the population in agriculture, about 12% industry, 6% construction, and 33% in services (Banister, 2005, 82). Different rules governing these sectors of the Chinese economy affect the technical and political composition of the Chinese working class. Wage differentials, uneven labor mobility and access to public services, degrees of political identification with or marginalization from the Party/State, cultural and sectional groupings - all affect the hierarchy and separation of the working class, i.e. its decomposition relative to capital. Rural farmers, 700 million in all, work individual plots of land and earn the lowest real incomes. Following a brief period of prosperity after 1978, farm incomes stagnated (Jianrong, 2003; Xulin, 2003). Where industrial and commercial expansion is widespread, farm lands are often seized with little or no compensation for projects profiting local governments and their business allies (Lee and Selden, 2007). Farmers in areas bypassed by growth have faced escalating tax burdens to pay for the swelling number of bureaucrats that accompanied fiscal and administrative decentralization (Xulin, 2003; Li and O’Brien, 2008). These factors have led to widening rural/urban inequality and the migration of some 120 to 200 million people from poor, rural provinces to the cities and coastal provinces (World Bank, 2009, 16). In industry there are really two working classes – the new class of migrants mostly in the export industries, mining and construction, and the old class in current or privatized State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs), concentrated in the North and in heavy and raw materials industries constructed from 1950-1975. The latter group’s state socialist deal for housing, employment, food, and health care was ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 2012, 11(3), 467-491 475 progressively dismantled through the 1990s. SOEs were sold, merged, went bankrupt, or were looted by management (often all these in combination) leading to some 25 million layoffs, concentrated in 1995-2000 (Banister, 2005; Lee, 2007; Aufheben, 2008). While this decomposition of the state industrial sector proceeded, Town and Village Enterprises (TVE) and foreign-invested urban industries boomed based on migrant labor and light consumer goods production. In recent years the share of investment in Chinese GDP has been about 35- 40%, consumption just 40% - by comparison, 70% of U.S. GDP goes to consumption (Leonhardt, 2009). This investment bought technology and equipment that boosted labor productivity, which coupled with cheap wages allowed capital to achieve a high rate of profit in China: 47% in 1978, falling to 32% by 2002 (O’Hara, 2006, 400-1). The mobilization of migrant workers by the tens of millions, state enterprises for sale, and land and resources up for grabs drew in huge amounts of capital to China that was invested primarily in the build-out of fixed capital and the expansion of manufacturing. Fixed capital formation is one of the requirements the Chinese state has extracted out of global capital in exchange for accessing Chinese workers and territory. This is unlike many other places where speculative capital inflows have predominated, leading to little meaningful production of space and great vulnerability to financial shocks. The Chinese neoliberal ‘class deal’ was to exchange low wages, migration, and the uneven development of city and country for the capture of global capital flows and their transformation into real investments, manufacturing employment, infrastructural gains and rising real wages. China and the U.S. as a circuit of neoliberal accumulation Linking these processes in the United States and China was a circuit between U.S. finance capital and East Asian manufacturing exports. The ballooning debt that allowed the consumption boom was predicated on an expensive U.S. dollar and low interest rates, factors made possible in part by the reinvestment of account surpluses from Asian exporters into the U.S. mortgage market and Treasury bills, completing the circuit (Landler, 2008; Ferguson, 2008). This deal meant for Americans stagnant wages and deindustrialization in exchange for access to credit and for Chinese rural crisis and sweatshop labor in exchange for spatially fixing global capital flows and achieving higher wages. In both cases, the deals were in a fundamental sense rotten because they were marked by the non-reproduction of the working class. The Chinese working class is in many ways the Doppelganger of the American, expressing parallel, proportionately opposite manifestations of a common trend. American non- reproduction was manifested in households’ growing indebtedness, covered up with debt, which both sustained and posed the limits of the accumulation strategy. In China, non-reproduction meant draining from both ends the reserve of rural labor power that fed industrial production; first, the subsistence wages paid to Autonomist Marxist Theory and Practice in the Current Crisis 476 migrants did not allow them to reproduce themselves for the long-term in the cities, and second, stagnant or falling farm income, land seizures, and rural disinvestment undermined their reproduction as cheap (because semi-proletarian) labor. There were perverse incentives for the acceleration of this accumulation by dispossession: the more people unable to survive in rural China, the more, and cheaper, the migrant labor pouring into the cities; the faster people ran up credit card debt, the higher went American (and Chinese) economic growth. The two trends had a striking complementarity: Americans dealt with non-reproduction by excessive spending and debt; Chinese, “shorn of the social safety net of the old Communist state, … squirrel away money to pay for hospital visits, housing or retirement” (Landler, 2008) - i.e. cover their precarity by excessive saving. Class struggles and the origins of the current crisis So how did this circuit break down? It’s simple enough to say ‘financial panic,’ ‘excessive deregulation,’ even ‘overproduction/underconsumptionist crisis’ (Foster and Magdoff, 2008; Harvey, 2010; Castree, 2010), but there is something missing in all those explanations - class struggles. Immediately prior to the onset of the crisis in 2007-08, a wave of labor actions circled the globe in 2005-06, centered on the booming low organic composition sectors of construction, consumer goods manufacturing, retail and education. The terrain for these struggles was in the major cities at the center of global accumulation like Paris, Los Angeles and Shanghai. Their participants were the unsettled and uprooted, mostly young, mobile proletariat thrown together in those cities. The number of such eruptions in this time period is no mere coincidence, nor a coordinated, consciously organized plan but an incipient recomposition of segments of the global proletariat. What these struggles have in common is that at mid-decade, at the zenith of the financialization boom, the deepening of exploitation through speed-up, greater precarity, or benefit cutbacks was partially blunted through action by the intended victims of these policies. In the United States, such struggles took most dramatic form in the immigrant rights mega-marches, while China saw the explosive growth of wildcat strikes throughout its migrant labor force. The American immigration mega-marches of 2006 In 2005 the Sensenbrenner immigration bill (HR 4437) sought to deepen the criminalization of undocumented immigrants in the U.S., intensifying the precariousness of immigrant workers filling the lower rungs of the booming high profit, labor-intensive sectors like home building, just-in-time light manufacturing, and service industries from which the finance-led economic expansion derived much of its real surplus value. The huge increase in the number of undocumented workers in the U.S. during the 1980s and ‘90s and their growing presence as militants in labor struggles in the janitorial, agricultural, and garment sectors from the late 1990s, years when U.S. wages ticked upwards for the first time in 25 years and corporate profits stagnated, contributed to an escalating attack on this fraction of American class composition. Escalating border enforcement, the PATRIOT Act ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 2012, 11(3), 467-491 477 of 2001 and HR 4437 in 2005 all constituted attempts at containing immigrant workers’ circulation of their struggles across international borders, between ethnic communities, and over legal divisions of the class, crucial factors in the decomposition of the American working class which have served to sustain capitalist initiative in the U.S. since the mid-1970s (Caffentzis, 2001, 2005). The decompositional import of HR 4437 was the offer of less competition in the labor market to documented blue-collar workers and the segregation of what remained of the social wage and labor protections in the U.S. to those with papers. Such a movement would have further divided American workers, aligning the more stable, documented segments’ desire to retain a living wage with the interests of capital to break up the growing militancy of immigrants and constrain the spread of their struggles to other parts of the class composition. Immigrant communities stopped HR 4437 and, for a time, the momentum of U.S. class decomposition. In 2006, starting in Chicago and spreading through networks of local organizers, radio stations, and by word of mouth, a ‘sleeping giant’ appeared on the streets of cities nationwide. The mega-marches drew people from many immigrant communities (and many beyond that) and jumped over into high schools, where thousands of students abandoned classes to join demonstrations. Some workers with a particularly potent situation in the circulation of commodities, independent short-haul truckers at the Port of Los Angeles, shut down the port during national May Day 2006 demonstrations and over their own issues of fuel costs, compensation, and ICE raids (Kutalik, 2006). The infectious spread of marches and boycotts got the government to back down from HR 4437, but this immigrant-led movement remained isolated from the rest of the class, many of whom saw their falling wages and growing indebtedness as the fault of immigrant workers, not capital. Thus while the wide circulation of this struggle prevented the further decomposition of the American working class by blunting the deepening of the wage and job security hierarchy resting on immigration status, it failed to recompose the U.S. working class around a more general demand for higher wages and job security that could erode such wage differentials (Midnight Notes and Friends, 2006, 2009). Class composition in the Chinese cycle of struggles In China through the 1990s and 2000s resistance proliferated against the gutting of the state industrial sector and the squeezing of the agricultural sector (Xulin, 2003; Jianrong, 2003; Gulick, 2004; Shi, 2003; Lee and Selden, 2007). Conflicts grew in number and intensity over time: The Chinese government said in 2003 there were 58,000 ‘mass incidents’ of petitioning, rallies, riots, etc., double the rate in 1999 and six times that of 1993 (Aufheben, 2008, 2). The number of mass incidents increased again from 2003 to 2005 by 50% to almost 90,000, declining slightly in 2006 (Chen, 2009, 88). Autonomist Marxist Theory and Practice in the Current Crisis 478

A fragmented and compartmentalized class composition combined with government repression and selective concessions meant that despite their huge number, such struggles remained largely isolated from each other. Rural and urban residents’ deals with the state and capital were disconnected: For example, rural people and migrants had no access to the benefits SOE workers and urban residents sought to hold onto, rights selectively granted through residential registration in particular cities or employment at specific factories. Urban workers fought individual local governments and plant managements over a variety of issues like the payment of unpaid wages or securing housing or pensions after being fired. Furthermore, these groups organized primarily among their factory’s workers. Likewise, farmers fought specific land seizures or grievous fees of the local administration in their district. Yet, while these struggles could seldom form spatially or socially extensive networks, they were so frequent, ubiquitous and intense they nevertheless reinforced and amplified each others’ energies vis a vis capital and the state. The interaction of this mass of generally isolated struggles created a kind of constructive resonance, in which the gains made in one place by one fraction of the Chinese proletariat produced leverage from which other struggles could amplify their force. In this way, they represent an indirect but potent form of class recomposition. Despite the tens of millions of layoffs from SOEs in the 1990s, the rate of growth in industrial wages rose. Real earnings of Chinese urban manufacturing workers in 1990-1998 grew about 5%/yr, in 1998-2004 over 10%/yr (Lett and Banister, 2006, 44). This must be qualified by the fact that the surviving industrial SOEs, where wages appeared to rise even faster than in the private and foreign- invested manufacturing sectors, were still paying nine million unemployed workers, who received just 1/7th the average worker salary. Beyond them were many millions of former workers cut off entirely from benefits or who found new jobs at often worse pay than before. Also, workers in the mainly rural TVEs, making up 70% of Chinese industrial employment, earned less than half the average urban manufacturing wage and their earnings grew at a considerably slower rate, just 3.25%/year for 2002-2004. That notwithstanding, the wage growth of the 2000s was not confined to restructured SOEs, nor was it only due to the shedding of old socialist deals, but reflected a real rise in living standards for Chinese industrial workers. Wage increases were smaller than, but proportional to, labor productivity gains at the time (7.3%/year in the 1990s and 13.3% for 2001-03 according to O’Hara, 2006, 400), meaning that workers were gaining a significant share of their growing output as industry was modernized. While manufacturing workers in China still earn just 3% of the U.S. manufacturing wage, the 1990s and 2000s were decades of real income growth after inflation for workers (Banister, 2005). Wage growth accelerated as the 2000’s boom peaked. In the mid-2000s some firms experienced 25 or even 40% hikes in salaries per year (Roberts, 2006; Bradsher, 2008b). Inflation, while higher than in previous years, did not eliminate ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 2012, 11(3), 467-491 479 these gains as it peaked at just 4% in 2005 before rising to 6% in 2008 (OECD, 2005; Xinhua, 2009a). Rather than an inexhaustible supply of labor, by 2005 factories in the booming export centers faced a shortage. Half the American firms in China reported their profits were reduced by wage growth in 2006 and workers’ rapid shifting from one firm to another meant companies had to match pay elsewhere or lose their employees, creating a situation where “… managers can no longer simply provide eight-to-a-room dorms and expect laborers to toil 12 hours a day, seven days a week” (Roberts, 2006). One reason for the shortage was the rapid growth of the national economy itself. The shortage of skilled and educated workers also increased wages, but only marginally: One study found that levels of education and work experience accounted for at most 20% of wage differentials among Chinese firms (Dong, 2005). The shift in technical composition towards higher-skilled jobs was also an aspect in class struggle because it was used by those workers to push pay higher and refuse work discipline, given that they could not be easily replaced. Another factor in the labor shortage was the policy of limiting legal migration to the cities, intended to reduce access to urban services and maintain the rural-urban wage hierarchy (Banister, 2005, 20-22). A policy change in 2004 allowed for more legal migration to smaller cities, but this did not stop the wage push and high turnover in the large cities where export manufacturing and construction was concentrated. The urban wage drive was articulated with the refusals of farmers to bear the burdens that drive rural outmigration as well as migrant workers’ actions against low pay, barracks housing, poor food, and harassment (Prol-Position, 2008). Farmers’ struggles led to tax and fee reductions and increased subsidies from the central government (Aufheben, 2008, 19). The effect was to improve conditions in the countryside and limit migration to cities. Fewer and less desperate migrants relative to labor demand meant workers had more power to push up wages through collective action or by frequent turnover. Workers used tight labor markets during the boom to refuse low-paying work, meaning employers had to raise salaries to fill positions and keep workers. These pro-worker policy moves by the Chinese Communist Party coincided with shifts within the Party/State (Li, 2005), but were not independent of the growing surge of struggles. There is a clear chronological alignment between the escalation of workers’ and farmers’ demands across China in the 2000s and the extension of greater benefits and protections to workers and farmers. These struggles do have leaders, however, if not any identifiable knot of conspirators or specific social fraction or institution giving direction to participants. Take the struggles of Chinese farmers (Li and O’Brien, 2008): The common characteristics of farmer leaders are somewhat higher education than their neighbors and some degree of respect and esteem by fellow villagers. Protest leaders are more likely to be non-Party members than members and while there is some tendency for older leaders to have experience from the Cultural Revolution, they are just as likely to be former demoted ‘Rightists’ as Red Guards – the Autonomist Marxist Theory and Practice in the Current Crisis 480 commonality is their being politically banished at one point or another from the local administration and Party, not their normative politics. The autonomist observation is that no organizational structure or ideological framework was necessary for such struggles to occur, to extract concessions from capital, and to circulate throughout the class composition. Rather than splintering struggles into a thousand militant particularisms, this lack of a coherent program, leadership, or centralized organization has made it more difficult for the state and capital to neutralize, mediate, or otherwise recuperate working class energies into labor productivity and political consent. From commodity boom to market crash The energy/food crises of 2008 When the present crisis began to manifest in 2007-08, it initially took the form of commodity price spikes, hitting people’s real incomes through energy and food costs. At the same time, the vast hoard of finance capital that had grown far in advance of the real expansion of surplus value teetered towards devaluation. Americans could no longer sustain their standard of living as their falling wages, combined with falling home prices, became a flood of foreclosures. Chinese factory workers, 40% of whose wages go to food costs, found themselves unable to afford to live as inflation surged. While the food/energy crisis was an assault on working class incomes globally, it also produced globally synchronized, if differentially effective, resistance. The international circulation of energy and food prices recomposed global working class struggles around those food and energy cost spikes. Food riots broke out in dozens of countries across the Global South (FAO, 2008). Energy and food costs also hit at the real income of Europeans, Americans and Japanese, but in these countries, where food comprises a relatively small part of the cost of living, struggles against the crisis were concentrated narrowly among the most vulnerable segments of the working class to rising energy prices: Transport workers, like those U.S. truckers who ran blockades and go-slows at ports, state capitols and interstates in early 2008 (Ehrenreich, 2008a, 2008b). In East Asia, a broader swathe of workers was able to significantly offset rapid food price inflation with comparable wage increases. The latter was true especially in China and Vietnam where larger waves of strikes and protests occurred than in any earlier year, an estimated 127,000 mass incidents in China in 2008 (Johnson, 2009; China Labour Bulletin, 2009a; Human Rights Watch, 2009). Industrial workers in those countries were, through large-scale if uncoordinated action, able to partially push the commodity price spike off their backs and onto their employers’ through these wage struggles (Bradsher, 2008a). China, the U.S., and ongoing struggles in the current crisis The financial devaluation and bailouts of late 2008 in the U.S., the reversal of commodity price trends, deep international recession and rapidly rising ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 2012, 11(3), 467-491 481 unemployment have all changed the dynamics of class struggles. Competition for jobs has made it harder to wage struggles at all, never mind link them together. Internationally, since 2009 the U.S. government has run up debt at an even faster pace than the huge dissaving of the 2000s (Goodman, 2009; Bowley and Healy, 2009). After recovery in 2009 in late 2010 the dollar and Treasury securities slid markedly (Bowley, 2010). Long-term American economic goals seem to be to transfer its financial problems onto its major foreign debt holder, Chinese government and financial firms, as the 1980s Plaza Accords did through devaluing the dollar and revaluating the Japanese yen. Behind this strategy of ‘global rebalancing’ is the idea that the Chinese save too much, while Americans spend too much, so the Chinese ought to consume more, invest less, revalue their currency, and invest domestically rather than exporting currency into American treasuries while importing foreign investment (Landler, 2008; Leonhardt, 2009). The Chinese government seemed to be taking this advice, however cautiously and at its own pace, with a $586 billion stimulus package of infrastructure and social spending that helped China rebound out of the recession faster than expected, pulling up other economies with it (Schwartz, 2009). Yet the motivating factor for this decisive spending plan was as much due to fear of escalating struggles from workers and farmers as Mr. Bernanke’s arguments. The slowdown in American and worldwide consumption led to falling export orders and layoffs and plant closures in China’s coastal cities (Bradsher, 2008a), stopping on a dime the labor shortage and wage push offensives of 2005-08 but threatening to open a new, wider front of contestation. Twenty million or so migrants went home for the 2009 Lunar New Year and didn’t return (LaFreniere, 2009), prompting fears of a greatly aggravated social situation in the countryside. Of the fourteen million migrants still at home in February, only two million had found work, while eleven million unemployed migrant workers stayed in the cities (China Labour Bulletin, 2009b). So the Chinese countryside could not absorb those thrown into rural cold storage, plus a near majority would not accept being ‘sent down to the countryside.’ This new migrant composition is breaking down the urban/rural split by circulating higher wage expectations in the countryside and becoming less willing to flee the cities when jobs decline. Their struggles are circulated through their actual movements from place to place. Their physical circulation from country to city and back again, between myriad worksites and between people from all across China, is not a project of organization or building consciousness but one of people coming into contact with each other and cross-pollinating struggles. In 2009, while struggles across China were numerous, there was also a loss of bargaining power as unemployment hit millions. Wages fell, and the worst fears of the Chinese state over mass incidents did not transpire (Batson, 2009). Most of the people fired in late 2008 returned to the cities and went back to work (Xinhua, 2009a). Yet in August the moderation in mass incidents escalated again (Johnson, 2009). The level of violence in labor disputes also seemed to increase, but with varying consequences. The riots in Xinjiang in China’s northwest in summer 2009 Autonomist Marxist Theory and Practice in the Current Crisis 482 showed that some Chinese workers were turning on each other along ethnic/racial/sectional lines as industrialists brought in fresh labor power from the country’s most distant reserves to the export factories. The impetus for the Xinjiang unrest was a riot at a Guangzhou toy factory in the southeast that recently imported 800 Uighur migrants from Xinjiang. Ethnic Han laborers got into a brawl with the new arrivals which led to two killings that in turn provoked the Xinjiang rioting (Wong, 2009; Jacobs, 2009). In July 2009 workers at the state-owned Tonghua Steel plant, informed it would be sold off and most workers fired, occupied the mill, confronted the new general manager, and beat him to death. Days later, the government announced the sale was cancelled (Bradsher, 2009). China is rebounding from the crisis on the merits of huge counter-cyclical infrastructure investments, a ballooning real estate bubble and resurgent export orders. In 2010, urban residents face rising rents and a surge in land seizures and demolitions, eroding real wages in the context of rebounding inflation and violent resistance to land grabs (Wines and Ansfield, 2010). Housing struggles and a wildcat strike that crippled Honda’s supply chain (Bradsher and Barboza, 2010) show the continued bubbling up of autonomous actions and state attempts to contain those explosions through new regulations, a mix of concessions and repression, and nationalist appeals. The larger lesson of China’s transforming class composition is that historical trends shape current realities. The recomposition of the 2000s characterized by the new urban migrant worker circulating struggles heretofore socially and geographically compartmentalized within the Chinese economy, was a source of strength in the fight against the onset of crisis of 2008, shaped a relatively pro- worker state response in 2009, and is continuing to demonstrate vitality and effectiveness in incidents like the Honda strike wave and housing struggles of 2010. Recomposition and the circulation of struggles have led to this outcome in China, whereas class decomposition and limitations on the circulation of struggles in the U.S. are associated with a relatively weaker working class response to the current crisis there. American class (de)composition in the clash of ‘Si se puede’ and ‘Don’t tread on me’ The level of decomposition of the American working class can be seen in the lack of effective response to plummeting real wealth as millions of homes are repossessed and already stagnant wages fall further, the gutting of the public sector and social benefits, further rounds of deindustrialization and disinvestment, all while the government has acted aggressively to secure the investments of the major banks and financial institutions. Despite this, it is false to say that there are no struggles going on in the U.S. in 2010. The two biggest contemporary movements are the immigrant solidarity movement and the Tea Party. The immigrant rights movement has been reanimated as a campaign against anti-immigrant legislation emanating from Arizona, where ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 2012, 11(3), 467-491 483 fiscal insolvency is being blamed on illegal immigrants. The movement comes out of the most precarious sectors of American class composition, those who built the houses in the former boom, bought many of the sub-prime loans, and are taking the hardest hit from state government budget cuts. Their program is essentially to refuse their forcible exclusion, physically and socially, from accessing the resources and spaces they need to reproduce themselves and resist their being warehoused as a reserve army of labor living in penury, shorn of rights. This refusal of displacement and dispossession, be it deportation, home foreclosure, or cutting (tenuous) claims to economic benefits, is captured in the slogan “Aquí estamos y no nos vamos!” Arizona is also inspirational for the Tea Party movement, which draws primarily on the older, whiter, and somewhat wealthier fractions of the American working class, the children of the old blue-collar industrial workers who moved to the Sun Belt to become housing contractors, realtors, small business owners and retirees. Apart from mobilizing to support laws like Arizona’s SB 1070, the Tea Partiers express the era’s chief slogan of resistance to corporate bailouts and public austerity: ‘we won’t pay for your crisis.’ Tea Partiers, despite their racial and nativist overtones, overwhelmingly place public spending and sovereign debt at the top of their concerns (New York Times and CBS News, 2010). Yet their primary target has not been the huge subsidies the national government has given to finance capital, nor the monetary, infrastructural and trade policies driving U.S. deindustrialization and trade deficits, but who they conceive of as the ‘irresponsible,’ ‘unworthy’ sectors of the American working class who took on mortgage and credit card debt during the boom and are now ‘underwater.’ The Tea Party is harnessing the nervousness and looming devaluation of the more secure sections of the class composition, turning it against the more precarious. It may well be necessary to fight these people and prevent them, or the politicians they support, from shoving many of us into an even more precarious existence, but it is also necessary to understand them and try to halt this decompositional trend. Autonomist Marxism does not provide a blueprint for how to achieve a revolution, but it does offer some practical advice as to how to participate and intervene in ongoing struggles. Principally, this involves conducting workers’ inquiries (Marx, 1880; Panzieri, 1965/2006), the production and circulation of knowledge about daily life, work, and how people resist and (re)produce themselves and social movements. In so doing, we should keep in mind several autonomist principles: Struggles are going on all around us, all the time; people can and do act with, without, or against leaders and organizations; our struggles include the conditions in which we live and reproduce ourselves as much as the waged work we do; and however ubiquitous, struggles yield gains for the working class only insofar as they circulate and recompose the class. So while this article is intended to describe the intellectual current of autonomism, enacting these ideas requires us to participate in, and not just write about, the struggles around us.

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Rising With the Robots: Towards a Human-Machine Autonomy for Digital Socialism

Christopher M. Cox

The University of Akron, Akron, OH, USA, [email protected]

Abstract: This essay is concerned with conceptualising digital socialism in two ways. First, this essay typifies digital socialism as a real utopian project bringing together the utopian po- tential of “full automation” as tied to socio-economic imperatives indicative of socialist aims. Second, in recognition of a critical gap between full automation and an emerging technological autonomy, this essay argues for a human-machine autonomy that situates autonomy as a shared condition among humans and machines. By conceiving of humans and automated technologies as autonomous subject aligned against capital, pursuing the aims of digital so- cialism can anticipate and avoid capitalist ideologies that hinders possibilities for autonomous pursuit of digital socialism.

Keywords: digital socialism, robots, robotics, fully-automated communism, full automation, human-machine autonomy, Autonomist Marxism, Autonomism

1. Introduction This essay attempts to answer the question “how do recent debates about ‘full auto- mation’ and postcapitalist socioeconomics establish a foundation for conceptualizing digital socialism?” Since 2015, debates about socialism have exhibited a resurgence among public consciousness and electoral politics in the western world. From the election of “Marx- admiring socialist” (Danner 2015) Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the UK Labour Party to successive Bernie Sanders U.S. presidential campaigns foregrounding “democratic socialism” as a series of comprehensive socio-economic reforms aimed at creating an economy that “works for all, not just the very wealthy” (Frizell 2015) to the surge of 13,000 new members and 100 new chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) (Schwartz 2017), “socialism” is increasingly mobilized by political actors. Concurrently, the emergence of Jacobin as the “leading intellectual voice of the American left” (Matthews 2016) and the publication of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality by Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara (2019) – and its coverage in mainstream news outlets from Wall Street Jour- nal (Swaim 2019) to Slate (Weissman 2019) – have contributed to “more interest in – and support for – socialist ideas than at any time in recent American history” (Nichols 2015, xxv). Alongside increasing socialist consciousness and mobilisation, the latter part of the 2010s gave rise to the era of “automated connectivity” (Van Dijck 2013, 23), as auto- mated processes built into digital platforms and techniques became significant forces in the production, governance, and maintenance of social life (Gillespie 2014; Bucher 2018). Since 2015, in tandem with the increasing interest in socialism, “full automation” has become increasingly central to imagining life beyond capitalism and thinking through the material means of reconstituting the production and provisioning of labour, goods, and services.

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To better understand the relationship between contemporary automation and social- ism, this essay teases out critical strands among recent scholarship to, first, define the imperatives of “digital socialism” and, second, interject concerns for technological au- tonomy otherwise neglected among full automation debates. In doing so, the essay argues for digital socialism to be understood as a “real utopian” (Wright 2010) project, outlines the imperatives of digital socialism, and stresses the opportunity to conceive of autonomy as a shared condition among humans and machines to better solidify and anticipate class solidarity amidst the struggle to achieve socialist ends. The essay pro- ceeds as follows:

 Digital Socialism: Full Automation as Real Utopia (section 2)  Socialist Imperative 1: Shifting Values and Ethics Associated with Labour (section 3)  Socialist Imperative 2: Centralised Planning (section 4)  Socialist Imperative 3: Basic Services (section 5)  Digital Socialism: Strategic Imperatives and Critical Opportunities (section 6)  Dualities of Autonomy: Oppositions Between Human and Technological Autonomy (section 7)  Becoming AutonomoUS: Human-Machine Autonomy (section 8)  Human-Machine Autonomy and Solidarity Against Capital (section 9)

2. Digital Socialism: Full Automation as Real Utopia Socialism is a socio-economic system predicated on maximising cooperation, demo- cratic participation, and egalitarian outcomes in all spheres of life. Communism is a successive stage of the socialist project that enables all property and means of pro- duction to be held in commons (i.e. communally-owned), basic necessities to be ap- portioned based on a person’s needs, and a centralized source (often conceived as the government) to maintain the mechanisms for communal ownership and equitable distribution. In and outside the United States, the terms “socialism and “communism” tend to be equated with Maoism, Stalinism, and other national communisms that in- stalled totalitarian ideologues who amassed and wielded power through a form of “state capitalism” (Sperber 2019) ill-suited to ennobling the proletariat and resolving class struggle through democratic participation. On this front, the contemporary prom- ulgation of “socialism” is at least somewhat attributable to the fact that it is no longer subject to “the burden of being associated in the propaganda systems of East and West with Soviet tyranny” (Chomsky 2016), a circumstance that enabled the East to maintain power through the aura of socialist aims and the West to demonize socialism and communism outright. Socialism has led been associated with utopian thought, leading Engels to distin- guish between utopian socialism (prominent in the 19th century) and the historical ma- terialism of Marx’s “scientific socialism” (Engels 1880). Utopia is a broad term that en- compasses a range of ideas about idealised conditions for society. In most cases, uto- pia is a place, one that is less a physical destination and more of a hypothetical realm where a harmonious society can be realised. Utopianism, in this sense, is a mode of thinking that attempts to imagine the conditions enabling social harmony, particularly in the context of governmental and economic relations. Utopian socialists in the 1880s attempted to foster social harmony by “devising plans to make society more coopera- tive, production more efficient, and distribution more fair” (Paden 2002, 68). These plans did not account for class politics and struggle and thus, for Marx and Engels,

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failed to represent the interests of any class, much less the proletariat forced into inev- itable contact with capitalist ownership (Paden 2002, 68). For Engels (1880), then, “scientific socialism” entails similar ideas about cooperation and equity rooted in “the materialistic conception of history and the revelation of the secret of capitalistic pro- duction through surplus-value” (305) such that socialism is primarily concerned with “the necessary outcome of the struggle between two historically developed classes – the proletariat and the bourgeoisie” (304). Others attempt to mitigate the ethereal qualities of utopianism with a more prag- matic perspective on concrete political relations. Notably, Ernst Bloch focused on the spiritual aspect of utopia and the ability for political change to alleviate material burdens that undermine spiritual fulfilment in lived experience. For Bloch, utopia entails “the world of the soul, the external, cosmic function of utopia, maintained against misery, death, the husk-realm of mere physical nature” (Bloch 1918/2000, 3) [emphasis in orig- inal]. Bloch’s utopianism is not an exotic hideaway or a proverbial Shangri-La but an inward journey of reflection and recognition of the universal conditions underlying the disillusion and disaffection experienced by many in modern capitalism. By reflecting on this spiritual condition of modern life, the journey inward illuminates the potential for a “utopian reality” (Bloch 1918/2000, 179) envisioned as the ability to strive for a realm of fulfilment capable of being actualized in the material world. The recent emergence of a “real utopia” works from a similar register. As devised by Erik Olin Wright, a “real utopian” project seeks practical opportunities to restructure social institutions to instantiate alternatives to capitalism and materialise “radical democratic egalitarianism” (2010, 22). By anchoring the large-scale optimistic imaginings of utopian thinking with “specific proposals for the fundamental redesign of different arenas of social instructions” and “immediately attainable reforms of existing practices” (Wright 2010, ii), real utopianism pursues new models for egalitarian prac- tice predicated on their viability and achievability. While Marx and Engels criticise uto- pian socialists for a reactionary tendency to appeal to working masses with a religious zeal that harkens towards “castles in the air” rather than grounded political struggle (1848, 516-517), the real utopian project squares the circle by situating utopian visions as an outward projection from the fruits of viable material intervention. In doing so, discourses around full automation conceive of automated technologies as “vectors for new utopias” (Hester 2018, 8) and oppose the seeming unfeasibility and immobility of revolutionary traction, calling for “the futural orientation of utopias” combined with “real tendencies of the world today” to devise a feasible starting point for life beyond capi- talism oriented towards continued progress and development (Srnicek and Williams 2015, 108). In this way, contemporary ideas about full automation epitomise the spirit of real utopianism by, first, specifying contemporary conditions that make economic and social reconfigurations strategically viable and, second, leverage “full automation” as frame for utopian imaginings. As a real utopian project, the emerging digital socialism seeks to avoid the techno- logical determinisms often associated with the “California ideology”) (Barbrook and Cameron 1996; Turner 2010) and other similar utopian ideas that stress free enterprise and marketplace expansion as the primary means of creating innovative technologies poised to change society for the better. Instead, real utopianism prioritises structural changes to policies and ideologies about the interrelationships of work, ownership, re- source planning and allocation. By typifying the specifics of digital socialism as it emerges from debates about full automation from 2015-2019, the goal here is to clarify the lay of the land as it is, rather than argue for what it should be. Key works emerging during this timeframe include Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without

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Work (Srnicek and Williams 2015), Four Futures: Life After Capitalism (Frase 2016), The Automatic Society: The Future of Work (Stiegler 2018), Xenofeminism (Hester 2018), Fully-Automated Luxury Communism (Bastani 2019), and Inhuman Power: Ar- tificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism (Dyer-Witheford, Kjøsen and Steinhoff 2019). All of these monographs in their own ways and to varying degrees – engage with full automation in conjunction with describing socio-economic conditions neces- sary to imagine a postcapitalist world reflective of socialist aims (whether or not the term “socialism” is explicitly used). While I ultimately take up the task of more forcefully arguing for a solidified conception of human and technological autonomy, the first step is to collate and clarify the specifics of digital socialism as it currently stands. In doing so, I identity and specify three socialist imperatives significant to current ideas around full automation:  Generating New Ethics, Values, and Arrangements for Labour  Centralising Economic Planning  Implementing Basic Services

3. Socialist Imperative 1: Shifting Values and Ethics Associated With Labour In the case of the first socialist imperative, Srnicek and Williams (2015, 125) decry the capitalist work ethic’s insistence that “renumeration be tied to suffering” and suffering the indignities and inequities of capitalist exploitation is “the only means for true self- fulfillment”. To their minds, the ability to implement full automation must account for the long-standing desire to attain status through work, even if said work is seen as unde- sirable. Significant cultural shifts around the work ethic can not only help underscore the possibilities for personal and collective fulfillment beyond market demands but also mitigate the precarity and turbulence of labour markets increasingly apt to diminish the abundance, variability, and remunerative sufficiency of work prospects. As a viable starting point, shortening the hours of the formal work week could reduce the amount of hours in the five-day week or institute a permanent three-day weekend (Srnicek and Williams 2015, 116). In a similar vein, xenofeminism situates automation and other technologies as the means to reconfigure cultural notions of work. Xenofeminism is a recent strand of tech- nofeminism that seeks to abolish the imposition of gender binaries and overturn es- sentialist gender ideologies associated with biological and social reproduction (Hester 2018). Xenofeminism’s pursuit of gender abolition and anti-naturalism stresses “post- industrial automation” (Hester 2018, 8) and related techno-materialisms as a means of changing concrete relations among gender, work, and social institutions (such as the family). Understood as a “multiply gendered world” (Hester 2018, 30), xenofeminsm’s gender abolition seeks to enlarge the range of gendered expression and concomitantly undo expectations of domestic labour as tied to gender. Shifting cultural ideas about the constructed and contested nature of gender is part and parcel of undoing “culturally weaponised markers of identity that harbor injustices” (Hester 2018, 30), including the necessity of child labour as a potentially dangerous bodily labour undertaken by women and ensuing expectations around childrearing and domestic caretaking. Be- yond undoing gender naturalism and expectations around domestic and biological la- bour, Hester offers Donna Haraway’s (2016) notion of “kin” as a “means of prioritizing the generation of new kinds of support networks” (Hester 2018, 63) to realise new forms of collaborative work and care, a “counter-social reproduction” envisioned as “social reproduction against the reproduction of the social as it stands” (Hester 2018, 64) [emphasis in original].

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Offering full automation as an orienting force for collectivist formation and harmony, Bernard Stiegler (2018) situates capitalist automation as an entropic force that gener- ates ever-increasing uncertainty, disorder, and instability in capitalist markets and so- ciety at large. These sentiments are internalised by everyday people who come to en- vision the future as inhospitable and devoid of the potential for widespread prosperity. For Stiegler (2018, 7), full automation is an opportunity for “dis-automatization”, the harnessing of energies previously-dedicated to formal wage labour and recalibrated towards “collective investment of the productivity gains derived from automatization” (Stiegler 2018, 15) [emphasis in original], a collectivism predicated on a negentropic perspective that offsets the disarray of capitalism’s automated entropy and engenders possibilities for egalitarian order and harmony. “Collective investment” also speaks to the need for economic and personal investment in work arrangements to be under- stood in terms of cooperation and plurality, eschewing the individualistic drives of cap- italism to amass capital in defiance of the common good. In their critique of full automation that foregrounds the role of artificial intelligence (AI), Dyer-Witheford, Kjøsen and Steinhoff’s (2019, 153-156) “communist orientation to AI” attempts to reconfigure the relationship between postcapitalist futures and auto- mated technologies. Rather than positing full automation as an opportunistic moment or tool to be seized and applied towards the break from capitalism, a communist ori- entation to AI prioritises “liquidating the structural dynamics of capital” (153) undergird- ing the development of automated technologies and the ethos built into these technol- ogies by companies driven to patternise forms of social interactivity antithetical to so- cialist solidarity. To these authors’ minds, the goal should be to expropriate capital from AI, collectivise ownership of AI, and retrain AI to function in accordance with collecti- vised values and structure to enact a “true democratization of AI” (Dyer-Witheford, Kjøsen and Steinhoff 2019, 154). Among such collectivised values, collectivised own- ership is a central facet of the second strategic imperative of digital socialism.

4. Socialist Imperative 2: Centralised Planning Similar to the way “full automation” is situated as a touchstone for charting a course beyond the confines of capitalism, “post-scarcity” is a similar touchstone among advo- cates of centralised planning (Frase 2016; Bastani 2019; Phillips and Rozworski 2019) who attempt to reconcile the technological ability to produce an uncapped abundance of goods and services with the artificial limits placed on production and dissemination by private ownership. Central planning entails a production of goods and services as directed by a governmental source to equitably allocate these goods and services. Even as some aspects of centralised planning receive more analysis than others, one of the recurrent themes among central planners is the ability to generate an abundance of goods and services equitability doled out through such planning, thereby transcend- ing scarcity as a circumstance of private accumulation. One of the common threads about central planning advocacy is that forms of privatised central planning already in place are useful structures capable of being refashioned to equitably allocate re- sources. One of the central tenets of Aaron Bastani’s (2019) advocation for a fully-automated luxury communism is the necessity of demanding “the intentional, conscious planning at the heart of modern capitalism be repurposed to socially useful ends rather than socially destructive ones” (227). Bastani shows a particular concern for finance, fore- grounding centralised banking and “municipal protectionism” (207) as two interrelated facets of central planning. Whereas central and private banks currently prioritise the administration of loans and other fiduciary mechanisms based on the assets held by a

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borrower and the likelihood of lending as a profitable venture, nationalised central banking shows the potential to guard against the inequities of capitalist finance by overseeing an informal network of locally-owned businesses and banks. In this context, “municipal protectionism” refers to the pursuit of localised businesses owned by work- ers that can better mitigate inequality through a wider range of ownership models (210). Tied to finance emanating from local banks and credit unions and mitigated by a cen- tralised national bank tasked with ensuring equitable allocation, these types of busi- nesses can protect against micro forms of capitalist domination within the workplace and macro forms of capitalist domination in society at large (211). In Leigh Phillips and Michael Rozworski’s (2019) monograph-length case study of Wal-Mart’s internal central planning, they stress “openness and cooperation along the supply chain” as fundamental to planning and the ability to continuously replenish re- sources (2019, 38). By arguing for Wal-Mart’s internal supply chain structure as a cen- tralised mode of production and distribution predicated on collaboration and coopera- tion among participants, Phillips and Rozworski highlight institutional and political prac- tices already at play that offer a viable means of recalibrating towards socialist ends. In their conception, central planning is not the purview of a small group of planners, programmers, or algorithmic calculations but, instead, relies on democratic participa- tion at all points of production and consumption, if “computer-assisted, decentralized, democratic economic decision making” is to be realised (Phillips and Rozworski 2019, 213). By treating the possibility of full automation and (post)scarcity as a given, Peter Frase (2016) outlines four possible future scenarios based on recomposed dualities of dualities of hierarchy/egalitarianism and scarcity/abundance: communism (egalitarian- ism and abundance), rentism (hierarchy and abundance), socialism (egalitarianism and scarcity), and exterminism (hierarchy and scarcity). Planning is but one of many facets impinging upon the extent to which resources are centralised for equitable allo- cation or concentrated for hierarchical control and, concomitantly, the extent to which resources are produced and replenished. Central planning and allocation also underlie efforts to instantiate and provide basic services.

5. Socialist Imperative 3: Basic Services One of the most widely and frequently discussed ideas related to full automation is the possibility of a basic income (BI), often conceived as a universal or unconditional basic income (UBI). A basic income is the allocation of a nominal sum of money on a recur- ring basic to individuals who are not required to provide labour in exchange for this income. Much like the recent resurgence of socialist thought in mainstream political discourse, basic income is an old idea that has received considerable recent attention in correlation with full automation. Since 2015, a veritable cottage industry of popular press and trade books have outlined the case for basic income (Stern 2016; Van Parijs and Vanderborght 2017; Bregman 2017; Lowery 2018), with UBI serving as a corner- stone of Andrew Yang’s 2020 presidential campaign (Yang 2019). Advocacy for (U)BI tends to stress the increased power workers can enjoy when economic livelihood is not solely tied to wage labour, often stipulated as a necessary condition to address the diminishing need for human labour amidst the rise of full au- tomation. With a UBI in place, workers could potentially choose not to work for certain periods of time, thereby increasing their individual negotiating power and the holistic power of labour (Srnicek and Williams 2015, 120). So long as it is sufficient to provide basic sustenance, allocated unconditionally, and a supplement to welfare programs

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(rather than a replacement), the working class can experience greater “voluntary flex- ibility” as opposed to precarity, instability, and insecurity (Srnicek and Williams 2015, 119; 212). At the individual level, UBI could function as a mechanism for providing universal access to resources while guarding against overuse (Frase 2016). Criticisms of UBI stress the possibility of UBI as a salve to libertarian and neoliberal ideologies intent on replacing welfare programs with a lump monetary sum, a “full mar- ketization of the welfare state” (Bastani 2019, 225). The concern is that pairing UBI with full automation does not alter the relationship between ownership and labour and, rather than augmenting the power of labour against ownership, risks a “miserable pen- ury” for people whose labour potential is seen as useless and cordoned off from further economic and social mobility (Dyer-Witheford, Kjøsen and Steinhoff 2019, 150-151). In addition to Srnicek and Williams insisting on UBI as a supplement to welfare programmes, Bastani (2019, 215, 217) accounts for UBI as a compliment to five es- sential basic services provided on an unconditional basis: housing, transport, educa- tion, healthcare and information, wherein “information” is understood as “media pro- duction and connectivity”. Under Bastani’s model, the state plays an indispensable role in “procurement with local worker cooperatives building homes, hospitals and schools as well as performing catering, maintenance, cleaning, and support services,” indicat- ing a continued role for private ownership with the caveat “the leverage of anchor in- stitutions will only expand”, given the role of worker-owned businesses more suited to address the common good (217).

6. Digital Socialism: Strategic Imperatives and Critical Opportunities At this point, we can now more specifically sketch “digital socialism” as a real utopian project advocating for full automation as a utopian beacon enjoined with the viable and practical pursuit of the following:

 Generating New Ethics, Values, and Arrangements for Labour o Undoing the capitalist work ethic and gendered associations with domestic la- bour o Shortening the formal working week o Pursuing collectivity as a means of instituting social harmony, reshaping institu- tional arrangements, and ensuring collectivist values can be built into auto- mated technologies

 Centralised Planning o Planned allocation predicated on democratic participation from contributors and recipients of goods and services o A network of localised worker-owned businesses, banks, and financial services operating under a “municipal protectionism” that guards against capital flight o Central federal banking that supports and protects localised businesses and fi- nance

 Basic Services o Universal access to publicly-developed education, transport, housing, healthcare, and media connectivity and production o A basic income apportioned unconditionally as a supplement to universally- available basic services

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From this foundational point, the foremost opportunity in pursuit of these goals is to ensure ideas about the relationship of full automation to socialist imperatives do not fall into traps laid by cultural ideas about the nature of autonomy and technological autonomy as an inevitable threat to workers.

7. Dualities of Autonomy: Oppositions Between Human and Technological Auton- omy “Autonomous technology” refers to both a long-standing cultural fear about the social implications of technological progress and the functional ability for technologies to op- erate free from direct human intervention. In terms of the latter, degrees of automated capacity are often described in terms of technological autonomy. A fruitful example is self-driving cars, often referred to as “autonomous” cars. Levels of automation desig- nated by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) range from “zero autonomy” to “full autonomy” along a successive scale of automated capability running from zero to five (with zero as “no automation” and five as “full automation”) (NHTSA 2019). Achiev- ing full automation means that, in the case of self-driving cars, the vehicle can perform driving tasks that do not require a human to operate or intervene (although the tech- nology may allow for human manual operation). As a cultural fear, autonomous tech- nology refers to a belief that technology has “gotten out of control and follows its own course, independent of human direction” (Winner 1977, 13). One of the primary con- cerns of functional technological autonomy is the realisation of such fears as reinforced by pop culture depictions (i.e. the Terminator and Westworld franchises), mainstream news headlines declaring “The Future Has Lots of Robots, Few Jobs for Humans” (McNeal 2015), and popular press books such as Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelli- gence and the End of the Human Era (2013). Even as recent scholarly discourse stresses the utopian potential of full automation, other pervasive cultural discourses about the dystopian “hegemonic” or “apocalyptic” implications of technological autonomy advance ideas about the possibilities for wide- spread social control or “agents of doom” posing an existential threat to human vitality (Nye 2004, 171). Where the cultural fear of autonomous technology is primarily “the question of human autonomy held up to a different light,” (Winner 1977, 43), one of the primary fears about self-driving cars and other present-day autonomous technologies is the direct threat to posed to the autonomy of human labourers. Books such as The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (2014) and Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (2015) stress the increasing capability of intelligent machines to per- form cognitive tasks once believed to be the unique purview of human intellect. Postu- lations about a forthcoming “automation wave” (Ford 2015) posit an impending tide of machines poised to “steal” the jobs of human labourers and threaten to deepen levels of socio-economic inequality as human workers are displaced – and replaced – in cor- ollary with the escalation of automation towards technological autonomy. The threat to the autonomy of human labour supposed by technological autonomy epitomises many of Marx’s concerns about strife and competition within the working class and the inten- sification of this circumstance when capitalist production pits machines against hu- mans. In Capital, Marx describes the labouring capacity of machines as pitted against hu- man workers and, because of this competition: “The self-valorization of capital by means of the machine is related directly to the number of workers whose conditions of exis- tence have been destroyed by it” (Marx 1867, 557). Just as, with respect to com- modities, “the devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing

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value of the world of things” (Marx 1844, 271) [emphasis in original], Marx posits a similar corollary relationship between humans and machines whereby the ability for human workers to seek and procure payment for their labour is invariably diminished the more ownership turns to machinic production. Ever the foresighted critic, Marx rec- ognised that “machinery necessarily throws men out of work in those industries into which it is introduced, it may, despite this, bring about an increase of employment in other industries” (Marx 1867, 570). While technological innovation has historically led to the emergence of new industrial paradigms that reconfigure the types – rather than the amount – of labour required (Bastani 2019), the contemporary narrative that “this time is different” indicates an unprecedented and inalterable risk of permanent dis- placement due to the humanlike intelligence of increasingly autonomous technology (Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014; Ford 2015). Thus, despite the worthiness of drawing out the utopian potential of full automation amidst recent debates, such debates neglect the tendency of full automation to con- note fearful notions of autonomous technology and what it portends for the potential of workers to direct their individual and collective capacities towards fruitful socio-eco- nomic gains. In this vein, foregrounding full automation risks reinforcing and uninten- tionally capitulating to Marx’s concerns about competition between humans and ma- chines and its potential to agitate intra-class strife among human workers. Applied to- wards socialist pursuits, the dichotomy between human and technological autonomy is a critical gap between the ability to imagine the utopian potential of full automation and pursue a democratic egalitarianism that can realise strategic imperatives that make full automation a viable venture. To mitigate this gap, I offer human-machine autonomy (Cox 2018) as a conceptual frame for recognising that autonomy is not couched in a singular entity, be it human or machine. Within this mindset, understanding human-machine autonomy as a shared condition among humans and highly-automated technologies resists misconceptions about autonomy as an innately dominating force and capitulation to capitalist ideolo- gies around labour and class composition. The next section unpacks aspects of auton- omy amenable to this line of thinking, before pulling from autonomist Marxism theory to stress autonomy as a shared condition between humans and technologies and hu- man-machine alignments against capital.

8. Becoming AutonomoUS: Human-Machine Autonomy Ideas about technological and human autonomy as separate and discreet forces ex- isting in negative correlation arise from illusory notions of autonomy as the sole prov- ince of an individualistic self. Autonomy is a “political or moral conception that brings together the ideas of freedom and control” often conceived as the ability to be “self- governing, independent, not ruled by an external law or force” (Winner 1977, 16). Scholars of technology and identity, however, reject the conception of an individual self as the source and purview of autonomous potential, particularly on the grounds that the autonomy of the self is a politics of domination. In her “Cyborg Manifesto”, Donna Haraway problematises autonomy as emerging from the relationship between the self and the other. For Haraway, the self is one who is not dominated, a non-domination understood only in relation to the dominance of the other. The supposed ontological nature of the self is “to be autonomous, to be powerful” (Haraway 1990, 219). The ability to experience freedom and control is therefore tied to the ability to impose one’s will onto others, a “tragedy of autonomy” that valorises the supremacy of the self through the domination of the other (Haraway 1990, 219). In their recent critique of technology as a “surrogate humanity”, Atanasoski and Kalindi (2019, 136) attempt to

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further liquidate notions of autonomy in relation to a dominating self, citing the “myth of the autonomous human” as the product of a “racial fetish of post-Enlightenment thinking” emanating from colonialist histories built on subjugation and servitude and attendant notions of autonomy as a possibility for those who possess mastery and control over the subjugated and servile. Such ideas about autonomy as a dominating self extends to technological auton- omy, as the cultural fear of autonomous technology expresses itself as not only the loss of control over machines but as “the style of absolute mastery, the despotic, one- way control of the master over the slave” (Winner 1977, 20). Viewed through this lens, the fear of autonomous technology can be understood as bound up in the perceived inability for humans to dominate a technological other and the ability for a technological other to exert the same type of domination humans pursue through autonomous will. In other words, for all that the illusory concept of autonomy as the purview of the self imparts about the politics of domination, one of the most critical points is that hu- mans and technology share the same root conception of autonomy. Human and tech- nological autonomy is not a matter of “here” and “there” but a shared condition inade- quate to delineation along lines of a human or machine and, instead, invokes the same questions around the pursuit and application of power, freedom, and control. As Hara- way notes, technology is not an object to be “animated, worshipped and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment” (Haraway 1990, 222). Where autonomy “cannot simply be understood as freedom from others” (Baker and Hesmondhalgh 2013, 40), these “others” include both human and machine counter- parts. Moreover, instead of conceiving of autonomy as self-set life against or apart from an “other,” recognizing that we are “socially constituted by others beyond them- selves” (Baker and Hesmondhalgh 2013, 40) imparts of a sense of how our autono- mous potential is truly a question of our autonomy. In other words, conceived in oppo- sition to dualistic conceptions, autonomy is always a shared condition among humans and between humans and machines, even though autonomy is not equitably afforded or experienced. This does not entail a deterministic relationship, however, as economic relations, culture, legal frameworks, and other vectors constitute the circuity that gives human-machine autonomy its variable charge. Notions of autonomy with respect to capitalist relations and technology underscore human-machine autonomy as a shared condition among humans and machines the way capitalism organises and patternises possibilities for autonomy among ownership, workers, and machines. Notably, Andrew Feenberg describes “operational autonomy” as a facet of capitalist ownership that incorporates autonomous potential into organisation, machinic, and workflow processes:

Operational autonomy is the power to make strategic choices among alternative rationalizations without regard for externalities, customary practice, workers' preferences, or the impact of decisions on their households. Whatever other goals the capitalist pursues, all viable strategies implemented from his peculiar position in the social system must reproduce his operational autonomy. The ‘metagoal’ of preserving and enlarging autonomy is gradually incorporated into the standard ways of doing things, biasing the solution to every practical prob- lem toward certain typical responses. In industrial societies, strategies of domi- nation consist primarily in embedding these constancies in technical proce- dures, standards, and artifacts in order to establish a framework in which day- to-day technical activity serves the interests of capital (Feenberg 2002,76).

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Understood in this light, capital implants self-serving notions of autonomy into pro- cesses that carry through to the fabric of material existence so that the autonomous potential of capital is reproduced and enhanced. To the extent that operational auton- omy is a hegemonic imposition of capital, workers possess a counterhegemonic po- tential, a “reactive autonomy” that Feenberg (2002, 84) otherwise refers to as a “margin of maneuver”. This reactive autonomy entails the ability of workers to leverage capital- ist technology for the purposes of “controlling work pace, protecting colleagues, unau- thorized productive improvisations, informal rationalizations and innovations” (Feen- berg 2002, 84), and otherwise countervailing the operational autonomy of ownership. Reactive autonomy is a margin of manoeuvre because the degree to which workers exercise autonomy can expand or contract, as can the operational autonomy of capital. Much like autonomy among humans and technology, operational, and reactive auton- omy are not bracketed off from one another and instead exist as co-constituted forms of autonomy inflecting upon on one another even though it is not supposed that reac- tive autonomy ever exceeds operational autonomy or reactive autonomy is the exem- plar way for workers to attain and experience autonomy. Automation plays a variable role in this dynamic, as it

increases management's autonomy only at the expense of creating new prob- lems that justify workers' demands for an enlarged margin of maneuver. That margin may be opened to improve the quality of self-directed activity or it may remain closed to optimize control (Feenberg 2002, 96).

To the mind of the capitalist, regardless of the degree of freedom or control afforded to labour, capitalist exchange “maximizes autonomy in general, promising liberation of the human essence from fixed definitions” (Feenberg 2002, 162), since ongoing acqui- sition and accumulation are infinite and therefore entail a range of shifting arrange- ments that increase both operational and reactive autonomy in the aggregate. Of course, this does not hold up to baseline Marxian scrutiny, as reactive autonomy is an autonomy conceived and experienced only within the auspices of capitalist ex- ploitation, alienation, and expropriation of surplus-value, as if operational autonomy was a natural phenomenon ensconced in some ineffable firmament and not the result of historical processes predicated on vouchsafing power and control in the hands of a dominant few. Nonetheless, reactive autonomy reinforces the central idea of human- machine autonomy: autonomy is a shared condition experienced with varying intensi- ties relative to critical socio-economic inputs shaping how autonomy is conceived, pur- sued, attained, and experienced. Furthermore, reactive autonomy shines a light on the autonomy of labour, understood by Autonomist Marxism as not only the autonomous potential of labour within capital, but the recognition that labour already possesses the ability to be autonomous from capital. While the preceding stresses the autonomy of human-machine autonomy as one resistant to traditional notions of autonomy as the purview of the dominating self and, instead, a shared condition among humans and technology shaped by relations to pro- duction and other critical vectors, the final section draws from Autonomist Marxism to recalibrate a particular strand of Autonomist thought that considers technology as the means for capitalist domination and the autonomy of workers as the potential to over- come such technology through class conflict. Rather than positing capitalist technology as the dominating force, or the force that must be dominated, the goal in this final section is to reframe this argument in terms that seek to illuminate how dichotomies of human/technology and domination/control are apt to reinforce the individualistic drives

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of capitalist competition that pit workers against one another and fracture opportunities for solidified class struggle. Conceiving of autonomy as a shared condition among hu- mans and machines emphasises the commonality already at hand among labour and the ability to draw from the shared potential for autonomy to maximise its potential in work arrangements and the overarching struggle against capital. By doing so, the ability to align full automation with strategic imperatives for socialism can evade tech- nological dystopia, maximise utopian potential, and otherwise resist capitulation to strife among labour entities (human and machine).

9. Human-Machine Autonomy and Solidarity Against Capital Autonomist Marxism is a branch of Marxian inquiry that affirms the potential of labour distinct from capitalist arrangements (Negri 2005; Berardi 2009; Tronti 1966/2000), foregrounding labour’s “creative human energy” and the labourer as the “active subject of production, the wellspring of the skills, innovation and cooperation on which capital depends” (Dyer-Witheford 1999, 65). Autonomy, in this context, also refers to “labor’s fundamental otherness from capital and also the recognition of variety within labor” (Dyer-Witheford 1999, 68). The variety within labour speaks to the recognition that capitalist labour is not a uniform series of functions and workers can strive for circum- stances best suited to differentiated skills, innovation, and cooperation, even as wage labour imposes itself as in restrictive force for worker autonomy. Labour’s “otherness” from capital, on the other hand, recognises the ability of the working class to exist apart from capitalism, while capitalism cannot exist without the working class. Since capital- ism can only instantiate and maintain power through the institutionalisation of its aims, the autonomous potential of labour lies in a “non-institutionalized political power” unique to the working class (Tronti 1966/2000, 247), whose position as the subject of production entails an innate power unbeholden to institutional forms or the auspices of capitalist accumulation. The Autonomist position on technology tends to correspond to the notion of auton- omy as the grounds for domination. On one hand, technology is the means for capital to control and dominate workers while, on the other hand, capitalist technology is the thing that should be dominated, as through class conflict workers can upend capitalist technology and subsequently remake it in the image of socialist ends, leveraging the ability for workers’ autonomous potential to break from capital and harness their “in- vention power” (Dyer-Witheford 1999, 69-71). From this perspective, Autonomist views of digital technologies reinforce the way emerging technologies are developed and de- ployed to be amenable to capitalist relations. In his description of the emerging “cog- nitariat”, Berardi (2009, 35) cites digital technologies and network connectivity as giving rise to the ubiquity of cognitive labour performed without deference to formal work ar- rangements or social existence, a “creation of technical and linguistic interfaces ensur- ing the fluidity both of the productive process and of social communication”. Matteo Pasquinelli’s read on information technology entails a similar transformative process, with regard to Marx’s organic composition of capital: “living information is understood as continuously produced by workers to be turned into dead information crystallized into machinery and the whole bureaucratic apparatus of the factory” (Pasquinelli 2015, 55). In both cases, digital technology is conceived as a tool to exacerbate capitalist domination. Therefore, it should be surmounted by working class revolution. I do not necessarily quibble or find fault with these assessments but, rather, point out the op- portunity for the Autonomist perspective to apply its foundational spirit to digital tech-

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nologies and recognise human-machine autonomy as an opportunity to consider polit- ical revolution as a coalition of human and technological workers based on their com- mon subjectivity as labouring entities and the recognition for the mutual endeavours of humans and automated technologies to help realise the aims of digital socialism. If the original aim of Autonomist thought was to foreground the autonomy of workers as an inherent feature of class struggle, extending Autonomist thought outwards towards po- tential socialist futures demands consideration of another possibility: full automation need not be a choice between a tool to shed capitalist dominion or an inert infrastruc- ture awaiting a political revolution to rewire its programming. Instead, a third option emerges: automated technologies as co-constituted with human workers and the work- ing class. By understanding autonomy and autonomous production as a shared con- dition, human-machine autonomy can frame the struggle against capital as a form of solidarity among autonomous production undertaken across lines of human and tech- nological performance based on their shared position against capital. This position is best illuminated through Mario Tronti’s problematisation of a working-class ideology and the “strategy of refusal.” Tronti describes the unnecessity of developing an ideology unique to the working class, since the working class is a “a reality antagonistic to the entire system of capi- talism”, an ontological position that means workers exist irrespective to capitalism and are not inevitably bound to circumstances enabling the development and persistence of capitalist exchange (Tronti 1966/2000, 6). The working class possesses the potential to exist beyond capitalism, whereas capitalism cannot exist without the exploitation of the worker. Should the working class accept the necessity of ideology, their struggle would become a “passive articulation of capitalist development” (7) [emphasis in orig- inal]. If the working class needs no ideology, and the pure fact of their autonomous production is sufficient, they are allied with machines as non-ideological and autono- mous workers freighted with ideological dimensions by capital. Rather than conceive of technologies as allied with capital by virtue of their operational deployment against workers, we should recognise that ideology is neither a necessity for workers nor ma- chines and both are subject to the imposition of capitalist ideologies with respect to the ways work is arranged and carried out. Humans and automated technologies are both programmed to perform computa- tional tasks carried out in accordance with the imperatives encoded into such program- ming (Bucher 2018). Computers are programmed via the input of computer code that dictates how to operate, just as human behaviour is directed by technological and so- cial codes that impart ideas about how humans should operate. In the context of work, any worker striving to build the latest iteration of AI or leverage AI in formal work ar- rangements occupies an allied subjectivity with technology insofar as both are inflected with ideologies about capitalist work in spite of the shared unnecessity for ideology or work to be undertaken in accordance with capitalist principles. To attempt to break from capitalist technologies is to break from entities allied with workers, as this break is to affirm ideologies about the ontological existence of technologies and their “pas- sive” position within capitalist orders. Further, to break from technology is to revert back towards the ideology of autonomy that insists upon domination as the means for polit- ical freedom. Extending Tronti’s “strategy of refusal” offers a means to refuse ideolog- ical assumptions about autonomy and the split between the autonomous productivity of humans and machines. The strategy of refusal acknowledges the ability for the working class to halt capi- talist production by refusing to carry out capitalist demands or undertakings. Under- stood as both “the refusal to collaborate actively in capitalist development, [and] the

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refusal to put forward a positive programme of demands” (Tronti 1966/2000, 255), this strategy spotlights the autonomy of the working class to exist apart from capitalism and therefore use collective labour power as a means to advance the power of labour. Power, in this context, is the political power to recognise the autonomous potential to refuse capital and the power to cease productive activities that accord economic and social power to capital (Tronti 1966/2000, 256). By expanding the political valence of this refusal to consciously incorporate technological counterparts, the working class aligns all possible autonomous production as part of its refusal strategy and thwarts ideological ideas about autonomy as a source for domination and control. Solidarity with automated technologies, then, is not only possible; it is critical as a means of evading dystopian conceptions of technological autonomy, resisting ideological as- sumptions about autonomy, and undertaking political praxis geared towards maximis- ing worker autonomy within capitalist as a means to move beyond its horizons.

10. Conclusion While the preceding offers a foundation for typifying digital socialism and incorporating a human-machine autonomy that stresses the shared conditions humans and ma- chines occupy with respect to capital, opportunities abound from this foundation. Scholars should consider relationships between eco-socialism (Pepper 2002; Huan 2014) and full automation, especially potential oppositions between raw resources nec- essary to develop such technologies and the environmental consequences of contin- ued technological development. Additionally, while the politics of full automation largely corresponds to postcapitalist perspectives, Blockchain advocates imagine Blockchain automation as a source for Libertarian autonomy conceived as liberation from central banking and the state (Greenfield 2017; Swartz 2017), indicating a critical need to con- sider the Blockchain’s decentralised structure and politics with an eye towards socialist imperatives. To stress the utopian and joyous potential of digital socialism, human-machine au- tonomy should also be used to expand ideas around “acid communism” (Gilbert 2017; Fisher 2018). Acid communism is a “provocation and a promise” (Fisher 2018, 757) oriented towards recapturing the joyous spirit and harmonious possibilities of counter- cultural politics and lifestyle. Where neoliberalism established itself as a sensible form of individualism defined in contrast to ideas of collectivity and communal living emerg- ing out of the 1960s counterculture, acid communism urges re-establishing counter- cultural pursuits for “the convergence of class consciousness, socialist-feminist con- sciousness raising and psychedelic consciousness, the fusion of new social move- ments with a communist project, an unprecedented aestheticisation of everyday life” (Fisher 2018, 758). It is, in other words, a recuperation and continuation of a cultural project otherwise stripped of its revolutionary potential and grouped into a libertarian ethos underpinning the emergence and global expanse of Silicon Valley (Turner 2010). Human-machine autonomy, then, can stress the collective reservoirs of autonomy al- ready at hand for a collective consciousness that simultaneously seeks to stand down capitalist power imposition and uplift the ability to live a joyful life of meaningful pursuit indicative of Marxian aims for a worker’s paradise.

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About the Author Christopher M. Cox Christopher M. Cox, PhD is Assistant Professor of Communication and Converged Media at the University of Akron. Researching in the areas of digital media theory, political economy, and cultural studies, his work examines the industrial development of digital media platforms and automated media technologies.

CC-BY-NC-ND: Creative Commons License, 2020. Autonomism

Autonomism, also known as autonomist Marxism and autonomous Marxism, is an anti-authoritarian left- wing political and social movement and theory.[1][2][3] As a theoretical system, it first emerged in Italy in the 1960s from workerism (operaismo). Later, post-Marxist and anarchist tendencies became significant after influence from the Situationists, the failure of Italian far-left movements in the 1970s, and the emergence of a number of important theorists including Antonio Negri, who had contributed to the 1969 founding of Potere Operaio as well as Mario Tronti, Paolo Virno and Franco "Bifo" Berardi.

George Katsiaficas summarizes the forms of autonomous movements saying that "In contrast to the centralized decisions and hierarchical authority structures of modern institutions, autonomous social movements involve people directly in decisions affecting their everyday lives, seeking to expand democracy and help individuals break free of political structures and behavior patterns imposed from the outside".[4] This has involved a call for the independence of social movements from political parties[5] in a revolutionary perspective which seeks to create a practical political alternative to both authoritarian/state socialism and contemporary representative democracy.[6]

Autonomism influenced the German and Dutch Autonomen, the worldwide social centre movement and today is influential in Italy, France and to a lesser extent the English-speaking countries. Those who describe themselves as autonomists now vary from Marxists to anarchists.[7]

Contents Etymology Theory By country France Germany Italy Influences Direct action Influence Thinkers Movements and organizations Publications See also References Bibliography External links Archives Others Etymology

The term autonomia or Autonome is composed out of two Greek words (αὐτο-, auto-, "self"; νόμος nomos, "law"), hence when combined understood to mean "one who gives oneself one's own law". Autonomy in this sense is not independence. While independence refers to an autarchic kind of life, separated from the community, autonomy refers to life in society but by one's own rule. Though the notion of autonomism was alien to the ancient Greeks, the concept is indirectly endorsed by Aristotle, who stated that only beasts or gods could be independent and live apart from the polis ("community"), while Kant defined the Enlightenment by autonomy of thought and the famous "Sapere aude" ("dare to know").

Theory

Unlike other forms of Marxism, autonomist Marxism emphasises the ability of the working class to force changes to the organization of the capitalist system independent of the state, trade unions or political parties. Autonomists are less concerned with party political organization than other Marxists, focusing instead on self- organized action outside of traditional organizational structures. Autonomist Marxism is thus a "bottom-up" theory: it draws attention to activities that autonomists see as everyday working-class resistance to capitalism, such as absenteeism, slow working, socialization in the workplace, sabotage, and other subversive activities.

Like other Marxists, autonomists see class struggle as being of central importance. However, autonomists have a broader definition of the working class than do other Marxists: as well as wage-earning workers (both white collar and blue collar), autonomists also include in this category the unwaged (students, the unemployed, homemakers, etc.), who are traditionally deprived of any form of union representation.

Early theorists such as Mario Tronti, Antonio Negri, Sergio Bologna and Paolo Virno developed notions of "immaterial" and "social labour" that extended the Marxist concept of labour to all society. They suggested that modern society's wealth was produced by unaccountable collective work, and that only a little of this was redistributed to the workers in the form of wages. Other Italian autonomists—particularly feminists, such as Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Silvia Federici—emphasised the importance of feminism and the value of unpaid female labour to capitalist society. Micheal Ryan, a scholar of the movement, writes:

Autonomy, as a movement and as a theory, opposes the notion that capitalism is an irrational system which can be made rational through planning. Instead, it assumes the workers' viewpoint, privileging their activity as the lever of revolutionary passage as that which alone can construct a communist society. Economics is seen as being entirely political; economic relations are direct political relations of force between class subjects. And it is in the economic category of the social worker, not in an alienated political form like the party, that the initiative for political change resides.[8]

By country

France

In France, the Marxist group Socialisme ou Barbarie, led by philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, could be said to be one of the first autonomist groups. Socialisme ou Barbarie drew upon the activist research of the American Johnson-Forest Tendency inside US auto plants and carried out their own investigations into rank- and-file workers struggles, struggles that were autonomous of union or party leadership. Also parallel to the work of the Johnson-Forest Tendency, Socialisme ou Barbarie harshly criticised the Communist regime in the Soviet Union, which it considered a form of "bureaucratic capitalism" and not at all the socialism it claimed to be. Philosopher Jean-François Lyotard was also part of this movement. However, the Italian influence of the operaismo movement was more directly felt in the creation of the review Matériaux pour l'intervention (1972– 73) by Yann Moulier-Boutang, a French economist close to Toni Negri. This led in turn to the creation of the Camarades group (1974–78). Along with others, Moulier-Boutang joined the Centre International pour des Nouveaux Espaces de Liberté (CINEL), founded three years earlier by Félix Guattari, and assisted Italian activists accused of terrorism, of whom at least 300 fled to France.

The French autonome mouvement organised itself in the AGPA (Assemblée Parisienne des Groupes Autonomes, "Parisian Assembly of Autonome Groups"; 1977–78). Many tendencies were present in it, including the Camarades group led by Moulier-Boutang, members of the Organisation communiste libertaire, some people referring themselves to the "Desiring Autonomy" of Bob Nadoulek, but also squatters and street- wise people (including the groupe Marge). French autonomes supported captured Red Army Faction former members. Jean-Paul Sartre also intervened on the conditions for the detention of RAF detainees. The militant group Action directe appeared in 1979 and carried out several violent direct actions. Action Directe claimed responsibility for the murders of Renault's CEO Georges Besse and General Audran. George Besse had been CEO of nuclear company Eurodif. Action Directe was dissolved in 1987.

In the 1980s, the autonomist movement underwent a deep crisis in Italy because of effective prosecution by the State, and was stronger in Germany than in France. It remained present in Parisian squats and in some riots (for example in 1980 near the Jussieu Campus in Paris, or in 1982 in the Ardennes department during anti- nuclear demonstrations). From 1986 to 1994 the French group "Comité des mal logés" occupied several buildings of the French national social housing authority to denounce the cruel lack of lodging for workers, they were several hundred and took their decisions in democratic assembly, with support from all autonomous groups of Paris, many of them were worked on the anti prison . In the 1980s, the French autonomists published the periodicals CAT Pages (1981–82), Rebelles (1981–93), Tout ! (1982–85), Molotov et Confetti (1984), Les Fossoyeurs du Vieux Monde, La Chôme (1984–85), and Contre (1987–89). In the 1990s, the French autonomist movement was present in struggles led by unemployed people, with Travailleurs, Chômeurs, et Précaires en colère (TCP, "Angry Workers, Unemployed, and Marginalised people") and l'Assemblée générale des chômeurs de Jussieu ("General Assembly of Jussieu's unemployed people"). It was also involved in the alter-globalisation movement and above all in the solidarity with illegal foreigners (Collective Des Papiers pour tous ("Permits for all", 1996) and Collectif Anti-Expulsion (1998–2005)). Several autonomist journals date from this time: Quilombo (1988–93), Apache (1990–98), Tic-Tac (1995–97), Karoshi (1998–99), and Tiqqun (1999–2001).

From 19 to 28 July 2002, a no borders camp was made in Strasbourg to protest against anti-immigration policies, in particular inside the Schengen European space. In 2003, Autonomists came into conflict with the French Socialist Party (PS) during a demonstration that took place in the frame of the European Social Forum in Saint-Denis (Paris). At the end of December, hundreds of unemployed people helped themselves in the Bon Marché supermarket to be able to celebrate Christmas (an action called "autoréduction" (of prices) in French). French riot police (CRS) physically opposed the unemployed people inside the shop. Autonomes rioted during the spring 2006 protests against the CPE, and again after the 2007 presidential election when Nicolas Sarkozy was elected. On 11 November 2008, the French police arrested ten people, including five living in a farmhouse on a hill overlooking Tarnac, and accused them of associating with a "terrorist enterprise" by sabotaging TGV's overhead lines. Nine out of ten were let go and only Julien Coupat, the alleged leader, remained in custody for about a year, charged with "directing a terrorist group" by the Paris Prosecutor's office.

Germany In West Germany, Autonome was used during the late 1970s to depict the most radical part of the political left.[9] These individuals participated in practically all actions of the social movements at the time, especially in demonstrations against nuclear energy plants (Brokdorf 1981, Wackersdorf 1986) and in actions against the construction of airport runways (Frankfurt 1976–86). The defense of squats against the police such as in Hamburg's Hafenstraße was also a major "task" for the "Autonomen" movement. The Dutch anarchist Autonomen movement from the 1960s also concentrated on squatting.

Tactics of the "Autonome" were usually militant, including the construction of barricades or throwing stones or molotov cocktails at the police. During their most powerful times in the early 1980s, on at least one occasion the police had to take flight. Because of their outfit (heavy black clothing, ski masks, helmets), the "Autonome" were dubbed der schwarze Block by the German media, and in these tactics were similar to modern black blocs. In 1989, laws regarding demonstrations in Germany were changed, prohibiting the use of so-called "passive weaponry" such as helmets or padding and covering your face. Today, the "autonome" scene in Germany is greatly reduced and concentrates mainly on anti-fascist actions, ecology, solidarity with refugees, and feminism. There are larger and more militant groups still in operation, such as in Switzerland or Italy.

Italy

Autonomist Marxism—referred to in Italy as operaismo, which translates literally as "workerism"—first appeared in Italy in the early 1960s. Arguably, the emergence of early autonomism can be traced to the dissatisfaction of automotive workers in Turin with their union, which reached an agreement with FIAT. The disillusionment of these workers with their organised representation, along with the resultant riots (in particular the 1962 riots by FIAT workers in Turin, "fatti di Piazza Statuto"), were critical factors in the development of a theory of self- organised labour representation outside the scope of traditional representatives such as trade unions.

In 1969, the operaismo approach was active mainly in two different groups: Lotta Continua, led by Adriano Sofri (which Antonio Negri, a leading theorist of Italian had a very significant Roman Catholic cultural matrix), and autonomism Potere Operaio, led by Antonio Negri, Franco Piperno, Oreste Scalzone, and Valerio Morucci. Mario Capanna was the charismatic leader of the Milan student movement, which had a more classical Marxist-Leninist approach.

Influences

Through translations made available by Danilo Montaldi and others, the Italian autonomists drew upon previous activist research in the United States by the Johnson–Forest Tendency and in France by the group Socialisme ou Barbarie. The Johnson-Forest Tendency had studied working-class life and struggles within the US auto industry, publishing pamphlets such as "The American Worker" (1947), "Punching Out" (1952), and "Union Committeemen and Wildcat Strikes" (1955). That work was translated into French by Socialisme ou Barbarie and published, serially, in their journal. They too began investigating and writing about what was going on inside workplaces, in their case inside both auto factories and insurance offices. The journal Quaderni Rossi ("Red Notebooks"), produced between 1961 and 1965, and its successor Classe Operaia ("Working Class"), produced between 1963 and 1966, were also influential in the development of early autonomism. Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti, and Toni Negri were some primary collaborators. Pirate radio stations also were a factor in spreading autonomist ideas. Bologna's Radio Alice was an example of such a station.

Direct action

The Italian student movement, including the Indiani Metropolitani (Metropolitan Indians), starting from 1966 with the murder of student Paolo Rossi by neo-fascists at Rome University, engaged in various direct action operations, including riots and occupations, along with more peaceful activities such as self-reduction, in which individuals refused to pay for such services and goods as public transport, electricity, gas, rent, and food. Several clashes occurred between students and the police during the occupations of universities in the winter of 1967–68, during the Fiat occupations, and in March Askatasuna autonomist social center in 1968 in Rome during the Battle of Valle Giulia. Turin, 2016

Indiani Metropolitani were a small faction active in the Italian far-left protest movement during 1976 and 1977, in the so-called "Years of Lead". The Indiani Metropolitani were the so-called 'creative' wing of the movement. Its adherents wore face-paint like the war-paint of Native Americans and dressed like hippies. The emphasis was on "stare insieme" (being together), spontaneity and the arts, especially music. The group was active in Rome, during the occupation of the university La Sapienza in 1977.

On 11 March 1977, riots took place in Bologna following the killing of student Francesco Lorusso by police. Beginning in 1979, the state effectively prosecuted the autonomist movement, accusing it of protecting the Red Brigades, which had kidnapped and assassinated Aldo Moro. 12,000 far-left activists were detained; 600 fled the country, including 300 to France and 200 to South America.[10]

Tute Bianche was a militant Italian social movement, active from 1994 to 2001. Activists covered their bodies with padding so as to resist the blows of police, to push through police lines, and to march together in large blocks for mutual protection during demonstrations. The tute bianche movement reached its apex during the anti-G8 protests in Genoa, in July 2001, with a turn-out of an estimated 10,000 protesters in a single "padded block", ironically after a collective decision to go without the white overalls. Shortly after Genoa the Ya Basta Association disbanded, with certain segments reforming into the "Disobbedienti" which literally means "Disobedients". This philosophy includes the occupation and creation of squatted self-managed social centers, anti-sexist activism, support for Members of the Italian militant social immigrant's rights and refugees seeking political asylum, as movement Tute Bianche well as the process of walking together in large formations during demonstrations held in the streets, by force if necessary in case of clashes with police. Central to the tute bianche movement was the Italian Ya Basta Association, a network of groups throughout Italy that was inspired by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation uprising in Chiapas in 1994. Ya Basta primarily originated in the "autonomist" social centers of Milan, particularly Centro Sociale Leoncavallo. These social centers grew out of the Italian Autonomia movement of the 1970 and 80s. The tute bianche movements have had international variations of one sort or another. For instance, in Britain a group calling itself WOMBLES adopted the tactics, even though the political orientation of WOMBLES differed from the Italian movement. In Spain, "Mono Blanco" was the preferred identifier. The first North American variant of the tute bianche, the NYC Ya Basta Collective (based in NYC) wore yellow overalls, rather than white.

Influence

The autonomist Marxist and Autonomen movements provided inspiration to some on the revolutionary left in English-speaking countries, particularly among anarchists, many of whom have adopted autonomist tactics.[11] The Italian operaismo movement also influenced Marxist academics such as Harry Cleaver, John Holloway, Steve Wright[12] and Nick Dyer-Witheford.[13] In Denmark and Sweden, the word is used as a catch-all phrase for anarchists and the extra-parliamentary left in general, as was seen in the media coverage of the eviction of the Ungdomshuset squat in Copenhagen in March 2007.[14][15]

Thinkers

Franco "Bifo" Berardi George Caffentzis Harry Cleaver Silvia Federici Michael Hardt John Holloway Antonio Negri Mario Tronti Paolo Virno Nick Dyer-Witheford Maurizio Lazzarato Christian Fuchs (sociologist)

Movements and organizations

Abahlali baseMjondolo Blitz (Norway) Disobbedienti (ex Tute Bianche) Homeless Workers' Movement MTST Kämpa tillsammans! Kämpa tillsammans! London Autonomists Plan C, a British anti-authoritarian communist group inspired by autonomism. Swedish Anarcho-syndicalist Youth Federation Ungdomshuset, Danish autonomist squat Zapatista Army of National Liberation Publications

Aufheben (http://libcom.org/aufheben/) Collegamenti-Wobbly Multitudes magazine ROAR Magazine

See also

Autonomy Affective labor Direct democracy Hakim Bey on autonomous zones Horizontalidad Kommune 1 Libertarian Marxism Mao-Spontex Open Marxism Popular assembly Sovereign citizen movement Spontaneism Sui iuris

References 1. "Autonomism as a global social movement" by Patrick Cuninghame (https://www.academia.ed u/1342334/AUTONOMISM_AS_A_GLOBAL_SOCIAL_MOVEMENT). WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society. Volume 13 (December 2010): 451–464. ISSN 1089-7011 (https:// www.worldcat.org/search?fq=x0:jrnl&q=n2:1089-7011). 2. Georgy Katsiaficas. The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life (http://www.eroseffect.com/books/subversion_download.ht m), AK Press 2006 3. El Kholti, Hedi; Lotringer, Sylvère; Marazzi, Christian (2007). Autonomia: post-political politics (2nd ed.). Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). ISBN 978-1-58435-053-8. OCLC 159669900 (https://ww w.worldcat.org/oclc/159669900). 4. Georgy Katsiaficas. The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life. AK Press. 2006. pg. 6 5. George Katsiaficas. The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life. AK Press. 2006. pg. 7 6. Georgy Katsiaficas. The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life. AK Press. 2006. pg. 8 7. "Autonomism: cutting the ground from under Marxism" (http://libcom.org/blog/autonomism-cuttin g-ground-under-marxism-03092017). libcom.org. Retrieved 2020-07-06. 8. Michael Ryan, "Translators' Introductions Part II," Antonio Negri, Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, New York: Autonomedia, 1991, p. xxx. 9. FIRE AND FLAMES: A History of the German Autonomist Movement by Geronimo. AK Press. 2012 10. (in French)On the Autonomist movement (http://sebastien.schifres.free.fr/italie.htm) 11. "Libertarian Marxism's Relation to Anarchism" (https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/wayne-pric e-libertarian-marxism-s-relation-to-anarchism). The Anarchist Library. Retrieved 2020-06-21. 12. Wright, Steve (2002). Storming heaven: class composition and struggle in Italian autonomist marxism. London: Pluto Press. ISBN 978-1-84964-083-1. OCLC 654106755 (https://www.world cat.org/oclc/654106755). 13. "Autonomist Marxism and the Information Society - Nick Dyer-Witheford, Treason pamphlet" (htt p://libcom.org/library/nick-dyer-witheford-autonomist-marxism-and-the-information-society-treas on-pamphlet). libcom.org. Retrieved 2020-06-21. 14. Collective, CrimethInc Ex-Workers. "CrimethInc. : The Battle for Ungdomshuset : The Defense of a Squatted Social Center and the Strategy of Autonomy" (https://crimethinc.com/2019/03/01/t he-battle-for-ungdomshuset-the-defense-of-a-squatted-social-center-and-the-strategy-of-autono my). CrimethInc. Retrieved 2020-06-21. 15. Illeborg, Jakob (2007-03-05). "Anarchy in the DK" (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre e/2007/mar/05/copenhagenisburningforfour). The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 (https://www.worl dcat.org/issn/0261-3077). Retrieved 2020-06-21.

Bibliography

"Autonomism as a global social movement" by Patrick Cuninghame (https://www.academia.ed u/1342334/AUTONOMISM_AS_A_GLOBAL_SOCIAL_MOVEMENT) The Journal of Labor and Society · 1089-7011 · Volume 13 · December 2010 · pp. 451–464 FIRE AND FLAMES: A History of the German Autonomist Movement by Geronimo. AK Press. 2012. ISBN 978-1-60486-097-9 (in French) L’Autonomie. Le mouvement autonome en France et en Italie, éditions Spartacus 1978 (in French) Autonomes, Jan Bucquoy and Jacques Santi, ANSALDI 1985 (in French) Action Directe. Du terrorisme français à l'euroterrorisme, Alain Hamon and Jean- Charles Marchand, SEUIL 1986 (in French) Paroles Directes. Légitimité, révolte et révolution : autour d'Action Directe, Loïc Debray, Jean-Pierre Duteuil, Philippe Godard, Henri Lefebvre, Catherine Régulier, Anne Sveva, Jacques Wajnsztejn, ACRATIE 1990 (in French) Un Traître chez les totos, Guy Dardel, ACTES SUD 1999 (novel) (in French) Bac + 2 + crime : l'affaire Florence Rey, Frédéric Couderc, CASTELLS 1998 (in French) Italie 77. Le « Mouvement », les intellectuels, Fabrizio Calvi, SEUIL 1977 (in Italian) L'operaismo degli anni Sessanta. Da 'Quaderni rossi' a 'classe operaia', Giuseppe Trotta e Fabio Milana edd., DERIVEAPPRODI 2008 (in Italian) Una sparatoria tranquilla. Per una storia orale del '77, ODRADEK 1997 (in German) Die Autonomen, Thomas Schultze et Almut Gross, KONKRET LITERATUR 1997 (in German) Autonome in Bewegung, AG Grauwacke aus den ersten 23 Jahren, ASSOCIATION A 2003 (in English) The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life (http://www.eroseffect.com/books/subversion_download.htm) Georgy Katsiaficas, AK Press 2006 (in English) Negativity and Revolution: Adorno and Political Activism London: Pluto Press, 2009 John Holloway ed. with Fernando Matamoros & Sergio Tischler ISBN 978-0-7453-2836-2 (in English) Autonomia: Post-Political Politics (http://libcom.org/files/autonomia1_rotated_merg ed_0.pdf), ed. Sylvere Lotringer & Christian Marazzi. New York: Semiotext(e), 1980, 2007. ISBN 1-58435-053-9, ISBN 978-1-58435-053-8. (in English) Os Cangaceiros A Crime Called Freedom: The Writings of Os Cangaceiros (Volume One) (http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/Os_Cangaceiros__A_Crime_Called_Freedo m__The_Writings_of_Os_Cangaceiros__Volume_One_.html) Eberhardt Press 2006 (in English) Storming Heaven: Class composition and struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism, Steve Wright, University of Michigan Press ISBN 0-7453-1607-7 (in Greek) Νοέμβρης 73. Αυτοί οι αγώνες συνεχίζονται, δεν εξαγοράζονται, δεν δικαιώθηκαν, ed. Αυτόνομη Πρωτοβουλία Πολιτών. Athens 1983. (in Greek) Αναμνήσεις, Άγης Στίνας, υψιλον, Αθήνα 1985 (in Greek) Το επαναστατικό πρόβλημα σήμερα, Κορνήλιος Καστοριάδης, υψιλον, Αθήνα 2000 (In English) The city is ours: Squatting and autonomous movements from the 1970s to the present. Ed. Bart van der Steen, Ask Katzeff, Leendert van Hoogenhuijze. PM press, 2014. ISBN 978-1604866834

External links

Archives

Libertarian Communist Library Mario Tronti Archive (http://libcom.org/tags/mario-tronti) Libertarian Communist Library Sergio Bolognia Archive (http://libcom.org/tags/sergio-bologna) Libertarian Communist Library Mariarosa Dalla Costa Archive (http://libcom.org/tags/mariarosa- dalla-costa) Libertarian Communist Library Nick Dyer-Witheford Archive (http://libcom.org/tags/nick-dyer-wit heford) Libertarian Communist Library Antonio Negri Archive (http://libcom.org/tags/antonio-negri) Libertarian Communist Library Raniero Panzieri Archive (http://libcom.org/tags/raniero-panzier i) Libertarian Communist Library Harry Cleaver Archive (http://libcom.org/tags/harry-cleaver)

Others

Articles by members of the operaismo movement (https://web.archive.org/web/2007070320323 3/http://www.generation-online.org/t/ppp.htm) Aut-op-sy - Autonomist forum and texts (https://users.resist.ca/%7Ejon.beasley-murray/index.ht ml) Rekombinant - Autonomist forum and mailing list (https://web.archive.org/web/2007120110315 9/http://www.rekombinant.org/) Texas Archives of Autonomist Marxism (http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/txarchintro. html) Affinity Project directory and chronology of Autonomous Marxism (http://affinityproject.org/traditi ons/autonomousmarxism.html) Libertarian Communist Library, texts on autonomism (http://libcom.org/tags/autonomism) Wildcat (http://www.wildcat-www.de/) A critique of autonomism, published by a Trotskyist group (http://www.workersliberty.org/node/1 521) TIQQUN “Introduction to Civil War [fragments]" (http://www.softtargetsjournal.com/v21/tiqqun.ph p)

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Autonomism&oldid=1011067911" This page was last edited on 8 March 2021, at 21:06 (UTC).

Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization. Libertarian Marxism

Libertarian Marxism refers to a broad scope of economic and political philosophies that emphasize the anti-authoritarian aspects of Marxism. Early currents of libertarian Marxism, known as left communism, emerged in opposition to Marxism–Leninism[1] and its derivatives, such as Stalinism, Ceaușism and Maoism. Libertarian Marxism is also often critical of reformist positions, such as those held by social democrats. Libertarian Marxist currents often draw from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' later works, specifically the Grundrisse and The Civil War in France;[2] emphasizing the Marxist belief in the ability of the working class to forge its own destiny without the need for a revolutionary party or state to mediate or aid its liberation.[3] Along with anarchism, libertarian Marxism is one of the main currents of libertarian socialism.[4]

Libertarian Marxism includes such currents as council communism, De Leonism, Socialisme ou Barbarie Lettrism/Situationism and workerism/autonomism and parts of the New Left.[5] Libertarian Marxism has often had a strong influence on both post-left and social anarchists. Notable theorists of libertarian Marxism have included Anton Pannekoek, Raya Dunayevskaya, CLR James, E. P. Thompson, Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Negri, Cornelius Castoriadis, Maurice Brinton, Guy Debord, Daniel Guérin, Fredy Perlman, Ernesto Screpanti and Raoul Vaneigem.

Contents

Overview 20th century Theory Postwar Notable libertarian Marxist tendencies De Leonism Council communism Left communism Within Freudo-Marxism Socialisme ou Barbarie Situationist International Solidarity Autonomism Communization References Bibliography External links

Overview

Marxism started to develop a libertarian strand of thought after specific circumstances. "One does find early expressions of such perspectives in Morris and the Socialist Party of Great Britain (the SPGB), then again around the events of 1905, with the growing concern at the bureaucratisation and de-radicalisation of international socialism".[6] William Morris established the Socialist League in December 1884, which was encouraged by Friedrich Engels and Eleanor Marx. As the leading figure in the organization Morris embarked on a relentless series of speeches and talks on street corners, in working men's clubs and lecture theatres across England and Scotland. From 1887, anarchists began to outnumber Marxists in the Socialist League.[7] The 3rd Annual Conference of the League held in London on 29 May 1887 marked the change, with a majority of the 24 branch delegates voting in favor of an anarchist-sponsored resolution declaring: "This conference endorses the policy of abstention from parliamentary action, hitherto pursued by the League, and sees no sufficient reason for altering it".[8] Morris played peacemaker, but sided with the anti- parliamentarians, who won control of the League, which consequently lost the support of Engels and saw the departure of Eleanor Marx and her partner Edward Aveling to form the separate Bloomsbury Socialist Society.

20th century However, "the most important ruptures are to be traced to the insurgency during and after the First World War. Disillusioned with the capitulation of the social democrats, excited by the emergence of workers' councils, and slowly distanced from Leninism, many communists came to reject the claims of socialist parties and to put their faith instead in the masses". For these socialists, "[t]he intuition of the masses in action can have more genius in it than the work of the greatest individual genius". Luxemburg's workerism and spontaneism are exemplary of positions later taken up by the far-left of the period—Pannekoek, Roland Holst and Gorter in the Netherlands, Sylvia Pankhurst in Britain, Gramsci in Italy and Lukacs in Hungary. In these formulations, the dictatorship of the proletariat was to be the dictatorship of a class, "not of a party or of a clique".[6] However, within this line of thought, "[t]he tension between anti-vanguardism and vanguardism has frequently resolved itself in two diametrically opposed ways: the first involved a drift towards the party; the second saw a move towards the idea of complete proletarian spontaneity.... The first course is exemplified most clearly in Gramsci and Lukacs.... The second course is illustrated in the tendency, developing from the Dutch and German far- lefts, which inclined towards the complete eradication of the party form".[6]

In the emerging Soviet state, there appeared left-wing uprisings against the Bolsheviks which were a series of rebellions and uprisings against the Bolsheviks led or supported by left wing groups including Socialist Revolutionaries,[9] Left Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks and anarchists.[10] Some were in support of theWhite Movement while some tried to be an independent force. The uprisings started in 1918 and continued through the Russian Civil War and after until 1922. In response, the Bolsheviks increasingly abandoned attempts to get these groups to join the government and suppressed them with force.

Theory For "many Marxian libertarian socialists, the political bankruptcy of socialist orthodoxy necessitated a theoretical break. This break took a number of forms. The Bordigists and the SPGB championed a super-Marxian intransigence in theoretical matters. Other socialists made a return 'behind Marx' to the anti-positivist programme of German idealism. Libertarian socialism has frequently linked its anti-authoritarian political aspirations with this theoretical differentiation from orthodoxy.... Karl Korsch... remained a libertarian socialist for a large part of his life and because of the persistent urge towards theoretical openness in his work. Korsch rejected the eternal and static, and he was obsessed by the essential role of practice in a theory's truth. For Korsch, no theory could escape history, not even Marxism. In this vein, Korsch even credited the stimulus for Marx's Capital to the movement of the oppressed classes".[6]

In rejecting both capitalism and the state, some libertarian socialists align themselves with anarchists in opposition to both capitalist representative democracy and to authoritarian forms of Marxism. Although anarchists and Marxists share an ultimate goal of a stateless society, anarchists criticise most Marxists for advocating a transitional phase under which the state is used to achieve this aim. Nonetheless, libertarian Marxist tendencies such as autonomist Marxism and council communism have historically been intertwined with the anarchist movement. Anarchist movements have come into conflict with both capitalist and Marxist forces, sometimes at the same time, as in the Spanish Civil War, though as in that war Marxists themselves are often divided in support or opposition to anarchism. Other political persecutions under bureaucratic parties have resulted in a strong historical antagonism between anarchists and libertarian Marxists on the one hand and Leninist Marxists and their derivatives such as Maoists on the other. However, in recent history libertarian socialists have repeatedly formed temporary alliances with Marxist–Leninist groups in order to protest institutions they both reject. Part of this antagonism can be traced to the International Workingmen's Association, the First International, a congress of radical workers, where Mikhail Bakunin (who was fairly representative of anarchist views) and Karl Marx (whom anarchists accused of being an "authoritarian") came into conflict on various issues. Bakunin's viewpoint on the illegitimacy of the state as an institution and the role of electoral politics was starkly counterposed to Marx's views in the First International. Marx and Bakunin's disputes eventually led to Marx taking control of the First International and expelling Bakunin and his followers from the organization. This was the beginning of a long-running feud and schism between libertarian socialists and what they call "authoritarian communists", or alternatively just "authoritarians". Some Marxists have formulated views that closely resemble syndicalism and thus express more affinity with anarchist ideas. Several libertarian socialists, notably Noam Chomsky, believe that anarchism shares much in common with certain variants of Marxism such as the council communism of Marxist Anton Pannekoek. In Chomsky's Notes on Anarchism,[11] he suggests the possibility "that some form of council communism is the natural form of revolutionary socialism in an industrial society. It reflects the belief that democracy is severely limited when the industrial system is controlled by any form of autocratic elite, whether of owners, managers, and technocrats, a 'vanguard' party, or a State bureaucracy".

Postwar In the mid-20th century, some libertarian socialist groups emerged from disagreements with Trotskyism which presented itself as Leninist anti-Stalinism. As such, the French group Socialisme ou Barbarie emerged from the Trotskyist Fourth International, where Castoriadis and Claude Lefort constituted a Chaulieu–Montal Tendency in the French Parti Communiste Internationaliste in 1946. In 1948, they experienced their "final disenchantment with Trotskyism",[12] leading them to break away to form Socialisme ou Barbarie, whose journal began appearing in March 1949. Castoriadis later said of this period that "the main audience of the group and of the journal was formed by groups of the old, radical left: Bordigists, council communists, some anarchists and some offspring of the German 'left' of the 1920s".[13] In the United Kingdom, the group Solidarity was founded in 1960 by a small group of expelled members of the Trotskyist Socialist Labour League. Almost from the start, it was strongly influenced by the French Socialisme ou Barbarie Cornelius Castoriadis, theorist of the group, in particular by its intellectual leader Cornelius Castoriadis, whose essays group Socialisme ou Barbarie were among the many pamphlets Solidarity produced. The intellectual leader of the group was Chris Pallis (who wrote under the nameMaurice Brinton).[14]

In the People's Republic of China (PRC) since 1967, the terms "ultra-left" and "left communist" refers to political theory and practice self-defined as further "left" than that of the central Maoist leaders at the height of the GPCR ("Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution"). The terms are also used retroactively to describe some early 20th century Chinese anarchist orientations. As a slur, the Communist Party of China (CPC) has used the term "ultra-left" more broadly to denounce any orientation it considers further "left" than the party line. According to the latter usage, in 1978 the CPC Central Committee denounced as "ultra-left" the line of Mao Zedong from 1956 until his death in 1976. Ultra-left refers to those GPCR rebel positions that diverged from the central Maoist line by identifying an antagonistic contradiction between the CPC-PRC party-state itself and the masses of workers and "peasants"[15] conceived as a single proletarian class divorced from any meaningful control over production or distribution. Whereas the central Maoist line maintained that the masses controlled the means of production through the party's mediation, the ultra-left argued that the objective interests of bureaucrats were structurally determined by the centralist state-form in direct opposition to the objective interests of the masses, regardless of however "red" a given bureaucrat's thought might be. Whereas the central Maoist leaders encouraged the masses to criticize reactionary "ideas" and "habits" among the alleged 5% of bad cadres, giving them a chance to "turn over a new leaf" after they had undergone "thought reform", the ultra-left argued that cultural revolution had to give way to political revolution "in which one class overthrows another class".[16][17] The emergence of the New Left in the 1950s and 1960s led to a revival of interest in libertarian socialism.[18] The New Left's critique of the Old Left's authoritarianism was associated with a strong interest in personal liberty, autonomy (see the thinking of Cornelius Castoriadis) and led to a rediscovery of older socialist traditions, such as left communism, council communism and the Industrial Workers of the World. The New Left also led to a revival of anarchism. Journals like Radical America and Black Mask in the United States, Solidarity, Big Flame and Democracy & Nature, succeeded by The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy[19] in the United Kingdom, introduced a range of left libertarian ideas to a new generation. In 1969, French platformist anarcho-communist Daniel Guérin published an essay called "Libertarian Marxism?" in which he dealt with the debate between Marx and Bakunin at the First International and afterwards suggested that "[l]ibertarian marxism [sic] rejects determinism and fatalism, giving the greater place to individual will, intuition, imagination, reflex speeds, and to the deep instincts of the masses, which are more far-seeing in hours of crisis than the reasonings of the 'elites'; libertarian marxism [sic] thinks of the effects of surprise, provocation and boldness, refuses to be cluttered and paralysed by a heavy 'scientific' apparatus, doesn't equivocate or bluff, and guards itself from adventurism as much as from fear of the unknown".[20]

Autonomist Marxism, neo-Marxism and situationist theory are also regarded as being anti-authoritarian variants of Marxism that are firmly within the libertarian socialist tradition. Related to this were intellectuals who were influenced by Italian left communist Amadeo Bordiga, but who disagreed with his Leninist positions, including Jacques Camatte, editor of the French publication Invariance; and Gilles Dauve, who published Troploin with Karl Nesic.

Notable libertarian Marxist tendencies

De Leonism De Leonism, occasionally known as Marxism–De Leonism, is a form of syndicalist Marxism developed by Daniel De Leon. De Leon was an early leader of the first United States socialist political party, the Socialist Labor Party of America. De Leon combined the rising theories of syndicalism in his time with orthodox Marxism. According to De Leonist theory, militant industrial unions are the vehicle of class struggle. Industrial unions serving the interests of the proletariat will bring about the change needed to establish a socialist system. The only way this differs from some currents in anarcho- syndicalism is that—according to De Leonist thinking—a revolutionary political party is also necessary to fight for the proletariat on the political field.

De Leonism lies outside the Leninist tradition of communism. It predates Leninism as De Leonism's principles developed in the early 1890s with De Leon's assuming leadership of the Socialist Labor Party. Leninism and its vanguard party idea took shape after the 1902 publication of Lenin's What Is First English edition of Vladimir Lenin's To Be Done?. The highly decentralized and democratic nature of the proposed "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile De Leonist government is in contrast to the democratic centralism of Disorder, published by the Executive Marxism–Leninism and what they see as the dictatorial nature of the Soviet Committee of the Communist International for delegates to its 2nd World Union and the People's Republic of China and other "communist" states. The Congress,[21] in which Lenin attacks left success of the De Leonist plan depends on achieving majority support among communists and council communists the people both in the workplaces and at the polls, in contrast to the Leninist notion that a small vanguard party should lead the working class to carry out the revolution.

Council communism Council communism was a radical left movement originating in Germany and the Netherlands in the 1920s. Its primary organization was the Communist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD). Council communism continues today as a theoretical and activist position within Marxism and also within libertarian socialism. The central argument of council communism, in contrast to those of social democracy and Leninist communism, is that workers' councils arising in the factories and municipalities are the natural and legitimate form of working class organisation and government power. This view is opposed to the reformist and Bolshevik stress on vanguard parties, parliaments, or the state. The core principle of council communism is that the state and the economy should be managed by workers' councils, composed of delegates elected at workplaces and recallable at any moment. As such, council communists oppose state-run "bureaucratic socialism". They also oppose the idea of a "revolutionary party", since council communists believe that a revolution led by a party will necessarily produce a party dictatorship. Council communists support a workers' democracy, which they want to produce through a federation of workers' councils.

The Russian word for council is soviet and during the early years of the revolution workers' councils were politically significant in Russia. It was to take advantage of the aura of workplace power that the word became used by Lenin for various political organs. Indeed, the name Supreme Soviet, which the parliament was called and that of the Soviet Union itself, make use of this terminology, but they do not imply any decentralization.

Furthermore, council communists held a critique of the Soviet Union as a capitalist state, believing that the Bolshevik revolution in Russia became a bourgeois Anton Pannekoek, one of the main revolution when a party bureaucracy replaced the old feudal aristocracy. Although theorists of council communism most felt the Russian Revolution was working class in character, they believed that because capitalist relations still existed (i.e. the workers had no say in running the economy) the Soviet Union ended up as a state capitalist country, with the state replacing the individual capitalist. Thus council communists support workers' revolutions, but oppose one-party dictatorships.

Council communists also believed in diminishing the role of the party to one of agitation and propaganda, rejected all participation in elections or parliament and argued that workers should leave the reactionary trade unions to form one big, revolutionary union.

Left communism Left communism describes the range of communist viewpoints held by the communist left, which criticizes the political ideas of the Bolsheviks at certain periods, from a position that is asserted to be more authentically Marxist and proletarian than the views of Leninism held by the Communist International after its first and during its second congress.

Although she lived before left communism became a distinct tendency, Rosa Luxemburg has heavily influenced most left communists, both politically and theoretically. Proponents of left communism have included Amadeo Bordiga, Herman Gorter, Anton Pannekoek, Otto Rühle, Karl Korsch, Sylvia Pankhurst and Paul Mattick.

Prominent left communist groups existing today include the International Communist Current and the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party. Different factions from the old Bordigist International Communist Party are also considered left communist organizations.

Within Freudo-Marxism Two Marxist and Freudian psychoanalytic theorists have received the libertarian label or have been associated with it due to their emphasis on anti-authoritarianism and freedom issues.

Wilhelm Reich[22][23][24][25] was an Austrian psychoanalyst, a member of the second generation of psychoanalysts after Sigmund Freud and one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry. He was the author of several influential books and essays, most notably Character Analysis (1933), The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) and The Sexual Revolution (1936).[26] His work on character contributed to the development of Anna Freud's The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936) and his idea of muscular armour—the expression of the personality in the way the body moves—shaped innovations such as body psychotherapy, Fritz Perls's Gestalt therapy, Alexander Lowen's bioenergetic analysis and Arthur Janov's primal therapy. His writing influenced generations of intellectuals—during the 1968 student uprisings in Paris and Berlin, students scrawled his name on walls and threw copies of The [27] Mass Psychology of Fascism at the police.[27] On 23 August, six tons of his books, journals and papers were burned in the 25th Street public incinerator in New York, the Gansevoort incinerator. The burned material included copies of several of his books, including The Sexual Revolution, Character Analysis and The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Though these had been published in German before Reich ever discussed orgone, he had added mention of it to the English editions, so they were caught by the injunction.[28] As with the accumulators, the FDA was supposed only to observe the destruction. It has been cited as one of the worst examples of censorship in the United States. Reich became a consistent propagandist for sexual freedom going as far as opening free sex-counselling clinics in Vienna for working- class patients[29] as well as coining the phrase "sexual revolution" in one of his books from the 1940s.[30]

On the other hand, Herbert Marcuse was a German philosopher, Wilhelm Reich, Freudo-Marxist sociologist and political theorist theorist who wrote the bookThe Sexual Revolution in 1936 associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. His work Eros and Civilization (1955) discusses the social meaning of biology—history seen not as a class struggle, but a fight against repression of our instincts. It argues that "advanced industrial society" (modern capitalism) is preventing us from reaching a non-repressive society "based on a fundamentally different experience of being, a Herbert Marcuse, associated with the fundamentally different relation between man and nature, and fundamentally Frankfurt School of critical theory, different existential relations".[32] It contends that Freud's argument that repression was an influential libertarian socialist is needed by civilization to persist is mistaken as Eros is liberating and constructive. [31] philosopher of the New Left Marcuse argues that "the irreconcilable conflict is not between work (reality principle) and Eros (pleasure principle), but between alienated labour (performance principle) and Eros".[33] Sex is allowed for "the betters" (capitalists) and for workers only when not disturbing performance. Marcuse believes that a socialist society could be a society without needing the performance of the poor and without as strong a suppression of our sexual drives—it could replace alienated labor with "non-alienated libidinal work" resulting in "a non-repressive civilization based on 'non-repressive sublimation'".[33] During the 1960s, Marcuse achieved world renown as "the guru of the New Left", publishing many articles and giving lectures and advice to student radicals all over the world. He travelled widely and his work was often discussed in the mass media, becoming one of the few American intellectuals to gain such attention. Never surrendering his revolutionary vision and commitments, Marcuse continued to his death to defend the Marxian theory and libertarian socialism.[34]

Socialisme ou Barbarie Socialisme ou Barbarie ("Socialism or Barbarism") was a French-based radical libertarian socialist group of the post-World War II period, whose name comes from a phrase Rosa Luxemburg used in her 1916 essay The Junius Pamphlet. It existed from 1948 until 1965. The animating personality was Cornelius Castoriadis, also known as Pierre Chaulieu or Paul Cardan.[35] The group originated in the Trotskyist Fourth International, where Castoriadis and Claude Lefort constituted a Chaulieu– Montal Tendency in the French Parti Communiste Internationaliste in 1946. In 1948, they experienced their "final disenchantment with Trotskyism",[36] leading them to break away to form Socialisme ou Barbarie, whose journal began appearing in The journal Socialisme ou Barbarie March 1949. Castoriadis later said of this period that "the main audience of the group and of the journal was formed by groups of the old, radical left: Bordigists, council communists, some anarchists and some offspring of the German 'left' of the 1920s".[37] The group was composed of both intellectuals and workers and agreed with the idea that the main enemies of society were the bureaucracies which governed modern capitalism. They documented and analysed the struggle against that bureaucracy in the group's journal. As an example, the thirteenth issue (January–March 1954) was devoted to the East German revolt of June 1953 and the strikes which erupted amongst several sectors of French workers that summer. Following from the belief that what the working class was addressing in their daily struggles was the real content of socialism, the intellectuals encouraged the workers in the group to report on every aspect of their working lives.

Situationist International The Situationist International (SI) was a restricted group of international revolutionaries founded in 1957 and which had its peak in its influence on the unprecedentedgeneral wildcat strikes of May 1968 in France.

With their ideas rooted in Marxism and the 20th century European artistic avant-gardes, they advocated experiences of life being alternative to those admitted by the capitalist order, for the fulfillment of human primitive desires and the pursuing of a superior passional quality. For this purpose they suggested and experimented with the construction of situations, namely the setting up of environments favorable for the fulfillment of such desires. Using methods drawn from the arts, they developed a series of experimental fields of study for the construction of such situations, likeunitary urbanism and psychogeography.

They fought against the main obstacle on the fulfillment of such superior passional living, identified by them in advanced capitalism. Their theoretical work peaked on the highly influential bookThe Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord. Debord argued in 1967 that spectacular features like mass media and advertising have a central role in an advanced capitalist society, which is to show a fake reality in order to mask the real capitalist degradation of human life. To overthrow such a system, the Situationist International supported the May 1968 revolts and asked the workers to occupy the factories and to run them with direct democracy through workers' councils composed by instantly revocable delegates.

After publishing in the last issue of the magazine an analysis of the May 1968 revolts and the strategies that will need to be adopted in future revolutions,[38] the SI was dissolved in 1972.[39]

Solidarity Solidarity was a small libertarian socialist organisation from 1960 to 1992 in the United Kingdom. It published a magazine of the same name. Solidarity was close to council communism in its prescriptions and was known for its emphasis on workers' self- organisation and for its radicalanti-Leninism . Solidarity was founded in 1960 by a small group of expelled members of the Trotskyist Socialist Labour League. It was initially known as Socialism Reaffirmed. The group published a journal, Agitator, which after six issues was renamed Solidarity, from which the organisation took its new name. Almost from the start it was strongly influenced by the French Socialisme ou Barbarie group, in particular by its intellectual leader Cornelius Castoriadis, whose essays were among the many pamphlets Solidarity produced. Solidarity existed as a nationwide organisation with groups in London and many other cities until 1981, when it imploded after a series of political disputes. The magazine Solidarity continued to be published by the London group until 1992—other former Solidarity members were behind Wildcat in Manchester and Here and Now magazine in Glasgow. The intellectual leader of the group was Chris Pallis, whose pamphlets (written under the name Maurice Brinton) included Paris May 1968, The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control 1917-21 and The Irrational in Politics.[40] Other key Solidarity writers were Andy Anderson (author of Hungary 1956), Ken Weller (who wrote several pamphlets on industrial struggles and oversaw the group's Motor Bulletins on the car industry), Joe Jacobs (Out of the Ghetto), John Quail (The Slow-Burning Fuse), Phil Mailer (Portugal:The Impossible Revolution) John King (The Political Economy of Marx, A History of Marxian Economics), George Williamson (writing as James Finlayson, Urban Devastation - The Planning of Incarceration), David Lamb (Mutinies) and Liz Willis (Women in the Spanish Revolution).

Autonomism Autonomism refers to a set of left-wing political and social movements and theories close to the socialist movement. As an identifiable theoretical system, it first emerged in Italy in the 1960s from workerist (operaismo) communism. Later, post-Marxist and anarchist tendencies became significant after influence from the Situationists, the failure of Italian far-left movements in the 1970s and the emergence of a number of important theorists including Antonio Negri, who had contributed to the 1969 founding of Potere Operaio, Mario Tronti and Paolo Virno.

Through translations made available by Danilo Montaldi and others, the Italian autonomists drew upon previous activist research in the United States by theJohnson–Forest Tendency and Antonio Negri, main theorist in France by the group Socialisme ou Barbarie. of Italian autonomism It influenced the German and Dutch Autonomen, the worldwide social centre movement and today is influential in Italy, France and to a lesser extent the English-speaking countries. Those who describe themselves as autonomists now vary from Marxists to post-structuralists and anarchists. The autonomist Marxist and autonomen movements provided inspiration to some on the revolutionary left in English speaking countries, particularly among anarchists, many of whom have adopted autonomist tactics. Some English-speaking anarchists even describe themselves as autonomists. The Italian operaismo ("workerism") movement also influenced Marxist academics such as Harry Cleaver, John Holloway, Steve Wright and Nick Dyer-Witheford.

Communization Communization mainly refers to a contemporarycommunist theory in which we find is a "mixing-up ofinsurrectionist anarchism, the communist ultra-left, postautonomists, anti-political currents, groups like the Invisible Committee, as well as more explicitly ‘communizing’ currents, such as Théorie Communiste and Endnotes. Obviously at the heart of the word is communism and, as the shift to communization suggests, communism as a particular activity and process".[41]

The association of the term communization with a self-identified "ultra-left" was cemented in France in the 1970s, where it came to describe not a transition to a higher phase of communism, but a vision of communist revolution itself. Thus the 1975 Pamphlet A World Without Money states that "insurrection and communisation are intimately linked. There would not be first a period of insurrection and then later, thanks to this insurrection, the transformation of social reality. The insurrectional process derives its force from communisation itself".

The term is still used in this sense in France today and has spread into English usage as a result of the translation of texts by Gilles Dauvé and Théorie Comuniste, two key figures in this tendency. However, in the late 1990s a close but not identical sense of "communization" was developed by the French post-situationist group Tiqqun. In keeping with their ultra-left predecessors, Tiqqun's predilection for the term seems to be its emphasis on communism as an immediate process rather than a far-off goal, but for Tiqqun it is no longer synonymous with "the revolution" considered as an historical event, but rather becomes identifiable with all sorts of activities—from squatting and setting up communes to simply "sharing"—that would typically be understood as "pre- revolutionary".[42] From an ultra-left perspective such a politics of "dropping-out" or, as Tiqqun put it, "desertion"—setting up spaces and practices that are held to partially autonomous from capitalism—is typically dismissed as either naive or reactionary.[43] Due to the popularity of the Tiqqun-related works Call and The Coming Insurrection in the United States anarchist circles it tended to be this latter sense of "communization" that was employed in U.S. anarchist and "insurrectionist" communiques, notably within the Californian student movement of 2009–2010.[44]

References

1. Herman Gorter, Anton Pannekoek, Sylvia Pankhurst, Otto Ruhl Non-Leninist Marxism: Writings on the Workers Councils. Red and Black, 2007. 2. Ernesto Screpanti, Libertarian communism: Marx Engels and the Political Economy of Freedom, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2007. 3. Draper, Hal. "The Principle of Self-Emancipation in Marx and Engels" (https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/srv/arti cle/view/5333) Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20110723070247/https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/srv/ar ticle/view/5333) 2011-07-23 at the Wayback Machine. "The Socialist Register." Vol 4. 4. Chomsky, Noam. "Government In The Future" (http://chomsky.info/audionvideo/19700216.mp3) Archived (https://we b.archive.org/web/20101121062818/http://chomsky.info/audionvideo/19700216.mp3) 2010-11-21 at the Wayback Machine. Poetry Center of the New York YM-YWHA. Lecture. 5. "A libertarian Marxist tendency map" (http://libcom.org/library/libertarian-marxist-tendency-map). Libcom.org. Retrieved 2013-10-11. 6. "The 'Advance Without Authority' (http://www.democracynature.org/vol7/ojeili_intellectuals.htm): Post-modernism, Libertarian Socialism and Intellectuals" by Chamsy Ojeili,Democracy & Nature vol.7, no.3, 2001. 7. Beer, A History of British Socialism, vol. 2, pg. 256. 8. Marx-Engels Collected Works: Volume 48. New York: International Publishers, 2001; pg. 538, fn. 95. 9. Carr, E.H. – The Bolshevik Revolution 1917–1923. W. W. Norton & Company 1985. 10. Avrich, Paul. "Russian Anarchists and the Civil War", Russian Review, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Jul., 1968), pp. 296–306. Blackwell Publishing 11. Noam Chomsky Notes on Anarchism (http://www.chomsky.info/articles/1970----.htm) 12. Castoriadis, Cornelius (1975). "An Interview".T elos (23)., p. 133 13. Castoriadis, Cornelius (1975). "An Interview".T elos (23)., p. 134 14. Brinton, Maurice (Goodway, David ed). For Workers' Power: the selected writings of Maurice Brinton. AK Press. 2004. ISBN 1-904859-07-0 15. "Peasant (农民)" was the official term for workers on people's communes. According to the Ultra-Left, both peasants and (urban) workers together composed aproletarian class divorced from any meaningful control over production or distribution. 16. See, for instance, "Whither China?" (http://www.marxists.de/china/sheng/whither.htm) by Yang Xiguang. 17. The 70s Collective, ed. 1996.China: The Revolution is Dead, Long Live the Revolution. Montreal: Black Rose Books. 18. Robin Hahnel, Economic Justice and Democracy: From Competition to Cooperation Part II ISBN 0-415-93344-7 19. The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy (http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal/). Inclusivedemocracy.org. Retrieved on 2011-12-28. 20. "Libertarian Marxism? by Daniel Guérin" (http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/Daniel_Guerin__Libertarian_Marxism_. html). Theanarchistlibrary.org. 2011-04-23. Retrieved 2013-10-11. 21. Charles Shipman, It Had to Be Revolution: Memoirs of an American Radical. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993; pg. 107. 22. "Wilhelm Reich is again the main pioneer in this field (an excellent, short introduction to his ideas can be found in Maurice Brinton's The Irrational in Politics). In Children of the Future, Reich made numerous suggestions, based on his research and clinical experience, for parents, psychologists, and educators striving to develop libertarian methods of child rearing. (He did not use the term "libertarian," but that is what his methods are.) Hence, in this and the following sections we will summarise Reich's main ideas as well as those of other libertarian psychologists and educators who have been influenced by him, such asA.S. Neill and Alexander Lowen." "J.6 What methods of child rearing do anarchists advocate?" inAn Anarchist FAQ by Various Authors. 23. "In an earlier article (“Some Thoughts on Libertarianism,” Broadsheet No. 35), I argued that to define a position as “anti-authoritarian” is not, in fact, to define the position at all “but merely to indicate a relationship of opposition to another position, the authoritarian one...On the psychoanalytic side, Wilhelm Reich (The Sexual Revolution, Peter Neville-Vision Press, London, 1951| Character Analysis, Orgone Institute Press, N.Y., 1945; and The Function of the Orgasm, Orgone Institute Press, N.Y., 1942) was preferred to Freud because, despite his own weaknesses – his Utopian tendencies and his eventual drift into “orgones” and “bions” – Reich laid more emphasis on the social conditions of mental events than did Freud (see, e.g., A.J. Baker, “Reich’s Criticism of Freud,” Libertarian No. 3, January 1960)." "A Reading List for Libertarians" by David Iverson. Broadsheet No. 39 24. "I will also discuss other left-libertarians who wrote about Reich, as they bear on the general discussion of Reich's ideas...In 1944, Paul Goodman, author of Growing Up Absurd, The Empire City, and co-author of Gestalt Therapy, began to discover the work of Wilhelm Reich for his American audience in the tiny libertarian socialist and anarchist milieu." Orgone Addicts: Wilhelm Reich Versus The Situationists. "Orgone Addicts Wilhelm Reich versus the Situationists" by Jim Martin (http://www.lust-for-life.org/Lust-For-Life/ReichVersusTheSituationists/ReichVersusTheSit uationists.htm) 25. "In the summer of 1950-51, numerous member of the A.C.C. and other interested people held a series of meetings in the Ironworkers' Hall with a view to forming a downtown political society. Here a division developed between a more radical wing (including e.g. Waters and Grahame Harrison) and a more conservative wing (including e.g. Stove and Eric Dowling). The general orientation of these meetings may be judged from the fact that when Harry Hooton proposed "Anarchist" and some of the conservative proposed "Democratic" as the name for the new Society, both were rejected and "Libertarian Society" was adopted as an acceptable title. Likewise then accepted as the motto for this Society - and continued by the later Libertarian society - was the early Marx quotation used by Wilhelm Reich as the motto for his The Sexual Revolution, vis: "Since it is not for us to create a plan for the future that will hold for all time, all the more surely what we contemporaries have to do is the uncompromising critical evaluation of all that exists, uncompromising in the sense that our criticism fears neither its own results nor the conflict with the powers that be." "SYDNEY LIBERTARIANISM & THE PUSH" by A.J. Baker, in Broadsheet, No 81, March, 1975. (abridged) 26. That he was one of the most radical figures in psychiatry, see Sheppard 1973 (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/a rticle/0,9171,907256-1,00.html). Danto 2007 (https://books.google.com/books?id=lq8rwc61ae4C&pg=PA43), p. 43: "Wilhelm Reich, the second generation psychoanalyst perhaps most often associated with political radicalism ..." Turner 2011, p. 114: "[Reich's mobile clinic was] perhaps the most radical, politically engaged psychoanalytic enterprise to date." For the publication and significance ofThe Mass Psychology of Fascism and Character Analysis, see Sharaf 1994 (https://books.google.com/books?id=ddlMl4jJgh0C&pg=PA163), pp. 163–164, 168. For Character Analysis being an important contribution to psychoanalytic theory, see: Young-Bruehl 2008 (https://books.google.com/books?id=OcoQTQwTDu8C&pg=PA157&lpg=PA157), p. 157: "Reich, a year and a half younger than Anna Freud, was the youngest instructor at theraining T Institute, where his classes on psychoanalytic technique, later presented in a book calledCharacter Analysis, were crucial to his whole group of contemporaries." Sterba 1982 (https://books.google.com/books?id=uaFaiUZsFD4C&pg=PA35), p. 35: "This book [Character Analysis] serves even today as an excellent introduction to psychoanalytic technique. In my opinion, Reich's understanding of and technical approach to resistance prepared the way for Anna Freud's Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936)." Guntrip 1961 (https://books.google.com/books?id=y6tfazvZU3gC&pg=PA105), p. 105: "... the two important books of the middle 1930s,Character Analysis (1935) by Wilhelm Reich andThe Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936) by Anna Freud."

For more on the influence ofThe Mass Psychology of Fascism, see Kirkpatrick 1947 (https://www.jstor.org/stabl e/1024664), Burgess 1947 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2571947); Bendix 1947 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2771 342); and Turner 2011, p. 152. 27. For Anna Freud, see Bugental, Schneider and Pierson 2001 (https://books.google.com/books?id=jtO7czidPeYC&pg =PA14), p. 14: "Anna Freud's work on the ego and the mechanisms of defense developed from Reich's early research (A. Freud, 1936/1948)." For Perls, Lowen and Janov, see Sharaf 1994 (https://books.google.com/books?id=ddlMl4jJgh0C&pg=PA4), p. 4. For the students, see Elkind, 18 April 1971 (https://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20D15FE355F127 A93CAA8178FD85F458785F9); and Turner 2011, pp. 13–14. 28. Sharaf 1994, pp. 419, pp. 460–461. 29. Sex-Pol stood for the German Society of Proletarian Sexual Politics. Danto writes that Reich feredof a mixture of "psychoanalytic counseling, Marxist advice and contraceptives," and argued for a sexual permissiveness, including for young people and the unmarried, that unsettled other psychoanalysts and the political left. The clinics were immediately overcrowded by people seeking help. Danto, Elizabeth Ann (2007).Freud's Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis & Social Justice, 1918–1938, Columbia University Press, first published 2005., pp. 118–120, 137, 198, 208. 30. The Sexual Revolution, 1945 (Die Sexualität im Kulturkampf, translated by Theodore. PWolfe) 31. Douglas Kellner Herbert arcuse (http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell12.htm) 32. Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization, 2nd edition. London: Routledge, 1987. 33. Young, Robert M. (1969).THE NAKED MARX: Review of Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (http://www.human-nature.com/rmyoung/papers/paper89h.html), New Statesman, vol. 78, 7 November 1969, pp. 666-67 34. Douglas Kellner "Marcuse, Herbert" (http://www.uta.edu/english/dab/illuminations/kell12.html) Archived (https://web.a rchive.org/web/20120207123630/http://www.uta.edu/english/dab/illuminations/kell12.html) 2012-02-07 at the Wayback Machine. 35. Howard, Dick (1975). "Introduction to Castoriadis".T elos (23): 118. 36. Castoriadis, Cornelius (1975). "An Interview".T elos (23): 133. 37. Castoriadis, Cornelius (1975). "An Interview".T elos (23): 134. 38. The Beginning of an Era (part1 (http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/12.era1.htm), part 2 (http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/12.e ra2.htm)) Situationist International #12, 1969 39. Karen Elliot (2001-06-01)."Situationism in a nutshell" (http://www.barbelith.com/cgi-bin/articles/00000011.shtml). Barbelith Webzine. Retrieved 2008-06-23. 40. Now collected in a book, Maurice Brinton,For Workers' Power. 41. Benjamin Noys (ed). Communization and its Discontents: Contestation, Critique, and Contemporary Struggles. (htt p://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=299) Minor Compositions, Autonomedia. 2011. 1st ed. 42. "As we apprehend it, the process of instituting communism can only take the form of a collection of acts of communisation, of making common such-and-such space, such-and-such machine, such-and-such knowledge. That is to say, the elaboration of the mode of sharing that attaches to them. Insurrection itself is just an accelerator, a decisive moment in this process." Anonymous,Call (http://www.bloom0101.org/call.pdf) Archived (https://web.archiv e.org/web/20110721212804/http://www.bloom0101.org/call.pdf) 2011-07-21 at the Wayback Machine. 43. For a critique of Tiqqun from an ultra-left perspective, as well as a description of the opposition between the two sense of "communization" See also Dauvé and Nesic,"Un Appel et une Invite" (http://troploin0.free.fr/ii/index.php/tex tes/19-communisation-un-appel-et-une-invite). 44. See e.g. "After the Fall: Communiqués from Occupied California" (http://afterthefallcommuniques.info/) Archived (http s://web.archive.org/web/20110126222020/http://afterthefallcommuniques.info/) 2011-01-26 at the Wayback Machine.

Bibliography

Pioneers of Anti-Parliamentarism by Guy Aldred. Glasgow: Bakunin Press. Non-Leninist Marxism: Writings on the Workers Councils (a collection of writings by Gorter, Pannekoek, Pankhurst, and Ruhle). Red and Black Publishers, St Petersburg, Florida, 2007.ISBN 978-0-9791813-6-8. The International Communist Current, itself a Left Communist grouping, has produced a series of studies of what it views as its own antecedents. The book on the German-Dutch current, which is by Philippe Bourrinet (who later left the ICC), in particular contains an exhaustive bibliography.

The Italian Communist Left 1926–1945 (ISBN 1897980132). The Dutch-German Communist Left (ISBN 1899438378). The Russian Communist Left, 1918–1930 (ISBN 1897980108). The British Communist Left, 1914–1945 (ISBN 1897980116). (in French) L’Autonomie. Le mouvement autonome en France et en Italie, éditions Spartacus 1978. Benjamin Noys (ed). Communization and its Discontents: Contestation, Critique, and Contemporary Struggles. Minor Compositions, Autonomedia. 2011. 1st ed. Beyond post-socialism. Dialogues with the far-left by Chamsy el- Ojeili. Palgrave Macmillan. 2015.

External links

"Libertarian Marxism?" by Daniel Guérin. Situationist International online. "Libertarian Marxism's Relation to Anarchism" by Wayne Price. "Franz Kafka and Libertarian Socialism" by Michael Löwy. For Communism – John Gray WebSite: large online library of libertarian communist texts. Left Communism collection on the Marxists Internet Archive. "The Libertarian Marxism of Andre Breton" by Michael Lowy.

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Libertarian_Marxism&oldid=831387465"

This page was last edited on 20 March 2018, at 09:43.

Text is available under theCreative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of theWikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization. Left communism

Left communism is the range of communist viewpoints held by the communist left, which criticizes the political ideas and practices espoused—particularly following the series of revolutions which brought theFirst World War to an end—by Bolsheviks and by social democrats. Left communists assert positions which they regard as more authentically Marxist and proletarian than the views of Marxism–Leninism espoused by the Communist International after its first congress (March 1919) and during its second congress (July–August 1920).[1]

There are a range of left communist political movements. These are all distinct from Marxist–Leninists (whom they largely view as merely the left-wing of capital), from anarchist communists (some of whom they consider internationalist socialists)[2] and from various other revolutionary socialist tendencies (see De Leonists, whom they tend to see as being internationalist socialists only in limited instances).[3]

Left communism breaks from Leninist ideas, believing that communists should not participate in capitalist parliaments or participate in conservative trade unions. However, many left communists split over their criticisms of Leninism. Of left communists, the council communists criticized the Bolsheviks for their elitist party functions and emphasized a more autonomous organization of the working class, while others like Amadeo Bordiga emphasized political parties and criticized multi-party states.[4]

Although she was murdered in 1919 before left communism proper crystallized, Rosa Luxemburg has heavily influenced most left communists, both politically and theoretically. Proponents of left communism have included Amadeo Bordiga (1889–1970), Onorato Damen (1893-1979), Jacques Camatte, Herman Gorter, Anton Pannekoek, Otto Rühle, Sylvia Pankhurst (1882–1960) and Paul Mattick (1904–1981).

Left communist organizations active as of 2017 include the International Communist Party, the International Communist Current and the Internationalist Communist Tendency.

Contents

Early history and overview Russian left communism Italian left communism until 1926 German-Dutch left communism until 1933 Left communism and the Communist International Italian left communism 1926–1939 1939–1945 1945–1952 1952–1968 Since 1968 See also References Further reading

Early history and overview Two major traditions can be observed within left communism: the Dutch-German tradition and the Italian tradition.[5] The political positions those traditions share are: opposition to what is termed frontism, many kinds of nationalism and thus national liberation movements (although Bordiga and many Bordigist groups have positions that some left-communists consider supportive of national liberation) and parliamentarianism. There is an underlying commonality at a level of abstract theory and more crucially, left communist groups from both traditions tend to identify elements of commonality in each other.

The historical origins of left communism can be traced to the period before the First World War. All left communists were supportive of the October Revolution in Russia but retained a critical view of its development. Some, however, would in later years come to reject the idea that the revolution had a proletarian or socialist nature, arguing that it had simply carried out the tasks of the bourgeois revolution by creating a state capitalist system.

Left communism first came into focus as a distinct movement around 1918. Its essential features were: a stress on the need to build a communist party entirely separate from the reformist and centrist elements who were seen as having betrayed socialism in 1914, opposition to all but the most restricted participation in elections and an emphasis on the need for revolutionaries to move on the offensive. Apart from that, there was little in common between the various wings. Only the Italians accepted the need for electoral work at all for a very short period of time, which they later vehemently opposed, attracting the wrath of Lenin in "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder.[6] Although the German-Dutch and Russian wings opposed the "right of nations to self- determination", which they denounced as a form of bourgeois nationalism, the Italians did not have a clear position on national determination.

Russian left communism

Left Bolshevism emerged in 1907 as the Vpered group challenged Lenin's authoritarianism and parliamentarianism. The group included: Alexander Bogdanov, Maxim Gorky, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Mikhail Pokrovsky, Grigory Aleksinsky, Stanislav Volski, and Martyn Liadov. The Otzovists (or Recallists) advocated the recall of RSDLP representatives from the Third Duma. Bogdanov and his allies accused Lenin and his partisans of promotingliberal democracy through "parliamentarism at any price."[7](p8)

In 1918 a faction emerged within the Russian Communist Party named the Left Communists, which opposed the signing of the Brest- Litovsk peace treaty with Imperial Germany. The Left Communists wanted international proletarian revolution across the world. The leader of this faction, in the beginning, was Nikolai Bukharin. They stood for a revolutionary war against the Central Powers; opposed the right of nations to self-determination (specifically in the case of Poland, since there were many Poles in this communist group and they did not want a Polish capitalist state to be established); and they generally took a voluntarist stance regarding the possibilities for social revolution at that time.

They began to publish a newspaper, Kommunist,[8] which offered a critique of the direction in which the Bolsheviks were heading. They argued against the over-bureaucratisation of the state and further argued that full state ownership of the means of production should proceed at a quicker pace than Lenin desired.

The Left Communists faded as the world revolutionary wave died down in militancy; Lenin had proved too strong a figure. They also lost Bukharin as a leading figure, since his position became more right-wing until he eventually came to agree with Lenin. Being defeated in internal debates, they then dissolved. A few very small left communist groups surfaced within the RSFSR in the next few years, but later fell victim to repression by the state. In many ways, the positions of the Left Communists were inherited by the Workers Opposition faction and Gabriel Myasnikov's Workers Group of the Russian Communist Party and to some extent by the Decists.

Italian left communism until 1926

The Italian left communists were named "left communists" at a later stage in their development, but when the Communist Party of Italy (PCI) was founded, its members actually represented the majority of communists in that country. This was a result of the Abstentionist Communist Faction of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) being in advance of other sections of the PSI in their realisation that a separate communist party had to be formed which did not include reformists. This gave them a great advantage over the sections of the PSI who looked to figures such as Serratti and Gramsci for leadership. It was a consequence of the revolutionary impatience common at a time when revolution, in the narrow sense of an insurrectionary attempt at the seizure of power, was expected to develop in the very near future.

Under the leadership of Amadeo Bordiga, the left was to control the PCI until the Lyons Congress of 1926. In this period, the militants of the PCI would find themselves isolated from reformist workers and from other anti-fascist militants. At one stage this isolation was deepened when communist militants were instructed to leave defense organisations that were not totally controlled by the party. These sectarian tactics produced concern in the leadership of the Communist International and led to a developing opposition within the PCI itself. Eventually these two factors led to the displacement of Bordiga from his position as first secretary and his replacement by Gramsci. By then, Bordiga was in a fascist jail and he was to remain outside organised politics until 1952. The development of the Left Communist Faction was not the development of the Bordigist current (as it is often portrayed).

The year 1925 was a turning point for the Italian left as it was the year that the so-called Bolshevisation took place in the sections of the Communist International. This plan was designed to eliminate all social democratic deviations from the Comintern and develop them on Bolshevik lines or at least along the lines of what Zinoviev, the secretary of the International, considered Bolshevik lines. In practice, this meant top-down bureaucratic structures in which the members were controlled by a leadership approved of by the Comintern's International Executive Committee. In Italy this meant that the leadership which had formerly been in the hands of Bordiga was given to a body that came into being when the Serrati-Maffi minority of the PSI joined the PCI, although Bordiga's group were in a majority. The new leadership was supported by Bordiga, who, as a centralist, accepted the will of the International.

Nevertheless, Bordiga fought the IEC from within, only to have an article of his which was favourable to Trotsky's positions on the disputed Russian questions suppressed. Meanwhile, sections of the left motivated by Onorato Damen formed the Entente Committee. This committee was ordered to dissolve itself by the incoming leadership, led now by Gramsci who only then opposed Bordiga's positions, which had gained prestige after a successful recruitment campaign. With the party Congress of 1926 held in Lyons, crowned by Gramsci's famous Lyons Theses, the left majority was now defeated and on course to becoming a minority within the party. With the victory of fascism in Italy, Bordiga was jailed and when he opposed a vote against Trotsky in the prison PCI group, he was expelled from the party in 1930 . He took a stance of non-involvement in politics for many years after this. The victory of Italian fascism also meant that the Italian left would enter into a new chapter in its development – this time in exile.

German-Dutch left communism until 1933

Left communism emerged in both countries together and was always very closely connected. Among the leading theoreticians of the more powerful German movement were Anton Pannekoek and Herman Gorter (for example) and German activists found refuge in the Netherlands after the Nazis came to power in 1933. The critique of Social Democratic reformism can be traced back before World War I, since in the Netherlands a revolutionary wing of Social Democracy had broken from the reformist party even before the war and had built links with German activists. By 1915 theAntinational Socialist Party was founded by Franz Pfemfert, and was linked to Die Aktion.[9] After the beginning of theGerman Revolution in 1918, a leftist mood could be found among sections of the communist parties of both countries. In Germany this led directly to the foundation of the Communist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD) after its leading figures were expelled from the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) by Paul Levi. This development was mirrored in the Netherlands and on a smaller scale inBulgaria , where the left communist movement was to mimic that of Germany.

When it was founded, the KAPD included some tens of thousands of revolutionaries. However, within a few years, it had broken up and practically dissolved. This was because it was founded on the basis of revolutionary optimism and a purism that rejected what became known as frontism. Frontism entailed working in the same organisations as reformist workers. Such work was seen by the KAPD as unhelpful at a time when the revolution was thought to be an imminent event, and not merely a goal to be aimed at. This led the members of the KAPD to reject working in the traditional trade unions in favour of forming their own Revolutionary Unions. These unionen, so called to distinguish them from the official trade unions, had 80,000 members in 1920 and peaked in 1921 with 200,000 members, after which they declined rapidly. They were also organisationally divided from the beginning, with those unionen linked to the KAPD forming the AAU-D, and those in Saxony around Otto Rühle who opposed the conception of a party in favour of a unitary class organisation being organised as the AAU-E. The KAPD was unable to reach even its founding Congress prior to suffering its first split when the so-called National Bolshevik tendency around Fritz Wolffheim and Heinrich Laufenberg appeared (it should be noted that this tendency has no connection with modern political tendencies in Russia which use the same name). More seriously, the KAPD lost most of its support very rapidly as it failed to develop lasting structures. This also contributed to internecine quarrels and the party actually split into two competing tendencies known as the Essen and Berlin tendencies to the historians of the left. The recently established Communist Workers International (KAI) split on exactly the same lines as did the tiny Communist Workers Party of Bulgaria. The only other affiliates of the KAI were the Communist Workers Party of Britain led by Sylvia Pankhurst, the Communist Workers Party of the Netherlands (KAPN) in the Netherlands and a group in Russia. The AAU-D split on the same lines, and it rapidly ceased to exist as a real tendency within the factories.

Left communism and the Communist International

Left communists generally supported the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 and entertained enormous hopes in the founding of the Communist International. In fact, they controlled the first body formed by the Comintern to coordinate its activities in Western Europe, the Amsterdam Bureau. However, this was little more than a very brief interlude and the Bureau never functioned as a leadership body for Western Europe as was originally intended. The Vienna Bureau of the Comintern may also be classified as left communist, but its personnel were not to evolve into either of the two historic currents that made up left communism. Rather, the Vienna Bureau adopted the ultra-left ideas of theearliest period in the history of the Comintern.

Left communists supported the Russian Revolution, but did not accept the methods of the Bolsheviks. Many of the German-Dutch tradition adopted Rosa Luxemburg's criticisms, as outlined in her posthumously published essay entitled The Russian Revolution. In this essay, she rejected the Bolshevik position on distribution of land to the peasantry, and their espousal of the "Right of nations to Self Determination" which she rejected as historically outmoded. The Italian left communists did not at the time accept any of these criticisms and both currents would evolve.

To a considerable degree, Lenin's well known polemic Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder,[6] is an attack on the ideas of the emerging left communist currents. His main aim was to polemicise with currents moving towards pure revolutionary tactics by showing them that they could remain based on firmly revolutionary principles while utilising a variety of tactics. Therefore, Lenin defended the use of parliamentarism and working within the official trade unions.

As the Kronstadt rebellion occurred at a time when the debate on tactics was still raging within the Comintern, it has been wrongly seen as being left communist by some commentators. In fact, the left communist currents had no connection with the rebellion – although they did rally to its support when they learned of it. In later years, the German-Dutch tradition in particular would come to see the suppression of the revolt as the historic turning point in the evolution of the Russian state after October 1917.

Italian left communism 1926–1939

After 1926, Italian left communism took shape in exile and without the participation of Bordiga. Contacts between the Italians and the Germans had been made and were developed in France, but the Italian left saw the KAPD's stress on factoryganisation or as being similar to the ideas of Gramsci's L'Ordine Nuovo and therefore rejected closer contact. Attempts to work with the group around Karl Korsch also failed. The left faction of the PCd'I was formally established in July 1927 by a number of young militants. This new group had members in France, Belgium and the USA and published a review entitled Prometeo. It was estimated in 1928 that it had at most 200 militants, but it would seem that while it never had more than 100 militants active at any one time its influence was actually far greater. The control of the PCd'I apparatus by the Stalinists, however, meant that attempts to reach other exiles was almost impossible and they were driven back into small circle work.

The Italian left faction was for the rest of the 1930s led by Ottorino Perrone (also known with the pseudonym Vercesi), although it was fiercely opposed to the cult of the personality which was developing in the Comintern around Stalin in these years and resisted similar pressures in its own organisation. The faction had members in France, Belgium and the USA; how many in Italy looked to it cannot be ascertained (since all communist activities there had been driven underground by the fascist government). The main activity of the faction through these years was the publishing of its press, which consisted of the paper Prometeo and the journal Bilan. With its establishment as a group, the Fraction also looked for international co-thinkers. Seeing the International Left Opposition, led by Leon Trotsky, as central to the non-Stalinist Communist movement, they sought contact with it. These contacts were to be severed when agreement on basic principles proved impossible.

The political distance between the faction and other communist currents would deepen throughout the 1930s as the faction declared itself opposed to the tactics adopted by the Left Opposition to broaden its support (i.e. the faction affirmed its opposition to fusion with centrist groups, opposition to entryism, etc.) Always opposed to the United Front tactic of the Comintern, the Fraction now declared itself firmly opposed to the Popular Front after 1933 . Like the Trotskyists, it saw the failure of the Communist Party of Germany in the face of fascism as its historic failure and ceased to consider itself a fraction of the Communist Party from the date of its 1935 Congress, held inBrussels .

Isolated, the Left Fraction sought to discover allies within the milieu of groups to the left of the Trotskyist movement. Typically these discussions came to nothing, but they were able to recruit from the disintegrating Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes (LCI) in Belgium, a group which had broken from Trotskyism. A loose liaison was also maintained with the Council Communist groups in the Netherlands and in particular with the GIK. However, these discussions were pushed into the background as the attempted fascist coup in Spain led to revolution andcivil war.

Immediately after the civil war began, a minority emerged within the Left Fraction whose members sought to participate in the events in Spain. This minority, including longtime members of the fraction, numbered some 26 militants mainly belonging to the Parisian federation of the Fraction. They traveled to Barcelona to enlist in the workers militias and after a fruitless meeting in September with a delegation from the Fraction back home, they were expelled. The problem for the Fraction was that the military support given to the Republican forces by this minority was accompanied by political support (in that the minority wished to halt strikes among loyalist workers in the name of military victory against fascism). According to the Fraction, no support could be given to a bourgeois state, even in a struggle against fascism.

The question of Spain forced the Belgian LCI to clarify its positions and a split ensued as a result of debate within its ranks. At its February 1937 conference a minority of the LCI led by Mitchell defended the positions of the Italian Left and were expelled. Although less than ten in number, they formed a Belgian Fraction of the Communist Left. It was at this point that the Italian Left learned of a group called the Grupo de Trabajadores in Mexico with very similar positions to their own. It was led by Paul Kirchhoff and had left the Mexican Trotskyist movement. Kirchoff had formerly been a member of the KAPD in Germany, then a Trotskyist in the USA but his tiny group would seem to have disappeared at the outbreak of war in 1939. In early 1938 the Italian and Belgian Fractions formed an International Bureau of the Left Fractions which published a review calledOctobr e.

During this period the Italian Left also reviewed a number of positions which it thought had become outdated. They rejected the idea of national self-determination and began to develop their views on the war economy and capitalist decadence. Much of this was carried out by Vercesi, but Mitchell from the Belgian Fraction was also a leading figure in the work. Perhaps most dramatically they also reviewed their understanding of the Russian Revolution and the state that had emerged from it. Eventually they came to argue that the Russian state was by the late 1930s state capitalist and was not to be defended. In short, they believed there was need for a new revolution.

1939–1945

Many small currents to the left of the mass Communist Parties collapsed at the beginning of the Second World War and the Left Communists were initially silent too. Despite having foreseen the war more clearly than some other factions, when it began they were overwhelmed. Many were persecuted by either German Nazism or Italian fascism. Leading militants of the Communist Left, such as Mitchell, who was Jewish, were to die in theBuchenwald concentration camp.

Meanwhile, in Germany the final council communist groups had disappeared in the maelstrom and in the Netherlands the International Communist Group (GIK) was moribund. The former "centrist" group led by Henk Sneevliet (the Revolutionary Socialist Workers Party, RSAP) transformed itself into the Marx–Lenin–Luxemburg Front. But in April 1942 its leadership was arrested by the Gestapo and killed. The remaining activists then split into two camps, on the one hand some turned to Trotskyism forming the Committee of Revolutionary Marxists (CRM) while the majority formed the CommunistenBond-Spartacus. The latter group turned to council communism and was joined by most members of the GIK.

In 1941, the Italian Fraction was reorganised in France and along with the new French Nucleus of the Communist Left came into conflict with the ideas which the Fraction had propagated from 1936: of the social disappearance of theproletariat and localised wars, etc. These ideas continued to be defended by Vercesi in Brussels. Gradually the Left Fractions adopted positions drawn from German Left Communism. They abandoned the conception that the Russian state remained in some way proletarian and also dropped Vercesi's conception of localised wars in favour of ideas on imperialism inspired by Rosa Luxemburg. Vercesi's participation in a Red Cross committee was also fiercely contested.

The strike at FIAT in October 1942 had a huge impact on the Italian Fraction in France, which was deepened by the fall of Mussolini's regime in July 1943. The Italian Fraction now saw a pre-revolutionary situation opening in Italy and prepared to participate in the coming revolution. Revived by Marco in Marseilles, the Italian Fraction now worked closely with the new French Fraction, which was formally founded in Paris in December 1944. However, in May 1945 the Italian Fraction, many of whose members had already returned to Italy, voted to dissolve itself so that it's militants could integrate themselves as individuals into the Internationalist Communist Party. The conference at which this decision was made also refused to recognise the French Fraction and expelled Marco from their group.

This led to a split in the French Fraction and the formation of the Gauche Communiste de France by the French Fraction led by Marco. The history of the GCF belongs to the post-war period. Meanwhile, the former members of the French Fraction who sympathised with Vercesi and the Internationalist Communist party formed a new French Fraction, which published the journal L'Etincelle and was joined at the end of 1945 by the old minority of the Fraction who had joinedL'Union Communiste in the 1930s.

One other development during the war years merits mention at this point. A small grouping of German and Austrian militants came close to Left Communist positions in these years. Best known, to those few who know of them, as the Revolutionary Communist Organisation, these young militants were exiles from Nazism living in France at the start of World War II and were members of the Trotskyist movement but they had opposed the formation of the Fourth International in 1938 on the grounds that it was premature. They were refused full delegates' credentials and only admitted to the founding conference of the Youth International on the following day. They then joined Hugo Oehler's International Contact Commission for the Fourth (Communist) International and in 1939 were publishing Der Marxist in Antwerp.

With the beginning of the war, they took the name Revolutionary Communists of Germany (RKD) and came to define Russia as state capitalist, in agreement with Ante Ciliga's book The Russian Enigma. At this point they adopted a revolutionary defeatist position on the war and condemned Trotskyism for its critical defence of Russia (which was seen by Trotskyists as a degenerated workers' state). After the fall of France, they renewed contact with militants in the Trotskyist milieu in Southern France and recruited some of them into the Communistes Revolutionnaires in 1942. This group became known as Fraternisation Proletarienne in 1943 and then L'Organisation Communiste Revolutionnaire in 1944 . The CR and RKD were autonomous, and clandestine, but worked closely together with shared politics. As the war ran its course, they evolved in a councilist direction, while also identifying more and more with Rosa Luxemburg's work. They also worked with the French Fraction of the Communist Left and seem to have disintegrated at the end of the war. This disintegration was speeded no doubt by the capture of a leading militant, Karl Fischer, who was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp where he was to participate in writing the Declaration of the Internationalist Communists of Buchenwald when the camp was liberated.

1945–1952

The closing stages of the Second World War marked a watershed in the history of Left Communism, as was true for every other political tendency. Left Communists, like the Trotskyists, expected the war to end with at least the beginnings of a revolutionary wave of struggle similar to that which had marked the end of the First World War. Therefore, strikes in Italy from 1942 onwards were of intense interest to them. Many Left Communists formerly in exile, in jail or simply inactive due to repression returned to active political activity in Italy. This had the result that new organisations identifying with Left Communism came into being and older ones dissolved themselves. We look at these organisations and in particular at theInternational Communist Party below.

If for the Italian Left the end of war marked a new beginning, it also did so for the German-Dutch Left. Although in Germany it was the case that the Communist Left tradition was all but extinguished, surviving only in the form of a few scattered groups holding councilist views, France, by comparison, saw an interesting development with the beginning of a conscious attempt to develop a synthesis of the two strands of Left Communism in the form of the Gauche Communiste de France, which built on pre-war contributions.

1952–1968

The year 1952 signaled the end of mass influence on the part of Italian Left Communism, as its sole remaining representative, the Internationalist Communist Party, split in two sections; the group led by Bordiga took the name International Communist Party, which continues today. The Gauche Communiste de France (GCF) also dissolved in the same year. Left Communists entered a period of almost constant decline from this point onwards, although they were somewhat rejuvenated by the events 1968of .

Since 1968

The uprisings of May 1968 led to a small resurgence of interest in left communist ideas. Various small left communist groups emerged around the world, predominantly in the leading capitalist countries.[10][11][12][13] A series of conferences of the communist left began in 1976, with the aim of promoting international and cross-tendency discussion, but these petered out in the 1980s without having increased the profile of the movement or its unity of ideas.[14]

Prominent post-1968 proponents of Left Communism have included Paul Mattick and Maximilien Rubel. Prominent left communist groups existing today include the International Communist Party, International Communist Current and the Internationalist Communist Tendency. In addition to the left communist groups in the direct lineage of the Italian and Dutch traditions, a number of groups with similar positions have flourished since 1968, such as theworkerist and autonomist movements in Italy; Kolinko, Kurasje, Wildcat;[15] Subversion and Aufheben in England; Théorie Communiste, Echanges & Mouvements and Démocratie Communiste in France; TPTG,[16] Blaumachen [17] in Greece; Kamunist Kranti in India; Collective Action Notes and Loren Goldner in the USA.

See also

Anarchist communism Autonomism Council communism Left Communism in China Libertarian socialism List of left-wing internationals List of left communists Luxemburgism Ultra-leftism

References

1. Non-Leninist Marxism: Writings on the Workers Councils (includes texts by Gorter, Pannekoek, Pankhurst and Rühle), Red and Black Publishers, St Petersburg, Florida, 2007.ISBN 978-0-9791813-6-8 2. http://en.internationalism.org/wr/336/anarchism 3. "The Legacy of De Leonism, part III: De Leon's misconceptions on class struggle" (http://en.internationalism.org/boo k/export/html/761). Internationalism. 2000–2001. 4. "Left-Wing, Anti-Bolshevik and Council Communism" (https://www.marxists.org/subject/left-wing/). Marxists.org. Retrieved 5 November 2016. 5. "Background on the Italian Communist Left, Bordiga and Bordigism" (http://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2003-08-01/b ackground-on-the-italian-communist-left-bordiga-and-bordigism). Leftcom. 2003-08-01. Retrieved 2013-10-17. 6. "Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder" (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/index.htm). Marxists.org. Retrieved 2013-10-17. 7. Sochor Z. A. "Revolution and Culture: The Bogdanov-Lenin Controversy." (https://books.google.com/books?id=wqNa ezGQ2uIC&dq=bogdanov&source=gbs_navlinks_s) Cornell University Press 1988 p4.ISBN 0801420881, 9780801420887. 8. "Glossary of Periodicals: Ko" (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/periodicals/k/o.htm). Marxists.org. Retrieved 2013-10-17. 9. Taylor, Seth (1990). Left-Wing Nietzscheans: The Politics of German Expressionism 1910-1920. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. p. 220. 10. "May 68: the student movement in France and the world" (http://en.internationalism.org/wr/313/may-68). Internationalism. Retrieved 2015-12-19. 11. Lassou (May 2012). "Contribution to a history of the workers' movement in Africa (v): May 1968 in Senegal" (http://e n.internationalism.org/print/book/export/html/4991). Internationalism. Retrieved 2015-12-19. 12. "1968 in Japan: the student movement and workers' struggles" (http://en.internationalism.org/2008/09/japan-1968). Internationalism. 2008-03-23. Retrieved 2015-12-19. |first1= missing |last1= in Authors list (help) 13. "1968 in Germany (Part 1): Behind the protest movement – the search for a new society" (http://en.internationalism.o rg/icconline/2008/june/Germany-1968). Internationalism. 2008-05-26. Retrieved 2015-12-19. 14. "The International Conferences of the Communist Left (1976-80) | International Communist Current" (http://en.intern ationalism.org/ir/122_conferences). En.internationalism.org. Retrieved 2013-10-17. 15. "Wildcat" (http://www.wildcat-www.de/). Wildcat-www.de. 2013-09-21. Retrieved 2013-10-17. 16. "Τα παιδιά της γαλαρίας" (http://www.tapaidiatisgalarias.org). Tapaidiatisgalarias.org. Retrieved 2013-10-17. 17. "Blaumachen – journal" (http://www.blaumachen.gr). Blaumachen.gr. Retrieved 2013-10-17.

Further reading

Non-Leninist Marxism: Writings on the Workers Councils (includes texts by Gorter, Pannekoek, Pankhurst and Rühle), Red and Black Publishers, St Petersburg, Florida, 2007.ISBN 978-0-9791813-6-8 The International Communist Current, itself a Left Communist grouping, has produced a series of studies of what it views as its own antecedents. The book on the German-Dutch current, which is by Philippe Bourrinet (who later left the ICC), in particular contains an exhaustive bibliography.

The Italian Communist Left 1926–1945 (ISBN 1897980132) The Dutch-German Communist Left (ISBN 1899438378) The Russian Communist Left, 1918–1930 (ISBN 1897980108) The British Communist Left, 1914–1945 (ISBN 1897980116) Also of interest is volume 5 number 4 of Spring 1995 of the journalRevolutionary History : "Through Fascism, War and Revolution: Trotskyism and Left Communism in Italy". In addition, there is a good deal of material published on the Internet in various languages. A useful starting point is the Left Communism collection published on the Marxists Internet Archive.

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Left_communism&oldid=829913548"

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Text is available under theCreative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of theWikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization. Autonomism

Autonomism or autonomist Marxism is a set of anti-authoritarian left-wing political and social movements and theories.[1][2][3] As a theoretical system, it first emerged in Italy in the 1960s from workerist (operaismo) communism. Later, post-Marxist and anarchist tendencies became significant after influence from the Situationists, the failure of Italian far-left movements in the 1970s, and the emergence of a number of important theorists including Antonio Negri, who had contributed to the 1969 founding of Potere Operaio, as well as Mario Tronti, Paolo Virno and Franco "Bifo" Berardi.

Georgy Katsiaficas summarizes the forms of autonomous movements saying that "In contrast to the centralized decisions and hierarchical authority structures of modern institutions, autonomous social movements involve people directly in decisions affecting their everyday lives. They seek to expand democracy and to help individuals break free of political structures and behavior patterns imposed from the outside."[4] As such this has involved a call for the independence of social movements from political parties[5] in a revolutionary perspective which seeks to create a practical political alternative to both authoritarian socialism and contemporary representative democracy.[6]

Autonomism influenced the German and Dutch Autonomen, the worldwide social centre movement, and today is influential in Italy, France, and to a lesser extent the English-speaking countries. Those who describe themselves as autonomists now vary from Marxists to anarchists.

Contents

Etymology The Marxist Autonomist theory Italian autonomism Influences Direct action The French autonome movement The German Autonome movement in the 1970s and 1980s The Greek anarcho-autonomoi Influence See also Autonomist thinkers Movements and organizations Autonomist publications Others References Bibliography External links Archives Others

Etymology The term autonomia/Autonome was first used in 1620, having been composed out of two Greek words, "auto–nomos", referring to someone or something which lives by his/her own rule. Autonomy, in this sense, is not independence. While independence refers to an autarchic kind of life, separated from the community, autonomy refers to life in society but by one's own rule. Though the notion of autonomism was alien to the ancient Greeks, the concept is indirectly endorsed by Aristotle, who stated that only beasts or gods could be independent and live apart from the polis ("community"), while Kant defined the Enlightenment by autonomy of thought and the famous "Sapere aude" ("dare to know").

The Marxist Autonomist theory

Unlike other forms of Marxism, autonomist Marxism emphasises the ability of the working class to force changes to the organization of the capitalist system independent of the state, trade unions or political parties. Autonomists are less concerned with party political organization than are other Marxists, focusing instead on self-organized action outside of traditional organizational structures. Autonomist Marxism is thus a "bottom-up" theory: it draws attention to activities that autonomists see as everyday working-class resistance to capitalism, such asabsenteeism , slow working, socialization in the workplace,sabotage , and other subversive activities.

Like other Marxists, autonomists seeclass struggle as being of central importance. However, autonomists have a broader definition of the working class than do other Marxists: as well as wage-earning workers (both white collar and blue collar), autonomists also include in this category the unwaged (students, the unemployed, homemakers, etc.), who are traditionally deprived of any form of union representation.

Early theorists (such as Mario Tronti, Antonio Negri, Sergio Bologna, and Paolo Virno) developed notions of "immaterial" and "social labour" that extended the Marxist concept of labour to all society. They suggested that modern society's wealth was produced by unaccountable collective work, and that only a little of this was redistributed to the workers in the form of wages. Other Italian autonomists—particularly feminists, such asMariarosa Dalla Costa and Silvia Federici—emphasised the importance of feminism and the value of unpaid female labour to capitalist society.

A scholar of the movement, Michael Ryan, writes that

Autonomy, as a movement and as a theory, opposes the notion that capitalism is an irrational system which can be made rational through planning. Instead, it assumes the workers' viewpoint, privileging their activity as the lever of revolutionary passage as that which alone can construct a communist society. Economics is seen as being entirely political; economic relations are direct political relations of force between class subjects. And it is in the economic category of the social worker, not in an alienated political form like the party, that the initiative for political change resides.[7]

Italian autonomism

Autonomist Marxism—referred to in Italy as operaismo, which translates literally as "labourism"—first appeared in Italy in the early 1960s. Arguably, the emergence of early autonomism can be traced to the dissatisfaction of automotive workers in Turin with their union, which reached an agreement with FIAT. The disillusionment of these workers with their organised representation, along with the resultant riots (in particular the 1962 riots by FIAT workers in Turin, "fatti di Piazza Statuto"), were critical factors in the development of a theory of self-organised labour representation outside the scope of traditional representatives such astrade unions.

In 1969, the operaismo approach was active mainly in two different groups: Lotta Continua, led by Adriano Sofri (which had a very significant Roman Catholic cultural matrix), and Potere Operaio, led by Antonio Negri, Franco Piperno, Oreste Scalzone, and Valerio Morucci. Mario Capanna was the charismatic leader of the Milan student movement, which had a more classical Marxist- Leninist approach.

Influences Through translations made available by Danilo Montaldi and others, the Italian autonomists drew upon previous activist research in the United States by the Johnson–Forest Tendency and in France by the group Socialisme ou Barbarie. The Johnson-Forest Tendency had studied working-class life and struggles within the US auto industry, publishing pamphlets such as "The American Worker" (1947), "Punching Out" (1952), and "Union Committeemen and Wildcat Strikes" (1955). That work was translated into French by Socialisme ou Barbarie and published, serially, in their journal. They too began investigating and writing about what was going on inside workplaces, in their case inside both auto factories and insurance offices.

The journal Quaderni Rossi ("Red Notebooks"), produced between 1961 and 1965, and its successor Classe Operaia ("Working Class"), produced between 1963 and 1966, were also influential in the development of early autonomism. Antonio Negri, a leading theorist of Italian Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti, and Toni Negri were some primary autonomism collaborators.

Pirate radio stations also were a factor in spreading autonomist ideas. Bologna's Radio Alice was an example of such a station.

Direct action The Italian student movement, including the Indiani Metropolitani (Metropolitan Indians), starting from 1966 with the murder of student Paolo Rossi by neo-fascists at Rome University, engaged in various direct action operations, including riots and occupations, along with more peaceful activities such as self-reduction, in which individuals refused to pay for such services and goods as public transport, electricity, gas, rent, and food. Several clashes occurred between students and the police during the occupations of universities in the winter of 1967–68, during the Fiat occupations, and in March 1968 in Rome during theBattle of Valle Giulia. Askatasuna "autonomist" social center in Indiani Metropolitani were a small faction active in the Italian far-left protest Turin (2016) movement during 1976 and 1977, in the so-called "Years of Lead". The Indiani Metropolitani were the so-called 'creative' wing of the movement. Its adherents wore face-paint like the war-paint of Native Americans and dressed like hippies. The emphasis was on "stare insieme" (being together), spontaneity and the arts, especially music. The group was active in Rome, during the occupation of the university La Sapienza in 1977.

On 11 March 1977, riots took place in Bologna following the killing of student Francesco Lorusso by police.

Beginning in 1979, the state effectively prosecuted the autonomist movement, accusing it of protecting the Red Brigades, which had kidnapped and assassinatedAldo Moro. 12,000 far-left activists were detained; 600 fled the country, including 300 to France and 200 to South America.[8]

Tute Bianche was a militant Italian social movement, active from 1994 to 2001. Activists covered their bodies with padding so as to resist the blows of police, to push through police lines, and to march together in large blocks for mutual protection during demonstrations. The tute bianche movement reached its apex during theanti-G8 protests in Genoa, in July 2001, with a turn-out of an estimated 10,000 protesters in a single "padded block", ironically after a collective decision to go without the white overalls. Shortly after Genoa the Ya Basta Association disbanded, with certain segments reforming into the "Disobbedienti" which literally means "Disobedients". This philosophy includes the occupation and creation of squatted self-managed social centers, anti-sexist activism, support for immigrant's rights and refugees seeking political asylum, as well as the process of walking together in large formations during demonstrations held in the streets, by force if necessary in case of clashes with police.

Central to the tute bianche movement was the Italian Ya Basta Association, a network of groups throughout Italy that was inspired by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation uprising in Chiapas in 1994. Ya Basta primarily originated in the "autonomist" social centers of Milan, particularly Centro Sociale Leoncavallo. These social centers grew out of the Italian Autonomia movement of the 1970 and 80s. The tute bianches have had international variations of one sort or another. For instance, in Britain a group calling itself WOMBLES adopted the tactics, even though the political orientation of Members of the Italian militant social WOMBLES differed from the Italian movement. In Spain, "Mono Blanco" movement Tute Bianche was the preferred identifier. The first North American variant of the tute bianche, the NYC Ya Basta Collective (based in NYC) wore yellow overalls, rather than white.

The French autonome movement

In France, the Marxist group Socialisme ou Barbarie, led by philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, could be said to be one of the first autonomist groups. Socialisme ou Barbarie drew upon the activist research of the American Johnson-Forest Tendency inside US auto plants and carried out their own investigations into rank-and-file workers struggles, struggles that were autonomous of union or party leadership.

Also parallel to the work of the Johnson-Forest Tendency, Socialisme ou Barbarie harshly criticised the Communist regime in the USSR, which it considered a form of "bureaucratic capitalism" and not at all the socialism it claimed to be. Philosopher Jean- François Lyotard was also part of this movement.

However, the Italian influence of the operaismo movement was more directly felt in the creation of the review Matériaux pour l'intervention (1972–73) by Yann Moulier-Boutang, a French economist close to Toni Negri. This led in turn to the creation of the Camarades group (1974–78). Along with others, Moulier-Boutang joined the Centre International pour des Nouveaux Espaces de Liberté (CINEL), founded three years earlier by Félix Guattari, and assisted Italian activists accused of terrorism, of whom at least 300 fled to France.

The French autonome mouvement organised itself in the AGPA (Assemblée Parisienne des Groupes Autonomes, "Parisian Assembly of Autonome Groups"; 1977–78). Many tendencies were present in it, including the Camarades group led by Moulier-Boutang, members of the Organisation communiste libertaire, some people referring themselves to the "Desiring Autonomy" of Bob Nadoulek, but also squatters and street-wise people (including the groupe Marge). French autonomes supported captured Red Army Faction former members. Jean-Paul Sartre also intervened on the conditions for the detention of RAF detainees.

The militant group Action directe appeared in 1979 and carried out several violent direct actions. Action Directe claimed responsibility for the murders of Renault's CEO Georges Besse and General Audran. George Besse had been CEO of nuclear company Eurodif. Action Directe was dissolved in 1987.

In the 1980s, the autonomist movement underwent a deep crisis in Italy because of effective prosecution by the State, and was stronger in Germany than in France. It remained present in Parisian squats and in some riots (for example in 1980 near the Jussieu Campus in Paris, or in 1982 in the Ardennes department during anti-nuclear demonstrations).From 1986 to 1994 the French group "Comité des mal logés" occupied several buildings of the French national social housing authority to denounce the cruel lack of lodging for workers, they were several hundred and took their decisions in democratic assembly, with support from all autonomous groups of Paris, many of them were worked on the anti prison . In the 1980s, the French autonomists published the periodicals CAT Pages (1981–82), Rebelles (1981–93), Tout ! (1982–85), Molotov et Confetti (1984), Les Fossoyeurs du Vieux Monde, La Chôme (1984–85), and Contre (1987–89). In the 1990s, the French autonomist movement was present in struggles led by unemployed people, with Travailleurs, Chômeurs, et Précaires en colère (TCP, "Angry Workers, Unemployed, and Marginalised people") and l'Assemblée générale des chômeurs de Jussieu ("General Assembly of Jussieu's unemployed people"). It was also involved in thealter -globalisation movement and above all in the solidarity with illegal foreigners (Collective Des Papiers pour tous ("Permits for all", 1996) and Collectif Anti-Expulsion (1998–2005)). Several autonomist journals date from this time: Quilombo (1988–93), Apache (1990–98), Tic-Tac (1995–97), Karoshi (1998–99), and Tiqqun (1999–2001).

From 19 to 28 July 2002, a No borders camp was made in Strasbourg to protest against anti-immigration policies, in particular inside the Schengen European space.

In 2003, autonomists came into conflict with the French Socialist Party (PS) during a demonstration that took place in the frame of the European Social Forum in Saint-Denis (Paris). At the end of December, hundreds of unemployed people helped themselves in the Bon Marché supermarket to be able to celebrate Christmas (an action called "autoréduction" (of prices) in French). French riot police (CRS) physically opposed the unemployed people inside the shop. Autonomes rioted during thespring 2006 protests against the CPE, and again after the 2007 presidential election when Nicolas Sarkozy was elected.

On 11 November 2008, the French police arrested ten people, including five living in a farmhouse on a hill overlooking Tarnac, and accused them of associating with a "terrorist enterprise" by sabotaging TGV's overhead lines. Nine out of ten were let go and only Julien Coupat, the alleged leader, remained in custody for about a year, charged with "directing a terrorist group" by the Paris Prosecutor's office.

The German Autonome movement in the 1970s and 1980s

In Germany, Autonome was used during the late 1970s to depict the most radical part of the political left.[9] These individuals participated in practically all actions of the social movements at the time, especially in demonstrations against nuclear energy plants (Brokdorf 1981, Wackersdorf 1986) and in actions against the construction of airport runways (Frankfurt 1976–86). The defense of squats against the police such as in Hamburg's Hafenstraße was also a major "task" for the "autonome" movement. The Dutch anarchist Autonomen movement from the 1960s also concentrated on squatting.

Tactics of the "Autonome" were usually militant, including the construction of barricades or throwing stones or molotov cocktails at the police. During their most powerful times in the early 1980s, on at least one occasion the police had to take flight.

Because of their outfit (heavy black clothing, ski masks, helmets), the "Autonome" were dubbed der schwarze Block by the German media, and in these tactics were similar to modern black blocs. In 1989, laws regarding demonstrations in Germany were changed, prohibiting the use of so-called "passive weaponry" such as helmets or padding and covering your face.

Today, the "autonome" scene in Germany is greatly reduced and concentrates mainly on anti-fascist actions, ecology, solidarity with refugees, and feminism. There are larger and more militant groups still in operation, such as in Switzerland or Italy.

The Greek anarcho-autonomoi

In Greece, the anarcho-autonomoi (Greek αναρχο-αυτόνομοι "anarchist-autonomists") emerged as an important trend in the youth and student movement, first during the 1973Athens Polytechnic uprising against the military dictatorship that ruled the country at the time. After the collapse of the dictatorship in 1974, the "anarcho-autonomoi" became considerably influential, firstly as a social trend within the youth and then as a (very loose and diverse) political trend. The definition "anarcho-autonomoi", itself, is much debated. One reason for this is that it was originally coined by opponents. However, it was also quite quickly adopted by many adherents, used as a generic term.

Before 1973, in Greece, there was very little tradition in anarchism or libertarian socialism in general. An exception to this was Agis Stinas, an early comrade of Cornelius Castoriadis. Castoriadis belonged to Stinas's small Council Communist group (before he emigrated to France) and was influenced by it; later these roles were turned around. The small groups that existed were almost (physically) eliminated by the Nazis, the local establishment, and the Stalinist communist party during the Nazi occupation and the Greek Civil War that followed, with Castoriadis and Stinas, themselves, being two of the few survivors.

Thus, the radical Greek youth in the 1970s, having very little relative background to refer to, resided to an extensive "syncretism" of multiple trends originating in the respective movements in other European countries. Anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist trends converged with situationist, workerist, or other autonomist trends and even with radical (non-autonomist) Marxist trends. The "anarcho-autonomoi" made a very strong stand during the 1978–80 student movement, coming into violent confrontation with the police and the (also, of considerable influence) Stalinist communist youth (K.N.E). Such stands were repeated whenever the student, worker, and youth movements were rising (in 1987, 1990–91, 1998–99, and 2006–7). However, their intensity has been falling since 1990–91.

Parallel to such participation in social movements, a large number of social centres (many of them squatted) exist to this day around Greece, and many of them participate in social struggles on a local level. These social centres, whether they now identify as "Autonomist" or not (most use more generic terms such as "anti-authoritarian", while some identify as "anarchist" ), function in the ways that historically emerged through "Autonomia". There is also a multitude of small political groups which identify as "Autonomist", ranging from workerist to post-modernist. Most of them are still connected to the respective groups that identify as "Anarchist".

Influence

The Autonomist Marxist and Autonomen movements provided inspiration to some on the revolutionary left in English-speaking countries, particularly among anarchists, many of whom have adopted autonomist tactics. Some English-speaking anarchists even describe themselves as Autonomists. The Italian operaismo movement also influenced Marxist academics such as Harry Cleaver, John Holloway, Steve Wright, and Nick Dyer-Witheford. In Denmark and Sweden, the word is used as a catch-all phrase for anarchists and the extra-parliamentary left in general, as was seen in the media coverage of the eviction of theUngdomshuset squat in Copenhagen in March 2007.

See also

Autonomist thinkers

Franco "Bifo" Berardi George Caffentzis Harry Cleaver Silvia Federici Michael Hardt John Holloway Antonio Negri Mario Tronti Paolo Virno

Movements and organizations

Blitz (Norway) Disobbedienti (ex Tute Bianche) Homeless Workers' Movement MTST Kämpa tillsammans! Kämpa tillsammans! London Autonomists Swedish Anarcho-syndicalist Youth Federation Ungdomshuset, Danish autonomist squat Autonomist publications

Aufheben Collegamenti-Wobbly Multitudes magazine ROAR Magazine

Others

Autonomy Affective labor Direct democracy Horizontalidad Kommune 1 Popular assembly Sovereign citizen movement Spontaneism Sui iuris Open Marxism Hakim Bey on autonomous zones

References

1. "Autonomism as a global social movement" by Patrick Cuninghame (https://www.academia.edu/1342334/AUTONOM ISM_AS_A_GLOBAL_SOCIAL_MOVEMENT). WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society. Volume 13 (December 2010): 451–464.ISSN 1089-7011 (https://www.worldcat.org/search?fq=x0:jrnl&q=n2:1089-7011). 2. Georgy Katsiaficas. The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life (http://www.eroseffect.com/books/subversion_download.htm), AK Press 2006 3. Autonomia: Post-Political Politics (http://libcom.org/files/autonomia1_rotated_merged_0.pdf), ed. Sylvere Lotringer & Christian Marazzi. New York: Semiotext(e), 1980, 2007. ISBN 1-58435-053-9, ISBN 978-1-58435-053-8. 4. Georgy Katsiaficas. The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life. AK Press. 2006. pg. 6 5. Georgy Katsiaficas. The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life. AK Press. 2006. pg. 7 6. Georgy Katsiaficas. The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life. AK Press. 2006. pg. 8 7. Michael Ryan, "Translators' Introductions Part II," Antonio Negri, Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, New York: Autonomedia, 1991, p. xxx. 8. (in French)On the Autonomist movement (http://sebastien.schifres.free.fr/italie.htm) 9. FIRE AND FLAMES: A History of the German Autonomist Movement by Geronimo. AK Press. 2012

Bibliography

"Autonomism as a global social movement" by Patrick Cuninghame The Journal of Labor and Society · 1089-7011 · Volume 13 · December 2010 · pp. 451–464 FIRE AND FLAMES: A History of the German Autonomist Movement by Geronimo. AK Press. 2012.ISBN 978-1- 60486-097-9 (in French) L’Autonomie. Le mouvement autonome en France et en Italie, éditions Spartacus 1978 (in French) Autonomes, Jan Bucquoy and Jacques Santi, ANSALDI 1985 (in French) Action Directe. Du terrorisme français à l'euroterrorisme, Alain Hamon and Jean-Charles Marchand, SEUIL 1986 (in French) Paroles Directes. Légitimité, révolte et révolution : autour d'Action Directe, Loïc Debray, Jean-Pierre Duteuil, Philippe Godard,Henri Lefebvre, Catherine Régulier, Anne Sveva, Jacques Wajnsztejn, ACRATIE 1990 (in French) Un Traître chez les totos, Guy Dardel, ACTES SUD 1999 (novel) (in French) Bac + 2 + crime : l'affaire Florence Rey, Frédéric Couderc, CASTELLS 1998 (in French) Italie 77. Le « Mouvement », les intellectuels, Fabrizio Calvi, SEUIL 1977 (in Italian) L'operaismo degli anni Sessanta. Da 'Quaderni rossi' a 'classe operaia', Giuseppe Trotta e Fabio Milana edd., DERIVEAPPRODI 2008 (in Italian) Una sparatoria tranquilla. Per una storia orale del '77, ODRADEK 1997 (in German) Die Autonomen, Thomas Schultze et Almut Gross, KONKRET LITERATUR 1997 (in German) Autonome in Bewegung, AG Grauwacke aus den ersten 23 Jahren, ASSOCIATION A 2003 (in English) The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life Georgy Katsiaficas, AK Press 2006 (in English) Negativity and Revolution: Adorno and Political Activism London: Pluto Press, 2009 John Holloway ed. with Fernando Matamoros & Sergio Tischler ISBN 978-0-7453-2836-2 (in English) Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, ed. Sylvere Lotringer & Christian Marazzi. New York: Semiotext(e), 1980, 2007. ISBN 1-58435-053-9, ISBN 978-1-58435-053-8. (in English) Os Cangaceiros A Crime Called Freedom: The Writings of Os Cangaceiros (Volume One) Eberhardt Press 2006 (in English) Storming Heaven: Class composition and struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism, Steve Wright, University of Michigan PressISBN 0-7453-1607-7 (in Greek) Νοέμβρης 73. Αυτοί οι αγώνες συνεχίζονται, δεν εξαγοράζονται, δεν δικαιώθηκαν, ed. Αυτόνομη Πρωτοβουλία Πολιτών. Athens 1983. (in Greek) Αναμνήσεις, Άγης Στίνας, υψιλον, Αθήνα 1985 (in Greek) Το επαναστατικό πρόβλημα σήμερα, Κορνήλιος Καστοριάδης, υψιλον, Αθήνα 2000 (In English) The city is ours: Squatting and autonomous movements from the 1970s to the present. Ed. Bart van der Steen, Ask Katzeff, Leendert van Hoogenhuijze. PM press, 2014. ISBN 978-1604866834

External links

Archives

Libertarian Communist Library Mario Tronti Archive Libertarian Communist Library Sergio Bolognia Archive Libertarian Communist Library Mariarosa Dalla Costa Archive Libertarian Communist Library Nick Dyer-Witheford Archive Libertarian Communist Library Antonio Negri Archive Libertarian Communist Library Raniero Panzieri Archive Libertarian Communist Library Harry Cleaver Archive

Others

Articles by members of theoperaismo movement Aut-op-sy - Autonomist forum and texts Rekombinant - Autonomist forum and mailing list Texas Archives of Autonomist Marxism Affinity Project directory and chronology of Autonomous Marxism Libertarian Communist Library, texts on autonomism Wildcat A critique of autonomism, published by a Trotskyist group TIQQUN “Introduction to Civil War [fragments]"

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Luxemburgism is a variant of Marxist revolutionary theory based on the writings of Rosa Luxemburg. According to M. K. Dziewanowski, the term was originally coined by Bolshevik leaders denouncing the deviations of Luxemburg's followers from traditional Leninism, but it has since been adopted by her followers themselves.

Luxemburgism is a Marxist tendency within Libertarian Marxism which, while supporting the Russian Revolution, as Luxemburg did, agrees with her criticisms of the politics of the Bolsheviks.

Contents

Luxemburgist theory Democratic revolutionary socialism Opposition to imperialist war and capitalism Criticism of Leninism Rosa Luxemburg, the ideological Dialectic of Spontaneity and Organisation mother of Luxemburgism. Present-day Luxemburgism See also References External links

Luxemburgist theory

Democratic revolutionary socialism The chief tenets of Luxemburgism are a commitment to democracy and the necessity of the revolution taking place as soon as possible. In this regard, it is similar toCouncil Communism, but differs in that, for example, Luxemburgists do not reject elections by principle. It resembles anarchism in its insistence that only relying on the people themselves as opposed to their leaders can avoid an authoritarian society, but differs in that it sees the importance of a revolutionary party, and mainly the centrality of the working class in the revolutionary struggle. It resembles Trotskyism in its opposition to the totalitarianism of Stalinist government while simultaneously avoiding the reformist politics of Social Democracy, and believing in a vanguard party but differs from Trotskyism in arguing that Lenin and Trotsky also made undemocratic errors as well as different views on national self-determination.

Luxemburg's idea of democracy, which Stanley Aronowitz calls "generalized democracy in an unarticulated form", represents Luxemburgism's greatest break with "mainstream communism", since it effectively diminishes the role of the Communist Party, but is in fact very similar to the views ofKarl Marx ("The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves"). According to Aronowitz, the vagueness of Luxembourgian democracy is one reason for its initial difficulty in gaining widespread support. However, since the fall of the Soviet Union, Luxemburgism has been seen by some socialist thinkers as a way to avoid the totalitarianism of Stalinism. Early on, Luxemburg attacked undemocratic tendencies present in the Russian Revolution: Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule. Among them, in reality only a dozen outstanding heads do the leading and an elite of the working class is invited from time to time to meetings where they are to applaud the speeches of the leaders, and to approve proposed resolutions unanimously – at bottom, then, a clique affair – a dictatorship, to be sure, not the dictatorship of the proletariat but only the dictatorship of a handful of politicians, that is a dictatorship in the bourgeois sense, in the sense of the rule of the Jacobins (the postponement of the Soviet Congress from three-month periods to six-month periods!) Yes, we can go even further: such conditions must inevitably cause a brutalization of public life: attempted assassinations, shooting of hostages, etc. (Lenin’s speech on discipline and corruption.)"[1]

The strategic contribution of Luxemburgism is principally based on her insistence on socialist democracy:

Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party – however numerous they may be – is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of "justice" but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when "freedom" becomes a special privilege. (...)But socialist democracy is not something which begins only in the promised land after the foundations of socialist economy are created; it does not come as some sort of Christmas present for the worthy people who, in the interim, have loyally supported a handful of socialist dictators. Socialist democracy begins simultaneously with the beginnings of the destruction of class rule and of the construction of socialism."[2]

Opposition to imperialist war and capitalism While being critical of the politics of the Bolsheviks, Rosa Luxemburg saw the behaviour of the Social Democratic Second International as a complete betrayal of socialism. As she saw it, at the outset of the First World War the Social Democratic Parties around the world betrayed the world's working class by supporting their own individual bourgeoisies in the war. This included her own Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), the majority of whose delegates in theReichstag voted for war credits.

Rosa Luxemburg opposed the sending of the working class youth of each country to what she viewed as slaughter in a war over which of the national bourgeoisies would control world resources and markets. She broke from the Second International, viewing it as nothing more than an opportunist party that was doing administrative work for the capitalists. Rosa Luxemburg, with Karl Liebknecht, organized a strong movement in Germany with these views, but was imprisoned and, after her release, killed for her work during the failed German Revolution of 1919 - a revolution which the German Social Democratic Party violently opposed.

Criticism of Leninism In "The Russian Revolution", written in a German jail during World War I, Luxemburg critiqued Bolsheviks' absolutist political practice and opportunist policies—i.e., their suppression of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, their support for the partition of the old feudal estates to the peasant communes. She derived this critique from Marx's original concept of the "revolution in permanence." Marx outlines this strategy in his March 1850 "Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League." As opposed to the Bolsheviks' neo-Blanquist interpretation of permanent revolution, Marx argued that the role of the working class revolutionary party was not to create a one-party state, nor to give away land—even in semi-feudal countries like Germany in 1850, or Russia in 1917, where the working class was in the minority.

Rather, Marx argued that the role of the working class was, within structures of radical democracy, to organize, arm and defend themselves in workers' councils and militias, to campaign for their own socialist political program, to expand workers' rights, and to seize and farm collectively the feudal estates. Because the Bolsheviks failed to fulfil this Marxian program, Luxemburg argued, the Revolution bureaucratized, the cities starved, and the peasant soldiers in the Army were demoralized and deserted in order to get back home for the land grab. Thus the Germans easily invaded and took Ukraine. They justified this, during the Brest-Litovsk treaty negotiations, in the very same terms of "national self-determination" (for the Ukrainian bourgeoisie) that the Bolsheviks had promoted as an aid to socialist revolution, and that Luxemburg critiqued, years earlier, in her "The National Question," and in this document.

Luxemburg criticized Lenin's ideas on how to organize a revolutionary party as likely to lead to a loss of internal democracy and the domination of the party by a few leaders. Ironically, in her most famous attack on Lenin's views, the 1904 Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy, or, Leninism or Marxism?,[3] a response to Lenin's 1903 What Is To Be Done?, Luxemburg was more worried that the authoritarianism she saw in Leninism would lead to sectarianism and irrelevancy than that it would lead to a dictatorship after a successful revolution - although she also warned of the latter danger. Luxemburg died before Stalin's assumption of power, and never had a chance to come up with a complete theory of Stalinism, but her criticisms of the Bolsheviks have been taken up by many writers in their arguments about the origins of Stalinism, including many who are otherwise far from Luxemburgism.

Rosa Luxemburg also criticized Lenin's views on the right of the oppressed nations of the former Czarist Empire to self- determination. She saw this as a ready-made formula for imperialist intervention in those countries on behalf of bourgeois forces hostile to socialism. Proponents of Lenin's position on the nationalities argue that it was in fact what brought many members of the different nationalities of the former Czarist Empire together in supporting the Bolshevik-led revolution.

Dialectic of Spontaneity and Organisation The Dialectic of Spontaneity and Organisation was the central feature of Rosa Luxemburg's political philosophy, wherein "spontaneity" is a grass roots, even anarchistic, approach to organising a party-oriented class struggle. Spontaneity and organisation, she argued, are not separable or separate activities, but different moments of one political process; one does not exist without the other. These beliefs arose from her view that there is an elementary, spontaneous class struggle from which class struggle evolves to a higher level:

"The working classes in every country only learn to fight in the course of their struggles ... Social democracy ... is only the advance guard of the proletariat, a small piece of the total working masses; blood from their blood, and flesh from their flesh. Social democracy seeks and finds the ways, and particular slogans, of the workers' struggle only in the course of the development of this struggle, and gains directions for the way forward through this struggle alone."[4]

Organisation mediates spontaneity; organisation must mediate spontaneity. It would be wrong to accuse Rosa Luxemburg of holding "spontaneism" as an abstraction. She developed the Dialectic of Spontaneity and Organisation under the influence of mass strikes in Europe, especially the Russian Revolution of 1905. Unlike the social democratic orthodoxy of the Second International, she did not regard organisation as product of scientific-theoretic insight to historical imperatives, but as product of the working classes' struggles:

"Social democracy is simply the embodiment of the modern proletariat's class struggle, a struggle which is driven by a consciousness of its own historic consequences. The masses are in reality their own leaders, dialectically creating their own development process. The more that social democracy develops, grows, and becomes stronger, the more the enlightened masses of workers will take their own destinies, the leadership of their movement, and the determination of its direction into their own hands. And as the entire social democracy movement is only the conscious advance guard of the proletarian class movement, which in the words of the Communist Manifesto represent in every single moment of the struggle the permanent interests of liberation and the partial group interests of the workforce vis à vis the interests of the movement as whole, so within the social democracy its leaders are the more powerful, the more influential, the more clearly and consciously they make themselves merely the mouthpiece of the will and striving of the enlightened masses, merely the agents of the objective laws of the class movement."[5] and

"The modern proletarian class does not carry out its struggle according to a plan set out in some book or theory; the modern workers' struggle is a part of history, a part of social progress, and in the middle of history, in the middle of progress, in the middle of the fight, we learn how we must fight... That's exactly what is laudable about it, that's exactly why this colossal piece of culture, within the modern workers' movement, is epoch-defining: that the great masses of the working people first forge from their own consciousness, from their own belief, and even from their own understanding the weapons of their own liberation."[6]

Present-day Luxemburgism

As of 2014 very few active Luxemburgist revolutionary movements exist. Two small international networks claim to be Luxemburgists : Communist Democracy (Luxemburgist), founded in 2005, and the International Luxemburgist Network, founded in 2008.

Feminists and Trotskyists, as well as leftists in Germany, especially show interest in Luxemburg's ideas. Distinguished modern Marxist thinkers such as Ernest Mandel, who has even been characterised as "Luxemburgist", have seen Luxemburgism as a corrective to revolutionary theory.[7] In 2002 ten thousand people marched in Berlin for Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht and another 90,000 people laid carnations on their graves.[8]

Many socialists, whether they regard themselves as Luxemburgist or not, see Rosa Luxemburg as a martyr for revolutionary socialism. For Luxemburgists, her stalwart dedication to democracy and vigorous repudiation of capitalism exemplifies the socialist concept of democracy that they view as the essential element of socialism Portrait of the revolutionary Rosa rather than as a contradiction of it. Many socialist currents today, particularly Luxemburg. Trotskyists and left communists, consider Rosa Luxemburg to have had an important influence on their theory and politics. However, while respecting Luxemburg, these organizations do not consider themselves "Luxemburgist".

See also

Libertarian Marxism Spartakusbund (Spartacist League) Revolutionary spontaneity Solidarity (U.S.) Novi Plamen Radical Left Group ROZA (Greece)

References

1. The Russian Revolution, http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/russian-revolution/ch06.htm 2. The Russian Revolution, http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/russian-revolution/ch06.htm 3. Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy (http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1904/questio ns-rsd/index.htm) 4. In a Revolutionary Hour: What Next?, Collected Works 1.2, p.554 5. The Political Leader of the German Working Classes, Collected Works 2, p.280 6. The Politics of Mass Strikes and Unions, Collected Works 2, p.465 7. The Actuality of Ernest Mandel (http://www.ernestmandel.org/en/aboutlife/txt/actuality_of_ernest_mandel.htm) by Gilbert Achcar 8. Workers World Jan. 31, 2002: Berlin events honor left-wing leaders (http://www.workers.org/ww/2002/berlin0131.ph p)

Aronowitz, Stanley. "Postmodernism and Politics." Social Text, No. 21: Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism (1989), pp. 46–62. Dziewanowski, M. K. "Social Democrats Versus "Social Patriots": The Origins of the Split of the Marxist Movement in Poland." American Slavic and East European Review, Vol. 10, No. 1. (Feb., 1951), pp. 14–25. LeBlanc, Paul (1993). Lenin and the Revolutionary Party. Prometheus Books. ISBN 157392427X.

External links

Rosa Luxemburg Internet Archive Feminist account of Luxemburg's importance by Beverly G. Merrick Libertarian Communist Library Archive Democratie Communiste (Luxemburgist group) (in French, Spanish and English) Espacio Rosa Luxemburg Critique Sociale

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Luxemburgism&oldid=830015857"

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Text is available under theCreative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of theWikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization. Anti-fascism

Anti-fascism is opposition to fascist ideologies, groups and individuals. The anti- fascist movement began in a few European countries in the 1920s, and eventually spread to other countries around the world. It was as its most significant shortly before and during World War II, where the fascist Axis powers were opposed by many countries forming the Allies of World War II and dozens of resistance movements worldwide.

Dutch resistance members with US Contents 101st Airborne troops in Eindhoven, September 1944 Origins History Italy: against Fascism and Mussolini Slovenians under Italianisation Germany: against the NSDAP and Hitlerism Spain: Civil War with the Nationalists France: against Action Française and Vichy United Kingdom: against Mosley's BUF United States, circa World War II After World War II United Kingdom: against the NF and BNP See also Notes Further reading External links

Origins

With the development and spread of Italian Fascism, i.e. original fascism, the National Fascist Party's ideology was met with increasingly militant opposition by Italian communists and socialists. Organizations such as the Arditi del Popolo[1] and the Italian Anarchist Union[2] emerged between 1919–1921, to combat the nationalist and fascist surge of the post-World War I period. Thus, as fascism coalesced into a coherent ideology, a militant leftist opposition sprouted in response.

In the words of historian Eric Hobsbawm, as fascism developed and spread, a "nationalism of the left" developed in those nations threatened by Italian irredentism (e.g. in the Balkans, and Albania in particular).[3] After the outbreak of World War II, the Albanian, and Serbian resistances were instrumental in antifascist action and underground resistance. This combination of irreconcilable nationalisms and leftist partisans constitute the earliest roots of European anti-fascism. Less militant forms of anti-fascism arose later. For instance, during the 1930s in Britain, "Christians – especially the Church of England – provided both a language of opposition to fascism and inspired anti-fascist action".[4]

The diversity of political entities that share only their anti-fascism has prompted the historian Norman Davies to argue in his book Europe at War 1939–1945: No Simple Victory that anti-fascism does not offer a coherent political ideology, but rather that it is an "empty vessel". Davies further asserts that the concept of anti-fascism is a "mere political dance" created by Josef Stalin and spread by Soviet propaganda organs in an attempt to create the false impression that Western democrats by joining the USSR in the opposition to fascism could in general align themselves politically with communism. The motive would be to lend legitimacy to the dictatorship of the proletariat and was done at the time the USSR was pursuing a policy ofcollective security. Davies goes on to point out that with Winston Churchill as a notable exception, the concept of anti-fascism gained widespread support in the West, except that its credibility suffered a serious but temporary blow while the USSR and Nazi Germany coordinated their wars of aggression in Eastern Europe under theirMolotov–Ribbentrop Pact.[5]

History

Anti-fascist movements emerged first in Italy, during the rise of Mussolini, but soon spread to other European countries and then globally. In the early period, Communist, socialist, anarchist and Christian workers and intellectuals were involved. Until 1928, the period of the United front, there was significant collaboration between the Communists and non-Communist anti-fascists. In 1928, the Comintern instituted its ultra-left "Third Period" policies, ending co-operation with other left groups, and denouncing social democrats as "social fascists". From 1934 until the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Communists pursued a Popular Front approach, of building broad-based coalitions with liberal and even conservative anti-fascists. As fascism consolidated its power, and especially during World War II, anti-fascism largely took the form of Partisan or Resistance movements.

Italy: against Fascism and Mussolini In Italy, Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime used the term "anti-fascist" to describe its opponents. Mussolini's secret police was officially known as Organizzazione per la Vigilanza e la Repressione dell'Antifascismo (OVRA), Italian for "Organization for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Fascism").

In the Kingdom of Italy in the 1920s, anti-fascists—many from the labour movement—fought against the violent Blackshirts and against the rise of fascist leader Benito Mussolini. After the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) signed a pacification pact with Mussolini and his Fascist Revolutionary Party (PFR) on 3 August 1921,[6] and trade unions adopted a legalist and pacified strategy, members of the workers' movement who disagreed with this strategy formed the Arditi del popolo. The

General Confederation of Labour (CGT) and the PSI refused to officially recognize Flag of the Arditi del Popolo, a the anti-fascist militia, while theItalian Communist Party (PCI) ordered its members militant anti-fascist group founded in to quit the organization. The PCI organized some militant groups, but their actions 1921 were relatively minor, and the party maintained a non-violent, legalist strategy. The Italian anarchist Severino Di Giovanni, who exiled himself to Argentina following the 1922 March on Rome, organized several bombings against the Italian fascist community.[7]

Italian liberal anti-fascistBenedetto Croce wrote Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals, which was published in 1925.[8] Another notable Italian liberal anti-fascist around that time wasPiero Gobetti.[9]

Between 1920 and 1943, several anti-fascist movements were active among theSlovenes and Croats in the territories annexed to Italy after World War I, known as the Julian March.[10][11] The most influential was the militant insurgent organization TIGR, which carried out numerous sabotages, as well as attacks on representatives of the Fascist Party and the military.[12][13] Most of the underground structure of the organization was discovered and dismantled by the Organization for Vigilance and Repression of Anti- Fascism (OVRA) in 1940 and 1941,[14] and after June 1941, most of its former activists joined theSlovene Partisans.

During World War II, many members of the Italian resistance left their houses and went to live in the mountainside, fighting against Italian fascists and German Nazi soldiers. Many cities in Italy, including Turin, Naples and Milan, were freed by anti-fascist uprisings.[15]

Slovenians under Italianisation In Italy, the first anti-fascist resistance emerged within the Slovene minority in Italy (1920–1947), who the Fascists meant to deprive of their culture, language and ethnicity. The 1920 burning of the National Hall in Trieste, the Slovene center in the multi-cultural and multi-ethnicT rieste by the Blackshirts,[16] Benito Mussolini who, at the time, was yet to become Duce, praised as a being a "masterpiece of the Triestine fascism" (capolavoro del fascismo triestino...).[17] Not only in multi-ethnic areas, but also in the areas where the population was exclusively Slovene, the use of Slovene language in public places, including churches, was forbidden.[18] Children, if they spoke Slovene, were punished by Italian teachers who were brought by the Fascist State from Southern Italy. The Slovene teachers, writers, and clergy were sent to the other side of Italy.

The first anti-fascist organization, called TIGR, was formed in 1927 in order to fight Fascist violence. Its guerrilla fight continued into the late 1920s and 1930s when by the mid-1930s, already 70,000 Slovenes fled Italy mostly to Slovenia (then part of Yugoslavia) and South America.

The Slovene anti-fascist resistance in Yugoslavia during World War II was led by An Italian partisan in Florence, 14 Liberation Front of the Slovenian People. The Province of Ljubljana, occupied by August 1944. Italian Fascists, saw the deportation of 25.000 people, equaling 7.5% of the total population, filling up Rab concentration camp and Gonars concentration camp and other Italian concentration camps.

Germany: against the NSDAP and Hitlerism In the 1920s and 1930s in the Weimar Republic, Communist Party and Social Democratic Party members advocated violence and mass agitation amongst the working class to first stop the Freikorps movements in immediate post-WW I Germany, and not long thereafter, Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party. Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote:

[F]ighting squads must be created ... nothing increases the insolence of the fascists so much as 'flabbypacifism ' on the part of the workers' organisations ... [It is] political cowardice [to deny that] without organised combat detachments, the most heroic masses will be smashed bit by bit by fascist gangs."[19]

There were several anti-Nazi militant and paramilitary groups. These included the Social Democrat-dominated Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold (formed in February 1924), the Communist paramilitary and propaganda organisation Roter Frontkämpferbund (Red Front Fighters League or RFB, formed in summer 1924) and the Communist Kampfbund gegen den Faschismus (Fighting- Alliance against Fascism, formed in 1930).[20] The Roter Front was a paramilitary organization affiliated with the Communist Party of Germany that engaged in street fights with the Nazi Sturmabteilung. Its first leader was Ernst Thälmann, who would later die in a concentration camp and become widely honored in East Germany as an anti-fascist and socialist.In 1932, during the United Front period, Antifaschistische Aktion was formed as a broad-based alliance in which Social Democrats, Communists and others could fight legal repression and engage in self-defence against Nazi paramilitaries.[21] Its two-flag logo, designed byMax Keilson and Max Gebhard, is still widely used as a symbol of militant anti-fascists globally.[22]

Spain: Civil War with the Nationalists In Spain, large-scale anti-fascist movements were first seen in the 1930s, before and during the Spanish Civil War. The republican government and army, the Antifascist Worker and Peasant Militias (MAOC) linked to the Communist Party (PCE),[23] the International Brigades, the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), Spanish anarchist militias, such as the Iron Column and the autonomous governments of Catalonia and the Basque Country, fought the rise of Francisco Franco with military force. The Friends of Durruti, associated with the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI), were a particularly militant group. Thousands of people from many countries went to Spain in support of the anti-fascist cause, joining units such as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the British Battalion, the Dabrowski Battalion, the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, the Naftali Botwin Company and the Thälmann Battalion. Notable anti-fascists who worked internationally against Franco included:Geor ge Orwell (who fought in the POUM militia and wrote Homage to Catalonia about this experience), Ernest Hemingway (a supporter of the International Brigades who wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls about this experience), and radical journalistMartha Gellhorn.

Spanish anarchist guerrilla Francesc Sabaté Llopart fought against Franco's regime until the 1960s, from a base in France. The Spanish Maquis, linked to the PCE, also fought the Franco regime long after the Spanish Civil war had ended.

France: against Action Française and Vichy In the 1920s and 1930s in the French Third Republic, anti-fascists confronted aggressive far-right groups such as the Action Française movement in France, which dominated the Latin Quarter students' neighborhood. After fascism triumphed via invasion, the French Resistance (French: La Résistance française) or, more accurately, resistance movements fought against the Nazi German occupation and against the collaborationist Vichy régime. Résistance cells were small groups of armed men and women (called the maquis in rural areas), who, in addition to their guerrilla warfare activities, were also publishers of underground newspapers and magazines such as Arbeiter und Soldat (Worker and Soldier) during World War 2, Maquis members in 1944 providers of first-hand intelligence information, and maintainers of escape networks.

United Kingdom: against Mosley's BUF The rise of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists (BUF) in the 1930s was challenged by the Communist Party of Great Britain, socialists in the Labour Party and Independent Labour Party, anarchists, Irish Catholic dockmen and working class Jews in London's east end. A high point in the struggle was the Battle of Cable Street, when thousands of eastenders and others turned out to stop the BUF from marching. Initially, the national Communist Party leadership wanted a mass demonstration at Hyde Park in solidarity with Republican Spain, instead of a mobilisation against the BUF, but local party activists argued against this. Activists rallied support with the slogan They shall not pass, adopted from Republican Spain.

There were debates within the anti-fascist movement over tactics. While many east end ex-servicemen participated in violence against fascists,[24] Communist Party leader Phil Piratin denounced these tactics and instead called for large demonstrations.[25] In addition to the militant anti-fascist movement, there was a smaller current of liberal anti-fascism in Britain; Sir Ernest Barker, for example, was a notable English liberal anti-fascist in the 1930s.[26]

United States, circa World War II There were fascist elements in the United States in the 1930s such as Friends of New Germany, German American Bund, the Ku Klux Klan, and Charles Coughlin.[27]

During the United States Red Scare after the end of World War II, the term "premature anti-fascist" came into currency to describe Americans who had strongly agitated or worked against fascism, such as by fighting for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, before fascism was seen as a proximate and existential threat to the United States (which only occurred generally after the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and universally after the attack on Pearl Harbor). The implication was that such persons were Communists or Communist sympathizers whose loyalty to the United States was suspect.[28][29][30] However, historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr have written that no documentary evidence has been found of the US government referring to American members of the International Brigades as "premature antifascists"; the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Office of Strategic Services, and United States Army records used terms such as "Communist", "Red", "subversive", and "radical" instead. Haynes and Klehr indicate that they have instead found many examples of members of the XV International Brigade and their supporters referring to themselves sardonically as "premature antifascists".[31] After World War II The anti-fascist movements which emerged during the period of classical fascism, both liberal and militant, continued after the defeat of the Axis powers in response to the resilience and mutation of fascism in Europe and elsewhere. In Germany, for example, in 1944, as Nazi rule crumbled, veterans of the 1930s anti-fascist struggles formed “Antifaschistische Ausschüsse,” “Antifaschistische Kommittees” or “Antifaschistische Aktion” groups (all typically abbreviated toAntifa ).[32]

United Kingdom: against the NF and BNP After World War II, Jewish war veterans in the 43 Group continued the tradition of militant confrontations withOswald Mosley's Union Movement. In the 1960s, the 62 Group continued the struggle againstneo-Nazis .[33]

In the 1970s, fascist and far-right parties such as the National Front (NF) and British American songwriter and anti-fascist Woody Guthrie and his guitar Movement (BM) were making significant gains electorally, and were increasingly labelled "This machine kills fascists" bold in their public appearances. This was challenged in 1977 with the Battle of Lewisham, when thousands of people disrupted an NF march in South London.[34] Soon after, the Anti-Nazi League (ANL) was launched by theSocialist Workers Party (SWP). The ANL had a large-scale propaganda campaign and squads that attacked NF meetings and paper sales. The success of the ANL's campaigns contributed to the end of the NF's period of growth. During this period, there were also a number of black-led anti-fascist organisations, including the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism (CARF) and local groups like theNewham Monitoring Project.[35]

The SWP disbanded the ANL in 1981, but many squad members refused to stop their activities. They were expelled from the SWP in 1981, many going on to found Red Action. The SWP used the term squadism to dismiss these militant anti-fascists as thugs. In 1985, some members of Red Action and the anarcho-syndicalist Direct Action Movement launched Anti-Fascist Action (AFA). Their founding document said "we are not fighting Fascism to maintain the status quo but to defend the interests of the working class".[36][37] Thousands of people took part in AFA mobilisations, such as Remembrance Day demonstrations in 1986 and 1987, the Unity Carnival, the Battle of Cable Street's 55th anniversary march in 1991, and the Battle of Waterloo against Blood and Honour in 1992.[38] After 1995, some AFA mobilisations still occurred, such as against the NF in Dover in 1997 and 1998. However, AFA wound down its national organisation and some of its branches and had ceased to exist nationally by 2001.[39]

There was a surge in fascist activity across Europe from 1989 to 1991 after the collapse of Communism. In 1991, the Campaign Against Fascism in Europe (CAFE) coordinated a large militant protest against the visit to London by French right-wing leader, Jean- Marie Le Pen. This sparked a surge in anti-fascist organisations throughout Europe. In the UK alone, in 1992 a number of left-wing groups formed anti-fascist front organisations, such as a re-launched ANL in 1992, the Socialist Party's Youth against Racism in Europe YRE, and the Revolutionary Communist Party's Workers Against Racism. A number of black-led organisations, along with the Labour Party Black Sections and the National Black Caucus, formed the Anti-Racist Alliance in 1991, which eventually became the National Assembly Against Racism.[40]

See also

Anti-authoritarianism Anti-Stalinist left Anti-capitalism Denazification Anti-communism Italian resistance movement Anti-Germans (political current) Laws against Holocaust denial Antifa movements Resistance during World War II Anti-Fascist Bloc Resistance movement Anti-fascist graffiti in Trnava, Antifascist Front of Slavs in Hungary Redskin (subculture) Slovakia Anti-racism Slovak National Uprising Antifascist Circle Squadism Yugoslav Partisans

Notes

1. Gli Arditi del Popolo (Birth) (http://www.romacivica.net/anpiroma/antifascismo/antifascismo3a.html) Archived (https:// web.archive.org/web/20080807125621/http://www.romacivica.net/anpiroma/antifascismo/antifascismo3a.html) 7 August 2008 at the Wayback Machine. (in Italian) 2. "Unione Anarchica Italiana" at italian anarchopedia (https://web.archive.org/web/20070823000013/http://ita.anarchop edia.org/Unione_Anarchica_Italiana) 3. Hobsbawm, Eric (1992). The Age of Extremes. Vintage. pp. 136–37. ISBN 0394585755. 4. Lawson, Tom (2010). Varieties of Anti-Fascism: Britain in the Inter-War Period. Palgrave Macmillan UK. pp. 119–39. ISBN 978-1-349-28231-9. 5. Davies, Norman (2006). Europe at War 1939–1945: No Simple Victory. London: Macmillan. pp. 54–55 (https://books. google.com/books?id=9P_uQ2qeFUkC&pg=PT53). ISBN 9780333692851. OCLC 70401618 (https://www.worldcat.o rg/oclc/70401618). 6. Charles F. Delzell, edit., Mediterranean Fascism 1919-1945, New York, NY, Walker and Company, 1971, p. 26 7. "Anarchist Century" (http://anarchist_century.tripod.com/timeline.html). Anarchist_century.tripod.com. Retrieved 7 April 2014. 8. David Ward Antifascisms: Cultural Politics in Italy, 1943–1946 9. James Martin, 'Piero Gobetti's Agonistic Liberalism',History of European Ideas, 32, (2006), pp. 205–22. 10. Milica Kacin Wohinz, Jože Pirjevec, Storia degli sloveni in Italia : 1866–1998 (Venice: Marsilio, 1998) 11. Milica Kacin Wohinz, Narodnoobrambno gibanje primorskih Slovencev : 1921–1928 (Trieste: Založništvo tržaškega tiska, 1977) 12. Milica Kacin Wohinz, Prvi antifašizem v Evropi (Koper: Lipa, 1990) 13. Mira Cenčič, TIGR : Slovenci pod Italijo in TIGR na okopih v boju za narodni obstoj (Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga, 1997) 14. Vid Vremec, Pinko Tomažič in drugi tržaški proces 1941 (Trieste: Založništvo tržaškega tiska, 1989) 15. "Intelligence and Operational Support for the Anti-Nazi Resistance" (http://darbysrangers.tripod.com/id102.htm). Darbysrangers.tripod.com. 16. "90 let od požiga Narodnega doma v Trstu" (http://www.primorski.eu/dossiers/dossier/10/31/130144/) [90 Years From the Arson of the National Hall in Trieste]. Primorski dnevnik [The Littoral Daily] (in Slovenian). 2010. pp. 14–15. COBISS 11683661 (http://www.cobiss.si/scripts/cobiss?command=DISPLAY&base=cobib&rid=11683661&lani=EN&f mt=11). Retrieved 28 February 2012. "Požig Narodnega doma ali šentjernejska noč tržaških Slovencev in Slovanov [Arson of the National Hall or the St. Bartholomew's Night of the riestineT Slovenes and Slavs]" 17. Sestani, Armando, ed. (10 February 2012). "Il confine orientale: una terra, molti esodi" [The Eastern Border: One Land, Multiple Exoduses].I profugi istriani, dalmati e fiumani a Lucca (http://www.provincia.lucca.it/scuolapace/uploa ds/quaderni/ricordo2012.pdf) [The Istrian, Dalmatian and Rijeka Refugees in Lucca] (PDF) (in Italian). Instituto storico della Resistenca e dell'Età Contemporanea in Provincia di Lucca. pp. 12–13. 18. Hehn, Paul N. (2005). A low dishonest decade: the great powers, Eastern Europe, and the economic origins of World War II, 1930–1941 (https://books.google.com/?id=nOALhEZkYDkC&pg=PA45&dq=%22signed+a+treaty+on+ November+12,+1920,+at+Rapallo&q=%22signed%20a%20treaty%20on%20November%2012%2C%201920%2C% 20at%20Rapallo). Continuum International Publishing Group. pp. 44–45.ISBN 0-8264-1761-2. 19. quoted Fighting Talk no.22 October 1999, p. 11 20. Eve Rosenhaft, Beating the Fascists?: The German Communists and Political iolenceV 1929-1933, Cambridge University Press, 25 Aug 1983, pp.3-4 21. Eve Rosenhaft, Beating the Fascists?: The German Communists and Political iolenceV 1929-1933, Cambridge University Press, 25 Aug 1983, p.81 22. Loren Balhorn The Lost History of Antifa (https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/antifascist-movements-hitler-nazis-k pd-spd-germany-cold-war)" Jacobin May 2017 23. De Miguel, Jesús y Sánchez, Antonio:Batalla de Madrid, in his Historia Ilustrada de la Guerra Civil Española. Alcobendas, Editorial LIBSA, 2006, pp. 189–221. 24. Jacobs, Joe (1991) [1977].Out of the Ghetto (http://libcom.org/tags/joe-jacobs). London: Phoenix Press. 25. Phil Piratin Our Flag Stays Red. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2006. 26. Andrezj Olechnowicz, 'Liberal anti-fascism in the 1930s the case of Sir Ernest Barker',Albion 36, 2005, pp. 636–60 27. jsmog (18 December 2004)."Support for Hitler (or Fascism) in the United States" (http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/ Fascism/Support_Hitler_US.html). Third World Traveler. Retrieved 29 December 2013. 28. Premature antifascists and the Post-war world (http://www.alba-valb.org/resources/lessons/world-war-ii-letters-from-t he-abraham-lincoln-brigade/premature-antifascists-and-the-post-war-world/?searchterm=bill%20susman), Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Bill Susman Lecture Series. King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center atNew York University, 1998. Retrieved 9 August 2009. 29. Knox, Bernard (Spring 1999). "Premature Anti-Fascist" (https://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/4613837?uid=373925 6&uid=2134&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=21103176974061). Antioch Review. 57 (2): 133–49. Retrieved 28 December 2013. 30. John Nichols (26 October 2009)."Clarence Kailin: 'Premature Antifascist' – and proudly so" (http://host.madison.co m/news/local/govt_and_politics/clarence-kailin-premature-antifascist----and-proudly-so/article_a1f96356-c21c-11de- a1da-001cc4c03286.html). Cap Times. Capital Times (Madision, Wisconsin). Retrieved 29 December 2013. 31. Haynes, John Earl; Klehr, Harvey (2005). In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage (https://books.google.com/ books?id=fBSbKS1FlegC&pg=PA277&dq=%22premature+anti-fascist%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=JggtU9qkM5GqqQGV_ oHwDQ&ved=0CDQQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=%22premature%20anti-fascist%22&f=false). San Francisco: Encounter Books. p. 123.ISBN 159403088X. Retrieved 22 March 2014. 32. Balhorn, Loren (8 May 2017)."The Lost History of Antifa" (https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/antifascist-moveme nts-hitler-nazis-kpd-spd-germany-cold-war). Jacobin. 33. Prowe, Diethelm (November 1994). "'Classic' Fascism and the New Radical Right in Western Europe: Comparisons and Contrasts". Contemporary European History. 3 (3): 289–313. JSTOR 20081528 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/200 81528). 34. "The real losers in Saturday's battle of Lewisham | 1970–1979" (http://century.guardian.co.uk/1970-1979/Story/0,,10 6928,00.html). century.guardian.co.uk. Retrieved 7 April 2014. 35. NMP’s History of Resisting Racism and Injustice (http://www.nmp.org.uk/timeline/); Alastair BonnettRadicalism, Anti- Racism and Representation, London: Routledge, 2013, p. 57; Nigel CopseyAnti-Fascism in Britain, Springer, 1999, pp. 125–83 36. "Anti-Fascist Action: Radical resistance or rent-a-mob?" (http://www.amielandmelburn.org.uk/collections/soundings/1 4_53.pdf) (PDF). Soundings – issue 14 Spring 2000. Amielandmelburn.org.uk. 37. AFA (London) Constitution Part 1.4 38. "Diamond in the Dust – The Ian Stuart Biography" (http://www.skrewdriver.net/diamond.html). Skrewdriver.net. Retrieved 7 April 2014. 39. Nigel Copsey Anti-Fascism in Britain London: Routledge, 2016 40. Peter Barberis, John McHugh, Mike Tyldesley (26 July 2005) Encyclopedia of British and Irish Political Organizations: Parties, Groups and Movements of the 20th Century. Continuum International Publishing Group. p. 107. ISBN 978-0-8264-5814-8; Stefano Fella, Carlo Ruzza (24 December 2012)Anti-Racist Movements in the EU: Between Europeanisation and National Trajectories. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-230-29090-7, pp. 67–68

Further reading

David Berry "‘Fascism or Revolution!’ Anarchism and Antifascism in France, 1933–39" Contemporary European History Volume 8, Issue 1 March 1999, pp. 51-71 Birchall, Sean (ed.). Beating The Fascists: The Untold Story of Anti-Fascist Action. ISBN 978-1-904491-12-5. Brasken, Kasper. "Making Anti-Fascism Transnational: The Origins of Communist and Socialist Articulations of Resistance in Europe, 1923–1924." Contemporary European History 25.4 (2016): 573-596. Bray, Mark (2017). Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook. New York: Melville House. ISBN 978-1612197036. Bullstreet, K. Bash the Fash: Anti-Fascist Recollections 1984–1993. ISBN 1-873605-87-0. External link in |title= (help) Class War/3WayFight/Kate Sharpley LibraryInterview from Beating Fascism: Anarchist Anti-Fascism in Theory and Practice, anarkismo.net Nigel Copsey Anti-Fascism in Britain; Palgrave Macmillan, January 2000ISBN 978-0-312-22765-4 Copsey, N. (2011) 'From direct action to community action: The changing dynamics of anti-fascist opposition', in Copsey, N. and Macklin, G. D. (eds) British National Party: Contemporary perspectives. Routledge Nigel Copsey & Andrzej Olechnowicz (eds.),V arieties of Anti-fascism. Britain in the Inter-war Period, Palgrave Macmillan Gilles Dauvé "Fascism/Antifascism", libcom.org David Featherstone "Black Internationalism, Subaltern Cosmopolitanism, and the Spatial Politics of Antifascism" Annals of the Association of American Geographers Volume 103, 2013 - Issue 6, pp.1406-1420 Joseph Fronczak "Local People’s Global Politics: A Transnational History of the Hands Off Ethiopia Movement of 1935 Diplomatic History, Volume 39, Issue 2, 1 April 2015, Pages 245–274 Hugo Garcia, ed, Transnational Anti-Fascism: Agents, Networks, Circulations Contemporary European History Volume 25, Issue 4 November 2016 , pp. 563-572 Key, Anna (ed.). Beating Fascism: Anarchist anti-fascism in theory and practice. ISBN 1-873605-88-9. Renton, Dave. Fascism, Anti-fascism and Britain in the 1940s. Springer, 2016. Enzo Traverso "Intellectuals and Anti-Fascism: For a Critical Historization" New Politics, vol. 9, no. 4 (new series), whole no. 36, Winter 2004

External links

Centre for fascist, anti-fascist and post-fascist studies, Teesside University Remembering the Anarchist Resistance to fascism

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Text is available under theCreative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of theWikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization. Post-WWII anti-fascism

Antifa movements and Anti-Fascist Action networks are left wing, often anarchist, extra- parliamentary political movements who describe themselves as anti-fascist. Such movements have been active in several countries in thesecond half of the 20th and early 21st century.

2007 photo of Antifa graffiti in Contents Trnava, Slovakia

History Germany Sweden: Antifascistisk Aktion activities United States Gallery References

History

Germany Antifaschistische Aktion, an umbrella organisation for militant anti-fascists in Germany, was formed in 1932. It was sometimes called "Antifa". Although it did not survive the war, local anti-fascist committees were formed across Germany, typically by veterans of this organisation, as Nazi rule crumbled in 1944, under the name "Antifa".[1] These anti-fascist committees often included communists, social democrats, and progressive Christians.[2]

In Communist East Germany, anti-fascism became part of the official ideology of state, and the abbreviation Antifa was used for various organs of the Communist state. For example, from 1961, the East German Socialist Unity Party used the term "Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart" (German: Antifaschistischer Schutzwall) as the official name for the Berlin Wall, in sharp contrast to the West Berlin city Logo of Antifaschistische Aktion, the [3][4] government which would sometimes refer to it as the W" all of Shame". militant anti-fascist network in 1930s Germany that inspired the Antifa The modern Germany movement most commonly associated with anti-fascism movement originated in the late 1980s, growing out of West Germany's squatter scene and autonomism movement.[5] This movement ultimately has its origins in the student- based Außerparlamentarische Opposition and the values associated with the new social movements. Unlike the 1930s Antifaschistische Aktion, which was linked to the Communist Party of Germany, concerned with industrial working-class politics against Hitler's NSDAP, the late 1980s and early 1990s "autonomists" were instead independent "anti-authoritarian" Libertarian Marxists and anarcho-communists, not associated with any particular party. The publication Antifaschistisches Infoblatt was in operation since 1987, seeking to expose radical nationalists publicly. In 2003, they joined Antifa-Net, part of an international network, including the likes of Britain'sSear chlight and Sweden's Expo. It was after German reunification in 1990, that most of the Antifa groups were formed. For example, the Autonomen Antifa (M) was created in Göttingen in 1990. Following the rise of the National Democratic Party of Germany and some actions of extra-parliamentary violence such as the Solingen arson attack of 1993, more groups were formed.[6] Antifaschistische Aktion Berlin, founded in 1993 was one of the more prominent groups and the Antifaschistische Aktion/Bundesweite Organisation was founded to coordinate these groups across Germany. Aside from their violent clashes with ultra-nationalists, these groups participated in the annual May Day in Kreuzberg, which typically ends in large scale riots. The German Antifa movement later fractured into three camps after German Reunification;[7] the Anti- Germans (who stress the importance of people of all races uniting across national lines, who support Israel), the Anti-Imperialists (who tend to view politics in terms Logo of Antifaschistische Aktion of how a country relates to the west, who take a position of Anti-Zionism and reject a peaceful, two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict), and those who have no position on Israel or see it as irrelevant to questions of contemporary anti-fascism in Germany. The Antifaschistische Aktion/Bundesweite Organisation splintered into different groups and factions as a result of these political differences, which remain bitterly contested to this day.

According to the German intelligence agency Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the contemporary anti-fascist movement in Germany includes those who are willing to use violence.[8] Militant behaviour against police is an expression of the "Autonome Szene" and part of the concept "Antifaschistische Aktion". There are illustrations made public in the antifascist movement with mottoes that sometimes call for not only violence against police or skinheads but also bishops and judges. There are slogans like "antifascism means attack" not only against neonazis but also against the civil and capitalist system of the "Bundesrepublik Deutschland".[9] Anti-fascist is sometimes shortened to "Antifa".[10] One of the bigger antifascist campaigns in Germany in recent years was the effort to block the annual Neo-Nazi marches in Dresden.

Sweden: Antifascistisk Aktion activities Militant anti-fascism emerged in Sweden in the early 1990s, in particular around the yearly November 30 protests in Lund and Stockholm propelled by blockades of neo-nazi marches in both cities in 1991.[11] The main militant antifascist group in the country is the Antifascistisk Aktion (AFA), founded in Sweden in 1993. AFA's Activity Guide advocates violence against neo-Nazis. Some in the mainstream media have labelled themleft-wing extremists.[12][13][14] An editorial in the tabloid newspaper Expressen argued that the label anti-fascist was misleading, because of the organization's methods,[15] such as stealing the subscriber list of the National Democrats newspaper, and threatening the subscribers.[15] Other critics say the group does not respect freedom of speech, because some members have attacked moderateconservatives and other nationalists.[16]

United States After World War II, but prior to the development of the modern antifa movement, violent confrontations with Fascist elements happened sporadically in the United States. In 1958 over 500 Lumbee men armed with rocks, sticks and firearms attacked and disrupted a Ku Klux Klan rally, wounding several Klansmen in an event known as the Battle of Hayes Pond. In 1979 the Maoist Communist Workers' Party confronted a local Ku Klux Klan chapter, first by disrupting a screening of The Birth of a Nation in China Grove, North Carolina and later organizing a rally and a march against the Klan on November 3 called the "Death to the Klan March" by the CWP.[17] The Maoists distributed flyers that "called for radical, even violent opposition to the Klan",[17] suggesting the Klan “should be physically beaten and chased out of town."[17] In response, as the marchers collected, a caravan of ten cars (and a van) filled with an estimated 40 KKK and American Nazi Party members confronted the protesters, culminating in a shootout known as the Greensboro Massacre. In the 2010s, self-described antifa groups have become increasingly active in Western Europe and North America.[18] These loose collectives first arose in the early 2010s in response to growing nationalism in countries including the United States, United Kingdom, Denmark, Germany, and France.[19][20][21] In the US, anti-fascist groups had existed since at least 1988 in the form of the Anti-Racist Action,[22] but an American movement using the same name has become increasingly active since 2016,[23][24] often affiliated with anarchism, and have become known for their clashes with far-right and alt-right groups.[22][25][26] US anti-fascist activities have included violent disruptions and demonstrations when provoked by the alt-right, reactions which have drawn criticism from both the political right and political left.[18][21][27] Through their anarchist and anti-nationalist orientation, antifa groups have sometimes been linked to thepunk subculture (including straight edge) both in the US and in Europe.[28]

Gallery

Logo of Antifaschistische Logo of Antifaschistische Toilet brush symbol Logo of Antifascistische Aktion (Germany) Aktion (1930s) adopted for the Hamburg Aktie (Netherlands) (Germany) protests (Antifaschistische Aktion (Germany)

Logo of Sicilia Logo of Action Logo of Union Logo of Action Antifascista (Sicily) Antifasciste Marseille Antifasciste Toulousaine Antifasciste 06 (France) (Marseille) (Toulouse)

Logo of Action Logo of Antifascistisk Logo of Antifa London Logo of Acción Antifasciste 04 (France) Aksjon (Norway) (London) Antifascista (Spain)

Logo of Acció Antifeixista Països Catalans (Catalan Countries)

References

1. Loren Balhorn The Lost History of Antifa (https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/antifascist-movements-hitler-nazis-k pd-spd-germany-cold-war)" Jacobin May 2017 2. Pritchard, Gareth (2012).Niemandsland: A History of Unoccupied Germany, 1944-1945. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 110701350X. 3. Berlin Wall: Five things you might not know (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/8698446/Berlin-Wall-Five-th ings-you-might-not-know.html), The Telegraph, 11 August 2011 4. "13. August 1961: Mauerbau in Berlin" (http://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/node/178754) [13 August 1961: Wall construction in Berlin]. chronik-der-mauer.de (in German). Retrieved 16 July 2015. 5. "The Lost History of Antifa" (https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/antifascist-movements-hitler-nazis-kpd-spd-germa ny-cold-war). Jacobin Mag. 15 August 2017. Retrieved 5 December 2014. 6. (in German) Opfer-Rechter-Gewalt (http://www.opfer-rechter-gewalt.de/) 7. Ogman, Robert (2013). Against The Nation. New Compass Press. ISBN 9788293064206. 8. "Verfassungsschutz-bericht 2015" (https://www.verfassungsschutz.de/de/download-manager/_vsbericht-2015.pdf) (PDF) (in German). Verfassungsschutz.de. pp. 97–102. 9. "Antifaschismus als Thema linksextremistischer Agitation, Bündnispolitik und Ideologie" (http://www.bpb.de/politik/ext remismus/linksextremismus/33612/antifaschismus?p=all). bpd. 6 March 2008. 10. "Antifa | Definition of Antifa in English by Oxford Dictionaries" (https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/antifa). Oxford Dictionaries | English. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 3 October 2017. 11. Brink Pinto, Andrés; Pries, Johan (2017). Wennerhag, Magnus; Fröhlich, Christian; Piotrowski], Grzegorz, eds. Rethinking transformative events to understand the making of new contentious performances: The “autonomous left” and the anti-fascist blockade in Lund 1991 (https://www.academia.edu/34629137/Rethinking_transformative_events _to_understand_the_making_of_new_contentious_performances_The_autonomous_left_and_the_anti-fascist_block ade_in_Lund_1991_excerpt_). Routledge. 12. "Polisen: Afa bakom upplopp i Fittja – Nyheter" (https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/stockholm/polisen-afa-bakom-upplo pp-i-fittja) (in Swedish). SVT.se. 29 October 2009. Retrieved 7 April 2014. 13. "10 Afa-anhängare begärdes häktade" (https://web.archive.org/web/20111001073801/http://mobil.svt.se/2.33538/1.1 752021/10_afa-anhangare_begardes_haktade) (in Swedish). svt.se. 1 November 2012. Archived fromthe original (h ttp://mobil.svt.se/2.33538/1.1752021/10_afa-anhangare_begardes_haktade) on 1 October 2011. Retrieved 8 March 2018. 14. Claes Petersson (13 September 2009)."Slåss med knogjärn | Nyheter | Aftonbladet" (http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyhe ter/article5784027.ab) (in Swedish). Aftonbladet.se. Retrieved 7 April 2014. 15. "090215: Stoppa AFA | Ledare | Expressen" (http://www.expressen.se/ledare/1.1466908/090215-stoppa-afa) (in Swedish). Expressen.se. 15 February 2009. Retrieved 7 April 2014. 16. "Vänsterextrema infiltrerade IOGT-NTO" (http://www.svd.se/nyheter/inrikes/artikel_454715.svd). Svenska Dagbladet (in Swedish). 7 September 2006. Retrieved 8 December 2006. 17. "The Greensboro Massacre" (https://library.uncg.edu/dp/crg/topicalessays/GreensMassacre.aspx). University of North Carolina – Greensboro. Retrieved 2014-02-02. 18. Stockman, Farah (2 Feb 2017)."Anarchists Respond to Trump's Inauguration, by Any Means Necessary" (https://ww w.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/us/anarchists-respond-to-trumps-inauguration-by-any-means-necessary.html). New York Times. Retrieved 10 July 2017. 19. Copsey, Nigel (2017). Anti-Fascism in Britain. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. p. 210.ISBN 9781138926493. 20. Horn, Heather (29 March 2012)."Anti-Islamic vs. Anti-Fascist: Europe's Clashing Protest Movements" (https://www.t heatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/anti-islamic-vs-anti-fascist-europes-clashing-protest-movements/25521 4/). The Atlantic. Retrieved 10 July 2017. 21. Yates, Will (20 February 2017)."America's extremist battle: antifa v alt-right" (http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trendin g-39004753). BBC News. Retrieved 22 February 2017. 22. Strickland, Patrick (21 February 2017)."US anti-fascists: 'We can make racists afraid again' " (http://www.aljazeera.c om/indepth/features/2017/02/anti-fascists-racists-afraid-170221100950730.html). Aljazeera. Retrieved 10 July 2017. 23. Beinhart, Peter. "The Rise of the Violent Left" (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/the-rise-of-the- violent-left/534192/). The Atlantic. Retrieved 12 August 2017. 24. "Behind Berkeley's Semester of Hate" (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/education/edlife/antifa-collective-univers ity-california-berkeley.html?_r=0). New York Times. 4 August 2017. Retrieved 12 August 2017. 25. "UK police arrest 12 at London protest, block clashes" (http://www.businessinsider.com/ap-uk-police-arrest-12-at-lon don-protest-block-clashes-2017-4). Business Insider. 1 April 2017. Retrieved 10 July 2017. 26. Osborne, Samuel (25 June 2017)."EDL and anti-fascists clash with police in London" (https://www.independent.co.u k/news/uk/home-news/edl-english-defence-league-anti-fascists-clash-police-london-britain-first-birmingham-a780740 1.html). Independent. Retrieved 10 July 2017. 27. Sheffield, Matthews (10 March 2017)."Anti-fascist radicals: Liberals don't realize the serious danger of the alt-right" (http://www.salon.com/2017/03/10/anti-fascist-radicals-liberals-dont-realize-the-serious-danger-of-the-alt-right/). Salon. Retrieved 10 July 2017. 28. Kuhn, Gabriel (2010). Sober Living for the Revolution: Hardcore Punk, Straight Edge, and Radical Politics (https://bo oks.google.cz/books?id=YWb7BgAAQBAJ&pg=PA137#v=onepage&q&f=false). PM Press. p. 137. ISBN 1604860510. Retrieved 7 October 2017.

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Text is available under theCreative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of theWikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization. Antifa (United States)

The Antifa (English: /ænˈtiːfə/ or /ˈæntiˌfɑː/)[1] movement is a conglomeration of autonomous, self-styled anti-fascist groups in the United States.[2][3][4] The principal feature of antifa groups is their opposition to fascism through the use of direct action.[5] They engage in militant protest tactics, which has included property damage and physical violence.[2][6][7][8] They tend to be anti-capitalist[9] and they are predominantly far-left and militant left,[10][5] which includes anarchists, communists and socialists.[11][12][13][14] Their stated focus is on fighting far-right and white supremacist ideologies directly, rather than politically.[5]

Contents

History Terminology An Antifa sticker Ideology and activities Notable street protests and violence Response Mainstream White House petition Twitter hoax See also References Further reading

History

The movement draws in part from a tradition of anti-fascism in the United States which stretches back a century, tracing its roots to the 1920s and 1930s, when militant leftists were involved in battles against American pro-Nazi organizations such as the Friends of New Germany.[15] Although there is no organizational connection, the lineage of antifa in America can be traced to Weimar Germany,[16] where the first group described as "antifa" was Antifaschistische Aktion, formed in 1932 with the involvement of theCommunist Party of Germany.[17]

After World War II, but prior to the development of the modern antifa movement, violent confrontations with Fascist elements continued sporadically. In 1958 over 500 Lumbee men armed with rocks, sticks and firearms attacked and disrupted a Ku Klux Klan rally, wounding several Klansmen in an event known as the Battle of Logo of Antifaschistische Aktion, the Hayes Pond. In 1979 the Communist Workers' Party confronted a local Ku Klux militant anti-fascist network in 1930s Klan chapter, first by disrupting a screening of The Birth of a Nation in China Germany that inspired the Antifa Grove, North Carolina and later organizing a rally and a march against the Klan on movement November 3 called the "Death to the Klan March" by the CWP.[18] The Maoists distributed flyers that "called for radical, even violent opposition to the Klan",[18] suggesting the Klan “should be physically beaten and chased out of town."[18] In response, as the marchers collected, a caravan of ten cars (and a van) filled with an estimated 40 KKK and American Nazi Party members confronted the protesters, culminating in a shootout known as the Greensboro Massacre.

Modern antifa politics can be traced to resistance to waves of xenophobia, the emergence of white power culture and the infiltration of neo-Nazi skinheads in Britain's punk scene in the 1970s and 1980s. In response to neo-Nazism gaining prominence in Germany, after the fall of the Berlin Wall unleashed a violent backlash, a cadre of young leftists, including many anarchists, punk fans, revolutionaries and migrants, organized self-defence groups and revived the tradition of street-level anti-fascist demonstrations.[10] Liberal columnist Peter Beinart writes that "in the late '80s, left-wing punk fans in the United States began following suit, though they initially called their groups Anti-Racist Action, on the theory that Americans would be more familiar with fighting racism than they would be with fighting fascism. According to Mark Bray, the author of the forthcoming Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, these activists toured with popular alternative bands in the '90s, trying to ensure that neo-Nazis did not recruit their fans. In 2002, they disrupted a speech by Matthew F. Hale, the head of the World Church of the Creator, a white supremacist group in Pennsylvania; 25 people were arrested in the resulting brawl".[10]

In the United States and Canada, activists of Anti-Racist Action Network (ARA) – the direct precursor of many contemporary US antifa groups – whose growth was spurred by the punk rock[19] and skinhead scene of the late 1980s,[10][20] doggedly pursued Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other assorted white supremacists into the 2000s. Their motto was simple but bold: "We go where they go". If Nazi skinheads handed out leaflets at a punk show in Indiana about how "Hitler was right", ARA was there to show them the door. If fascists plastered downtown Alberta's Edmonton with racist posters, ARA tore them down and replaced them with anti-racist slogans.[21] Other antifa groups in the U.S. have other genealogies, for example in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where a group called the Baldies was formed in 1987 with the intent to fight neo-Nazi groups directly.[9]

Terminology Although various antifascist movements have existed in the United States pretty much since the beginning of fascism, the word antifa, adopted from German usage,[16][22][23] only came into prominence as an umbrella term in English in 2017.[24][25]

Ideology and activities

The antifa movement is composed of autonomous groups and thus has no formal organization.[10][26] Antifa groups either form loose support networks, such as NYC Antifa, or operate independently.[27] Activists typically organize protests via social media and through websites and email lists.[10][26] Some activists have built peer-to-peer networks, or use encrypted-texting services like Signal.[28] According to Salon, it is an organizing strategy, not a group of people.[29] While its numbers cannot be estimated accurately, the movement has grown since the 2016 presidential election and approximately 200 groups currently exist in the US, of varying sizes and levels of engagement.[16] The activists involved subscribe to a range of ideologies, typically on the left and they include anarchists, socialists and communists along with some liberals and social democrats.[30][31][32]

According to Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at the California State University, San Bernardino, Antifa activists participate in violent actions because "they believe that elites are controlling the government and the media. So they need to make a statement head-on against the people who they regard as racist".[2] According to Mark Bray, a historian at Dartmouth College sympathetic to the antifa movement's goals, the adherents "reject turning to the police or the state to halt the advance of white supremacy. Instead they advocate popular opposition to fascism as we witnessed in Charlottesville".[31]

The idea of direct action is central to the antifa movement. Antifa organizer Scott Crow told an interviewer: "The idea in Antifa is that we go where they [right-wingers] go. That hate speech is not free speech. That if you are endangering people with what you say and the actions that are behind them, then you do not have the right to do that. And so we go to cause conflict, to shut them down where they are, because we don't believe that Nazis or fascists of any stripe should have a mouthpiece".[2] A manual posted on It's Going Down, an anarchist website, warns against accepting "people who just want to fight". It furthermore notes that "physically confronting and defending against fascists is a necessary part of anti-fascist work, but is not the only or even necessarily the most important part".[33] According to Beinart, antifa activists "try to publicly identify white supremacists and get them fired from their jobs and evicted from their apartments", in addition to "disrupt(ing) sic[ ] white-supremacist rallies, including by force".[34] According to a Washington Post book review, antifa tactics include "no platforming", i.e. denying their targets platforms from which to speak; obstructing their events and defacing their propaganda; and when antifa activists deem it necessary, deploying violence to deter them.[32] According to National Public Radio, "people who speak for the Antifa movement acknowledge they sometimes carry clubs and sticks" and their "approach is confrontational".[35] CNN describes antifa as "known for causing damage to property during protests".[2] Scott Crow, described by CNN as "a longtime Antifa organizer", argues that destroying property is not a form of violence.[2] The groups have been associated with physical violence in public against police[36] and against people whose political views its activists deem repugnant.[37] Antifa activists used clubs and dyed liquids against the white supremacists in Charlottesville[38] and caused property damage.[2] In one incident, an apparent antifa supporter punched white supremacist Richard Spencer in the face as he was giving an impromptu street interview[39][40] and on another occasion, in Berkeley, it was reported that some threw Molotov cocktails.[2]

Apart from the other activities, antifa activists engage inmutual aid, such as disaster response in the case ofHurricane Harvey.[41][42] According to Natasha Lennard in The Nation, antifa "collectives are working with interfaith groups and churches in cities around the country to create a New Sanctuary Movement, continuing and expanding a 40-year-old practice of providing spaces for refugees and immigrants, which entails outright refusal to cooperate withICE ".[43]

In June 2017, the antifa movement was linked to "anarchist extremism" by the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness.[44] In September 2017, an article in Politico stated that the website had obtained confidential documents and interviews indicating that in April 2016, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation believed that "anarchist extremists" were the primary instigators of violence at public rallies against a range of targets. The Department of Homeland Security was said to have classified their activities as domestic terrorism. Politico interviewed law enforcement officials who noted a rise in activity since the beginning of the Trump administration, particularly a rise in recruitment (and on the part of the far right as well) since the CharlottesvilleUnite the Right rally. Politico stated that one internal assessment acknowledged an inability to penetrate the groups' "diffuse and decentralized organizational structure". Politico also reported that the agencies were (as of April 2016) monitoring "conduct deemed potentially suspicious and indicative of terrorist activity".[45]

Notable street protests and violence Antifa groups, along withblack bloc activists, were among those who protested the 2016 election of Donald Trump.[10][43] They also participated in the February 2017 Berkeley protests against alt-right[46][47][48][49] speaker Milo Yiannopoulos, where they gained mainstream attention,[26] with media reporting them "throwing Molotov cocktails and smashing windows"[2] and causing $100,000 worth of damage.[50] Before the talk, there were rumors that he planned to out undocumented students in his speech. Yiannopoulos denied the rumors, saying that he was not planning to target individual students, rather he planned to campaign against "sanctuary campuses".[51][52][28]

In April 2017, two groups described as "anti-fascist/anarchist", including the socialist/environmentalist Direct Action Alliance, threatened to disrupt the 82nd Avenue of Roses Parade after hearing the Multnomah County Republican Party would participate. The parade organizers also received an anonymous email, saying: "You have seen how much power we have downtown and that the police cannot stop us from shutting down roads so please consider your decision wisely". The two groups denied having anything to do with the email. The parade was ultimately canceled by the organizers due to safety concerns.[53][54]

On June 15, 2017, some antifa groups joined protestors at Evergreen State College to oppose Patriot Prayer's event. Patriot Prayer was supporting biology professor Bret Weinstein who became the central figure in a controversy after he criticized changes to one of the college's events. In addition to the peaceful antifa activists who held up a "community love" sign, USA Today reported that one slashed the tires of right-wing activistJoey Gibson and another was wrestled to the ground by Patriot Prayer activists after being seen with a knife.[55]

Antifa counter-protesters at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017 "certainly used clubs and dyed liquids against the white supremacists".[38] Journalist Adele Stan interviewed an antifa protester at the rally who said that the sticks carried by the protesters are a justifiable countermeasure to the fact that "the right has a goon squad".[56] Some antifa participants at the Charlottesville rally chanted that counter-protesters should "punch a Nazi in the mouth".[35] Antifa participants also protected Cornel West and various clergy from attack by white supremacists, with West stating he felt that antifa had "saved his life".[57][58] Another religious leader stated that antifa activists defended the First United Methodist Church, where the Charlottesville Clergy Collective provided refreshments, music and training to the counter-protesters and "chased [the white supremacists] off with sticks".[57][59]

Groups that had been preparing to protest the Boston Free Speech Rally saw their plans become viral following the violence in Charlottesville. The event drew a largely peaceful crowd of 40,000 counter-protestors. In The Atlantic, McKay Coppins stated that the 33 people arrested for violent incidents were "mostly egged on by the minority of 'Antifa' agitators in the crowd".[60] President Trump described the protestors outside his August 2017 rally inPhoenix, Arizona as "Antifa".[61]

During a Berkeley protest on August 27, 2017, an estimated one hundred antifa protesters joined a crowd of 2,000–4,000 counter- protesters to attack a reported "handful" of alt-right demonstrators and Trump supporters who showed up for a "Say No to Marxism" rally that had been cancelled by organizers due to security concerns. Some antifa activists beat and kicked unarmed demonstrators[50][62] and threatened to smash the cameras of anyone who filmed them.[63] Jesse Arreguin, the mayor of Berkeley, suggested classifying the city's antifa as a gang.[64] The group Patriot Prayer cancelled an event in San Francisco the same day following counter protests. Joey Gibson, the founder of Patriot Prayer, blamed antifa, along with By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), for breaking up the event.[65]

Response

Mainstream Antifa actions have been subject to criticism from Republicans, Democrats and political commentators in the U.S. media.[66][67][68] House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi condemned the violence of "Antifa" activists in Berkeley on August 29, 2017.[69] Conservative talk show host and Fox News contributor Laura Ingraham suggested labeling antifa as a terrorist organization.[70] Trevor Noah, host of the popular late-night television program The Daily Show jokingly referred to antifa as "Vegan ISIS".[71] Several antifa protesters have been arrested for property damage, assault with a deadly weapon as well as for other charges.[72][73]

White House petition In August 2017, a petition requesting that "AntiFa" be classified by the Pentagon as a terrorist organization was launched on the White House petitioning systemW e the People. It gathered more than 100,000 signatures in three days and therefore under policy set by the Obama administration would have received an official review and response from the White House (at over 300,000 signatures, by late August it was the third most-signed submission posted).[74] However, the precedent set by the Obama administration of issuing formal responses to petitions which exceed the 100,000 signature threshold has not been continued by the Trump administration, which has not responded to any petitions on the site.[75] The originator of the "AntiFa" petition, who goes by the pseudonym "Microchip", remarked to Politico that getting conservatives to share and discuss the petition was the entire point, rather than prompting any concrete action by the government. As of October 2017, the petition has over 350,000 signatures.[76]

Twitter hoax

In August 2017, a #PunchWhiteWomen photo hoax campaign was started by members of the alt-right in an attempt to discredit the antifa movement.[77] In August 2017, the image of British actress Anna Friel portraying a battered woman in a 2007 Women's Aid anti-domestic violence campaign was re-purposed using fake antifa Twitter accounts organized by way of 4chan, which was discovered after an investigation by Bellingcat researcher Eliot Higgins. The image is captioned "53% of white women voted for Trump, 53% of white women should look like this" and includes an antifa flag. Another image featuring an injured woman is captioned "She chose to be a Nazi. Choices have consequences" and includes the hashtag #PunchANazi. Eliot Higgins remarked to the BBC that "[t]his was a transparent and quite pathetic attempt, but I wouldn't be surprised if white nationalist groups try to mount more sophisticated attacks in the future".[78] A report by ProPublica said that both overtly and covertly pro-Russian social media accounts were found using the hashtag #Antifa in reference to the events and aftermath of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.[79] Nafeesa Syeed of Bloomberg reported that "[t]he most-tweeted link in the Russian-linked network followed by the researchers was a petition to declare Antifa a terrorist group".[80]

See also

Antifa movements Redneck Revolt, an anti-capitalist, anti-fascist and anti-racist group Refuse Fascism, an organization opposed to thepresidency of Donald Trump Rose City Antifa Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice

References

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Retrieved September 23, 2017. 47. Roose, Kevin (August 9, 2017)."The Alt-Right Finds a New Enemy in Silicon Valley" (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/ 08/09/business/alt-right-silicon-valley-google-memo.html). The New York Times. Retrieved September 23, 2017. 48. Porter, Tom (August 12, 2017). "Who are the alt-right leaders and provocateurs addressing the Charlottesville white nationalist rally?" (http://www.newsweek.com/alt-right-leaders-are-addressing-largest-white-nationalist-rally-decades- 650096). Newsweek. Retrieved September 23, 2017. 49. Luckhurst, Phoebe (November 25, 2016)."Who is Milo Yiannopoulos? Everything you need to know about Donald Trump's alt-Right poster boy" (http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/who-is-milo-yiannopoulos-everything-yo u-need-to-know-about-donald-trumps-altright-poster-boy-a3404921.html). London Evening Standard. Retrieved November 7, 2017. 50. Swenson, Kyle (August 28, 2017)."Black-clad antifa attack peaceful right wing demonstrators in Berkeley" (https://w ww.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/08/28/black-clad-antifa-attack-right-wing-demonstrators-in-berk eley/). The Washington Post. Retrieved August 28, 2017. 51. Asimov, Nanette (February 1, 2017)."UC warns campus group: Yiannopoulos event could target students" (http://ww w.sfgate.com/news/article/UC-warns-campus-group-Yiannopoulos-event-could-10901517.php). San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved November 7, 2017. 52. Steinmetz, Katy (September 5, 2017)." 'Free Speech Week' Is Coming to Berkeley. Things Could Get Heated Again" (http://time.com/4924477/berkeley-yiannopoulos-antifa-free-speech-week). Time. Retrieved November 7, 2017. 53. Brown, Doug (April 25, 2017)."82nd Avenue of the Roses Parade Cancelled after Threats of Political Protests, Violence" (http://www.portlandmercury.com/blogtown/2017/04/25/18973706/82nd-avenue-of-the-roses-parade-cance lled-after-threats-of-political-protests-violence). The Portland Mercury. Retrieved August 16, 2017. 54. Mettler, Katie (April 27, 2017). "Portland rose parade canceled after 'antifascists' threaten GOP marchers" (https://w ww.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/04/27/portland-rose-parade-canceled-after-antifascists-threaten -gop-marchers/). The Washington Post. Retrieved August 14, 2017. 55. Bancalari, Kellie (June 30, 2017)."Evergreen State College looks to mend campus following protests" (http://college. usatoday.com/2017/06/30/evergreen-state-college-looks-to-mend-campus-following-protests). USA Today. Retrieved August 30, 2017. 56. Stan, Adele (August 14, 2017)."White Supremacist Chaos in Charlottesville Is Just the Beginning" (http://billmoyers. com/story/white-supremacist-chaos-charlottesville-just-beginning/). Moyers & Company. Retrieved August 14, 2017. 57. Lithwick, Dahlia (August 16, 2017)."Y es, What About the "Alt-Left"?" (http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politic s/politics/2017/08/what_the_alt_left_was_actually_doing_in_charlottesville.html). Slate. Retrieved November 7, 2017. 58. Flood, Alison (August 22, 2017)."Antifa: the Anti-fascist Handbook – 'What Trump said made the book seem even more urgent' Rushed into print after the US president said there were 'fine people on both sides' of the Charlottesville clashes, Mark Bray's guide provides tactics for those hoping to 'defeat the resurgent far right' " (http s://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/22/antifa-anti-fascist-handbook-trump-us-politics-far-right-charlottesville). The Guardian. Retrieved August 27, 2017. 59. Bellows, Kate (July 6, 2017)."Charlottesville activists, religious leaders to counter KKK rally with community events Saturday" (http://www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2017/07/charlottesville-activists-religious-leaders-to-counter-kkk-rally- with-community-events-saturday). The Cavalier Daily. Retrieved August 30, 2017. 60. Coppins, McKay (August 19, 2017)."The far right's day in Boston" (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/ 08/boston-free-speech-rally/537435/). The Atlantic. Retrieved August 30, 2017. 61. Smith, David (August 23, 2017)."T rump paints himself as the real victim of Charlottesville in angry speech" (https://w ww.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/23/donald-trump-arizona-rally-phoenix). The Guardian. Retrieved November 7, 2017. 62. Bowman, Emma (August 28, 2017)."Scattered Violence Erupts At Large, Left-Wing Berkeley Rally" (http://www.npr. org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/28/546641577/scattered-violence-erupts-at-large-left-wing-berkeley-rally). National Public Radio. Retrieved August 28, 2017. 63. Queally, James; St. John, Paige; Oreskes, Benjamin; Zahniser, David (August 27, 2017)."Counter-demonstrators vastly out number Trump supporters at Berkeley rally" (http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-berkeley-protest s-20170827-story.html). Los Angeles Times. Retrieved November 7, 2017. 64. Porter, Tom (August 29, 2017). "Berkeley's mayor wants antifa to be classified as a gang" (http://www.newsweek.co m/berkeley-mayor-calls-antifa-be-classified-crime-gang-after-clashes-sunday-656286). Newsweek. Retrieved August 29, 2017. 65. Bauer, Shane (August 25, 2017)."Pro-T rump group cancels San Francisco rally as hundreds of counterprotesters march on the streets" (https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/post-nation/wp/2017/08/26/a-pro-trump-grou p-canceled-its-rally-but-san-francisco-prepared-for-violence-anyway/). The Washington Post. Retrieved August 27, 2017. 66. "Calmer voices on the left must disavow antifa's tactics — or else they will give rhetorical ammunition torump" T (htt p://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/antifa-threat-poisoning-trump-opposition-article-1.3424272). New York Daily News. August 20, 2017. Retrieved August 25, 2017. 67. Berrien, Hank (August 15, 2017)."Crowder Slams Antifa, Alt-Right" (http://www.dailywire.com/news/19731/crowder-s lams-antifa-alt-right-hank-berrien). The Daily Wire. Retrieved August 30, 2017. 68. Oppenheim, Maya (August 22, 2017)."Noam Chomsky: Antifa is a 'major gift to the right' " (https://www.independent. co.uk/news/world/americas/noam-chomsky-antifa-major-gift-right-wing-anti-fascist-alt-left-a7906406.html). The Independent. Retrieved August 30, 2017. 69. Pelosi, Nancy (August 29, 2017)."Pelosi Statement Condemning Antifa Violence in Berkeley" (https://www.democrat icleader.gov/newsroom/82917). democraticleader.gov. Retrieved August 30, 2017. 70. Concha, Joe (August 29, 2017)."Laura Ingraham proposes declaring antifa a 'terrorist organization' " (http://thehill.co m/homenews/media/348383-laura-ingraham-proposes-declaring-antifa-a-terrorist-organization). The Hill. Retrieved August 30, 2017. 71. Noah, Trevor (August 31, 2017). "Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Antagonists of the Alt-Right: The Daily Show" (https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=kmpqnxpYUqA). YouTube. Retrieved October 13, 2017. 72. "Eric Clanton charged with four counts of assault with deadly weapon" (http://www.berkeleyside.com/2017/05/26/eric -clanton-charged-four-counts-assault-deadly-weapon). Berkeleyside. May 26, 2017. Retrieved August 30, 2017. 73. Seunagal, Gabrielle (August 16, 2017)."AntiFa Protester Arrested For Destruction of Property" (http://usaherald.co m/antifa-protester-arrested-destruction-property). USA Herald. Retrieved August 30, 2017. 74. "Petition urging terror label for Antifa gets enough signatures for White House response" (http://www.foxnews.com/p olitics/2017/08/21/petition-urging-terror-label-for-antifa-gets-enough-signatures-for-white-house-response.html). Fox News. August 21, 2017. Retrieved August 26, 2017. 75. Nelson, Steven (April 18, 2017)."White House Considers Dumping Petition Site" (https://www.usnews.com/news/arti cles/2017-04-18/white-house-considers-dumping-petition-site). U.S. News & World Report. Retrieved August 31, 2017. 76. Musgrave, Shawn (August 24, 2017)."White House 'antifa' petition written by pro-Trump troll" (http://www.politico.co m/story/2017/08/24/antifa-white-house-petition-trump-troll-241990). Politico. Retrieved August 25, 2017. 77. Maldonado, Alessandra (August 24, 2017)."Antifa '#PunchWhiteWomen' campaign revealed as 4Chan hoax" (http:// www.salon.com/2017/08/24/antifa-punchwhitewomen-campaign-revealed-as-4chan-hoax/). Salon. Retrieved August 30, 2017. "Reportedly, 'alt-right' activists have been using masked Twitter accounts and doctored photos of battered women to run a smear campaign against the antifa movement". 78. "Far-right smear campaign against Antifa exposed by Bellingcat" (http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-4103663 1). BBC News. August 24, 2017. Retrieved August 25, 2017. 79. Arnsdorf, Isaac (August 28, 2017)."Pro-Russian Bots Take Up the Right-Wing Cause After Charlottesville" (https://w ww.propublica.org/article/pro-russian-bots-take-up-the-right-wing-cause-after-charlottesville). ProPublica. Retrieved September 18, 2017. 80. Syeed, Nafeesa (September 1, 2017)."Pro-Russian Bots Sharpen Online Attacks for 2018 U.S. ote"V (https://www.bl oomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-01/russia-linked-bots-hone-online-attack-plans-for-2018-u-s-vote). Bloomberg Politics. Retrieved November 7, 2017.

Further reading

"The Black Bloc Papers: An Anthology of Primary extsT From The North American Anarchist Black Bloc 1988–2005" (PDF)., by Xavier Massot & David Van Deusen of the Green Mountain Anarchist Collective (NEFAC-VT), Breaking Glass Press, 2010. Bray, Mark (2017). Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook. Melville House. ISBN 978-1-61219-703-6.

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Antifa_(United_States)&oldid=830873184"

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Text is available under theCreative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of theWikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization. Anti-Fascist Action

Anti-Fascist Action (AFA) was a militant anti-fascist organisation founded in the Anti-Fascist Action UK in 1985, by a wide range of anti-racist and anti-fascist organisations.

It was active in fighting far-right organisations, particularly the National Front and British National Party. It was notable in significantly reducing fascist street activity in Britain in the 1990s.[1] AFA had what they called a "twin-track" strategy: physical confrontation of fascists on the streets and ideological struggle against fascism in working class communities.[2][3]

Among its more notable mobilisations were violent confrontations such as the "Battle of Waterloo" in 1992 and non-violent events such as the Unity Carnivals of the early 1990s. Formation 1985 Extinction 2001 Type Militant anti-fascism Contents Location London, England, UK History Affiliations Red Action and Direct Early 1990s Action Movement "Filling the Vacuum" strategy Politics See also Notes Further reading External links

History

AFA was launched in London in 1985 at a large public meeting representing a wide range of anti-fascist and anti-racist organisations and individuals, including Red Action and the Direct Action Movement, Searchlight, the Newham Monitoring Project, and the Jewish Socialist Group.[2] It was partly a reaction to the perceived inadequacies of the original Anti-Nazi League (ANL), which had recently wound up its operations. AFA members accused ANL of failing to directly confront fascists, of allying with moderates who were complicit in racism, and of being a vanguardist front for the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).[4] Although many Trotskyist groups, independent socialists, anarchists and members of the Labour Party were active in AFA in the 1980s, after its relaunch in 1989 the main members were always from Red Action, a group founded by disillusioned militant anti-fascist ex-SWP members who had criticised perceived populist or popular front politics of the ANL.[5]

Thousands of people took part in AFA mobilisations such as the Remembrance Day demonstrations in 1986 and 1987, and a mobilisation against a Blood and Honour gig, "the Main Event", in May 1989.[6] In 1988, AFA formed a musical arm, Cable Street Beat (named after the Battle of Cable Street, a 1936 confrontation between fascists and anti-fascists), on similar principles to the Anti-Nazi League’s Rock Against Racism.[7] Cable Street Beat launched a magazine, Cable Street Beat Review, in early 1989.[8] Among the artists who performed for early Cable Street Beat events were Blaggers ITA, Angelic Upstarts, Attila the Stockbroker, The Men They Couldn't Hang, Forgotten Sons and Blyth Power.[9] In 1989, there was a split in AFA between militant anti-fascists and other members, such as the Newham Monitoring Group, whose views were closer to liberal anti-fascism. The militant groups relaunched AFA that year, with the affiliates Direct Action Movement and Workers' Power, as well as several trade unions.

Early 1990s In the early 1990s, AFA continued the pattern of twin-track physical and ideological confrontations with fascism. Examples of the former include the first Unity Carnival in east London in 1991, with 10,000 participants, and a demonstration in Bethnal Green, with 4,000 participants (under the slogan “Beating the Fascists: An old East End tradition”). In September 1991, AFA launched its magazine Fighting Talk, of which 25 issues were published between 1991 and April 1999; the magazine incorporated Cable Street Beat Review.[10] The first issue reported the recent launch of a Dublin branch and a Glasgow branch, the latter with the support of Red Action, Class War, Direct Action Movement,W orkers Party Scotland, Scottish Anti-Racist Movement and the Republican Bands Alliance.[11]

Cable Street Beat continued in the early 1990s, with the involvement of bands including the reformed The Selecter,[12] Bad Manners and Gary Clail.

Physical resistance to fascism also continued. In 1990, three AFA members were jailed for a total of 11 years following an attack on a neo-Nazi activist.[13] AFA's militant approach to anti-fascism was given media airing in May 1992, when the BBC screened a documentary, Fighting Talk, as part of its Open Space series.[14]

A long street battle between AFA against Blood and Honour supporters, skinheads, hooligan firms and far-right groups on 11 September 1992 was dubbed the Battle of Waterloo as it was centred on Waterloo station. There were stabbings and 36 people were arrested.[15][16]

By this time, there were 21 branches of AFA listed in Fighting Talk, in locations including Birmingham, Brighton, Bristol, Cardiff, Oxford, Exeter, Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester and Norwich.[17]

"Filling the Vacuum" strategy In 1993, Derek Beackon, a candidate from the British National Party (BNP), won a council seat on the Isle of Dogs in Tower Hamlets, East London, under the slogan of "Rights for Whites".[18][19] This signalled a turn in the BNP's policy from confrontation on the streets to a bid for electoral respectability, partly as a response to their defeat on the streets by AFA.[18] In 1994, BNP activist Tony Lecomber announced this turn in tactics with a statement to the press that there would be "no more meetings, marches, punch- ups".[20][21] In 1995 London AFA responded with its Filling the Vacuum strategy,[22] which involved offering a political alternative in these communities instead of concentrating on challenging the fascist presence on the streets. Red Action and its allies campaigned within the AFA Network after 1995 for AFA as an organisation to adopt the "Filling the Vacuum" strategy. However, given that AFA contained a number of political groups, with differing political programmes, this, and the decline of street action by the BNP as it embraced "respectable electoralism", contributed to the breakup of much of the AFA network, with much internal recrimination.[23]

Anti-fascist mobilisations still occurred after 1995, such as ones against the National Front in Dover in 1997 and 1998. The number of AFA branches across the UK peaked at 38 in the mid-1990s, with regular national conferences and an active Northern Network. A new AFA National Coordinating Committee was set up, and in 1997, an official AFA statement forbade members from associating with Searchlight. In 1998 the committee expelled Leeds and Huddersfield AFA for ignoring this policy. There were some local relaunches of AFA groups, such as in Liverpool in 2000, but by 2001, AFA barely existed as a national organisation.

Red Action and other AFA activists followed the logic of providing a political alternative to fascism in setting up the Independent Working Class Association (IWCA) in 1995, which became the sole focus of Red Action activity after 2001. Others formerly involved in AFA, predominantly anarchists, have maintained militant, street-focused tactics, initially in the group No Platform, then Antifa UK.[2] Some of these groups re-formed in the Anti-Fascist Network in 2011, which aims to recreate the "two-track" approach of AFA.[24] Politics

Critics argue that AFA's physical confrontation approach was often more visible than their ideological work, and their tactics were criticised for their squadism and use of violence.[25] However, supporters of AFA's approach cite its involvement in the youth music scene and successful propaganda events like the 1986 and 1987 Remembrance Day "Remember the victims of Fascism" marches, as evidence of this wider agenda.[1]

See also

Antifaschistische Aktion Searchlight Magazine Anti-Racist Action Post-WWII Anti-fascism Anti-Nazi League Redskin (subculture) Red Action Squadism Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice United Front

Notes

1. British Fascism: The British National Party and the Quest for Legitimacy, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, pp. 53-54 19. Diane Taylor "https://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/nov/20/raceineducation.schools Isle of prejudice]" Guardian Tuesday 20 November 2001 02.41 GMT 20. "New Leader : New Danger" (http://www.redactionarchive.org/2012/03/new-leader-new-danger.html). www.redactionarchive.org. 21. Jon Kelly "Nicky Crane: The secret double life of a gay neo-Nazi (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25142557)", BBC News Magazine 6 December 2013 22. "Filling The vacuum - London AFA" (http://libcom.org/library/filling-vacuum-london-afa). libcom.org. 23. Physical Resistance. 2013 by Dave Hann 24. "About us" (http://antifascistnetwork.wordpress.com/about/). 8 August 2013. 25. Dave Hann "Physical Resistance" Zero Books, 2013

Further reading

Birchall, Sean, Beating The Fascists: The Untold Story of Anti-Fascist Action (London: Freedom Press, 2010) ISBN 978-1-904491-12-5 Bullstreet, K. Bash the Fash: Anti-Fascist Recollections 1984-1993. ISBN 1-873605-87-0. Anti-Fascist Action: an Anarchist Perspective (Kate Sharpley Library, 2006) ISBN 978-1-873605-49-3 Hann, Dave and Steve Tilzey, No Retreat (Milo Books, 2003) ISBN 1-903854-22-9

Interview with author of No Retreat in Spike Magazine Hann, Dave, A Hundred Years of Anti Fascism (Zero Books, 2013) ISBN 978-1780991771 Mark Hayes and Paul Aylward Radical resistance or rent-a-mob? soundings issue 14 Spring 2000

External links

Anti-Fascist Archive 1985-2001: A short history of Anti-Fascist Action (AFA) on Libcom.org Beating The Fascists: The Untold Story of Anti-Fascist Action Beating The Fascists Video on YouTube Bullstreet, K. Bash the Fash: Anti-Fascist Recollections 1984-1993 (Kate Sharpley Library, 2001) AFA Ireland (archived) Nicky Crane: The secret double life of a gay neo-Nazi

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anti-Fascist_Action&oldid=828555854"

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Text is available under theCreative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of theWikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization. Antifaschistische Aktion

Antifaschistische Aktion (German: [ˌantifaˈʃɪstɪʃə akˈtsio̯ ːn]), abbreviated as Antifa (German: [ˈantifaː]), is a militant anti-fascist network in Germany.

Contents

History 1930s After Hitler From the 1980s Gallery See also References Further reading External links

History

1930s The first German movement to call itselfAntifaschistische Aktion was proclaimed by the German Communist Party (KPD) in their newspaper Rote Fahne in 1932 and held its first rally in Berlin on 10 July 1932, then capital of the Weimar Republic. Its two-flag logo, designed by Association of Revolutionary Visual Artists members Max Keilson and Max Gebhard, remains a widely used symbol of militant anti- fascism.[1]

The late 1920s and early 1930s saw rising tensions between Nazis and leftists.Berlin in particular was the site of regular and often very violent clashes between the two groups. There were several Nazi and anti-Nazi paramilitary groups. On the anti-Nazi side, these included the Social Democrat-dominated Reichsbanner (formed in 1924), the Communist paramilitary and propaganda organisation Roter Frontkämpferbund (Red Front Fighters League or RFB, formed in 1924) and the Communist Kampfbund gegen den Faschismus (Fighting-Alliance against Fascism, formed in "Come to us" Poster of 1930).[2] In late 1931, the local Roter Massenselbstschutz (Red Mass Self-Defence, Antifaschistische Aktion (1932) RMSS) units were formed by Kampfbund members as autonomous and loosely organised structures under the leadership of, but outside the formal organisation of, the KPD, as part of the party's united front policy to work with other working class groups to defeat fascism.[3] In May 1932, the Roter Frontkämpferbund had been banned and, following a skirmish between Nazi and Communist members in the parliament, Antifaschistische Aktion was formed as a broad-based alliance in which Social Democrats, Communists and others could fight legal repression and engage in self-defence against Nazi paramilitaries.[4] The RMSS units were absorbed into Antifaschistische Aktion, forming the nuclei of the latter's "Unity Committees", organised on a micro-local basis, e.g. in apartment buildings, factories or allotments.[5]

As well as fighting fascists, the RMSS and Antifaschistische Aktion used their militant approach to develop a comprehensive network of self-defence for communities targeted by the nazis, for example in "tenant protection" (Mieterschutz), action against evictions.[6] Initially the RMSS units had minimal formal membership, but in the second half of 1932, local executive boards were A demonstration by Antifaschistische created to co-ordinate the activities of the KPD, Kampfbund, RMSS and (now Aktion on May Day 2014 in Berlin; illegal) RFB, with the RMSS given a more distinct and almost paramilitary defence Bereitschaftspolizei are in the foreground. role, often co-operating on an ad hoc basis with the Reichsbanner.[7]

After the forced dissolution in the wake of the Machtergreifung in 1933, the movement went underground.

After Hitler Groups called "Antifaschistische Ausschüsse", "Antifaschistische Kommittees" or "Antifaschistische Aktion", all typically abbreviated to Antifa, spontaneously re-emerged in Germany in 1944, mainly involving veterans of pre-war KPD, KPO and SPD politics,[1][8][9][10] as well as some members of other democratic political parties and Christians who opposed the Nazi régime.[11] In 1945, for example, the antifascist committee in the city of Olbernhau included "three Communists and three Social Democrats" while the antifascist committee inLeipzig "had nine members, including three liberals and progressive Christians".[11]

In the French, British, and American zones, Antifas began to recede by the late summer of 1945, marginalized by Allied bans on political organization and by re-emerging divisions within the movement between Communists and others, while in East Germany the Antifa groups were absorbed into the new Stalinist state.[1] On 11 July 1945, the Soviets permitted the formation of the "United Front of the Antifascist-Democratic Parties", which included representatives from the "communist KPD, the Social Democratic SPD, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)".[12]

From the 1980s Contemporary Antifa in Germany "has no practical historical connection to the movement from which it takes its name, but is instead a product of West Germany's squatter scene and autonomist movement in the 1980s".[1] Many new Antifa groups formed from the late 1980s onwards. One of the biggest antifascist campaigns in Germany in recent years was the, ultimately successful, effort to block the annual Nazi-rallies in the east German city of Dresden in Saxony, which had grown into "Europe's biggest gathering of Nazis".[13]

In October 2016, the Antifa in Dresden campaigned on the occasion of the anniversary of the reunification of Germany on 3 October for "turning Unity celebrations into a disaster" („Einheitsfeierlichkeiten zum Desaster machen“), to protest this display of new German nationalism, whilst explicitly not ruling out the use of violence.[14]

The American Antifa of the early 21st-century has drawn its aesthetics and some of its tactics from the original German organization.[15]

Gallery

Logo of Antifaschistische Logo of Antifaschistische Toilet brush symbol An Antifaschistische Aktion (Germany) Aktion (1930s) adopted for the Hamburg Aktion (Antifa) sticker (Germany) protests placed on the (Antifaschistische Aktion representation of the (Germany)) diary of Anne Frank at the Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial in Boise, Idaho.

See also

Anti-Fascism Antifa movements Anti-Fascist Action (UK) Anti-Fascist Action (disambiguation) German resistance to Nazism

References

1. Loren Balhorn The Lost History of Antifa (https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/antifascist-movements-hitler-nazis-k pd-spd-germany-cold-war)" Jacobin May 2017 2. Eve Rosenhaft, Beating the Fascists?: The German Communists and Political iolenceV 1929-1933, Cambridge University Press, 25 Aug 1983, pp.3-4 3. Eve Rosenhaft, Beating the Fascists?: The German Communists and Political iolenceV 1929-1933, Cambridge University Press, 25 Aug 1983, p.96-7 4. Eve Rosenhaft, Beating the Fascists?: The German Communists and Political iolenceV 1929-1933, Cambridge University Press, 25 Aug 1983, p.81 5. Eve Rosenhaft, Beating the Fascists?: The German Communists and Political iolenceV 1929-1933, Cambridge University Press, 25 Aug 1983, p.97-8 6. Eve Rosenhaft, Beating the Fascists?: The German Communists and Political iolenceV 1929-1933, Cambridge University Press, 25 Aug 1983, p.54, 98 7. Eve Rosenhaft, Beating the Fascists?: The German Communists and Political iolenceV 1929-1933, Cambridge University Press, 25 Aug 1983, p.98 8. David Kahn Betrayal: our occupation of Germany (https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=OGVYAAAAMAAJ&q=%22a ntifa%22&dq=%22antifa%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjRvL-B2O_VAhUjKMAKHVY9B7AQ6AEITjAJ) Beacon Service Co., 1950 9. Information Bulletin (https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=RfkqAAAAMAAJ&q=%22antifa%22&dq=%22antifa%22&hl =en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjRvL-B2O_VAhUjKMAKHVY9B7AQ6AEINDAD), Office of Military Government Control Office, Germany (Territory under Allied occupation, U.S. Zone). Issues 1-22, 1945, pp.13-15 10. Leonard Krieger "The Inter-Regnum in Germany: March-August 1945 (http://www.psqonline.org/article.cfm?IDArticle =5990)" Political Science Quarterly Volume 64 - Number 4 - December 1949, pp. 507-532 11. Pritchard, Gareth (2012).Niemandsland: A History of Unoccupied Germany, 1944-1945. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 110701350X. 12. Vogt, Timothy R. (2000). Denazification in Soviet-occupied Germany: Brandenburg, 1945-1948. Harvard University Press. p. 48. ISBN 9780674003408. 13. Focus-Online. "Demo-Samstag in Dresden: Nazi-Aufmärsche und Linke treffen aufeinander" (http://www.focus.de/re gional/dresden/einschraenkungen-in-der-innenstadt-demo-samstag-in-dresden-nazi-aufmaersche-und-linke-treffen-a ufeinander_id_6631107.html). Focus-Online. 14. DNN-Online. "Protest gegen Einheitsfeier – Initiativen wollen Dresdner „Einheitsfeierlichkeiten zum Desaster machen" – DNN - Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten" (http://www.dnn.de/Dresden/Polizeiticker/Polizeiticker-Dresden/Ini tiativen-wollen-Dresdner-Einheitsfeierlichkeiten-zum-Desaster-machen). 15. BALHORN, LOREN (2017-05-08)."The Lost History of Antifa: 72 years after the triumph over Nazism, we look back to postwar Germany, when socialists gave birth to Antifa" (https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/antifascist-moveme nts-hitler-nazis-kpd-spd-germany-cold-war). Jacobin. Retrieved 2017-09-01.

Further reading

Autonome Antifa (M) Die Geschichte der Antifaschistischen Aktion, April 1995, ANTIFASCHISTISCHEN AKTION/Bundesweite Organisation(in German) Heinz Karl and Erika Kücklich, eds,Die Antifaschistische Aktion. Dokumentation und Chronik, Mai 1932 Bis Januar 1933. Berlin : Dietz, 1965.(in German) Hans-Helmuth Knütter Antifaschismus: der geistige Bürgerkrieg. Foreword by Heinrich Lummer. Hamburg : Die Dt. Konservativen e.V. 2010. (in German) Albrecht Lein "Antifaschistischen Komitees nach 1945" Antifaschistische Aktion 1945: d. "Stunde Null" in Braunschweig Musterschmidt, ISBN 3788117028 1978 (in German) Jeannette Michelmann Die Aktivisten der ersten Stunde: Die Antifa 1945 in der sowjetischen Besatzungszone zwischen Besatzungsmacht und Exil-KPD Vorgelegt dem Rat der Philosophischen Fakultät der Friedrich-Schiller- Universität Jena(in German) Patrick Moreau, Linksextremismus: eine unterschätzte Gefahr (with Jürgen P. Lang) Bonn 1996. (in German)

External links

Antifaschistische Aktion – Germany (in German) Autonomen Antifa [M (in German)

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Antifaschistische_Aktion&oldid=830141014"

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Text is available under theCreative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of theWikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization. Antifascistisk Aktion

Antifascistisk Aktion—abbreviated as AFA—is a far-left, extra-parliamentary, anti-fascist network in Sweden, whose stated goal is to "smash fascism in all its forms".[1] Some of its members are influenced by the theory of triple oppression, and all of its members claim to oppose sexism, racism, and classism. The point of the organization is to exchange information and to coordinate activities between local groups.

The groups' activities have included handing out flyers, organizing demonstrations, direct action, and property destruction. In line with their ideology, and as a consequence of being constantly monitored by the police, the group has no central authority. This means it has a flat organization consisting of many independent groupings, without a board or leader. AFA works with other anti-racist groups all over Europe.[2][3] The groups' origins are in the heterogeneous anti-fascist groups of the late 1930s and early 1940s, mostly made up of social democrats, communists, and progressive Christians.[4] Their ideology is libertarian socialism.[5]

They are considered to be the biggest domestic threat to democracy according to Säpo, the Swedish Security Service.[6] Both SÄPO and med classifies Swedish AFA as left extremists.[7][8][9]

Contents

History Approach Criticism See also References External links

History

The name Antifaschistische Aktion (Anti-Fascist Action) was used from the early 1930s in Germany.[10] The name was subsequently used by anti-fascist groups in several other countries.

Antifascistisk Aktion (AFA) was founded in Sweden in 1993. AFA is a part of the "autonomous" (autonoma in Swedish, from autonomist marxism) subculture, which revolves around many forms of leftist activism like antifascism, environmentalism and animal rights activism. This subculture includes people of many different ideologies, but the ideologies of the movement is always some form of radical leftism.[11] In staunch contrast to the American Antifa,[12] is Swedish AFA not open for more moderate forms of leftism, and there is even occasions where relative moderates have been assaulted by them.[13]

Approach

Their Activity Guide advocates direct action againstneo-Nazis .[14] AFA members have admitted to arson by timed firebombs,[15] and have pleaded guilty to burning the Tråvad spinnery in 2005.[16] In January 2006, Swedish AFA members attacked the Norrköping immigration office and threatened officials.[17] In June 2006, AFA members broke windows of an estate of the Christian Democrats in Kalmar.[18] In October 2006, AFA members threatened to block a municipal council meeting in Gothenburg, because the Sweden Democrats had been elected to the council.[19] In July 2007, AFA members threatened and attacked an immigration judge in Gothenburg.[20] The judge's front door was hit with an axe, and the house was vandalized with red spraypaint. Personal information about the judge and other judges was posted on the Internet.[21] On 7 March 2008, Säpo, the Swedish security police agency, reported that AFA or people using its symbols constantly threaten municipal and provincial elected council members.[22] In August 2008, AFA members spread announcements in Uppsala with the name and image of an opponent, encouraging people to attack him. For this, AFA promised to pay 500 Swedish kronor and a free "knogjärn" (knuckle duster).[23] In February 2009, AFA members attacked the National Democrats politician Vávra Suk.[24]

Criticism An editorial in the tabloid newspaper Expressen argued that the label 'anti-fascist' was misleading, because the organization's methods, such as stealing the subscriber list of the National Democrats newspaper, and threatening the subscribers are "Come to us" Poster of counterproductive and similar to methods used by fascists.[25] Antifaschistische Aktion (1932) See also

Post-WWII Anti-fascism Anti-Fascist Action Anti-Fascist Action (disambiguation) Unite Against Fascism

References

1. "antifa.se - Antifascistisk Aktion Sverige" (http://www.antifa.se/index.php?sida=3). Antifa.se. Retrieved 2017-08-24. 2. "Antifascistisk Aktion – Mot sexism, fascism, kapitalism och homofobi" (http://www.antifa.se/index.php?sida=8). Antifa.se. Retrieved 24 August 2017. 3. "Antifascistisk Aktion – Mot sexism, fascism, kapitalism och homofobi" (http://www.antifa.se/index.php?sida=3#platfo rm). Antifa.se. Retrieved 24 August 2017. 4. Pritchard, Gareth (2012).Niemandsland: A History of Unoccupied Germany, 1944-1945 (https://books.google.com/b ooks?id=NQVk-cYUOYYC&pg=PA7&dq=liberal+Christian+ANTIFA&hl=en&sa=X&ei=pivWUOWTBPG10AGfnYDQC Q&ved=0CDQQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=liberal%20Christian%20ANTIFA&f=false). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 110701350X. 5. "Presentation – Antifascistisk Aktion" (https://antifa.se/presentation/). antifa.se. 6. Olle Lönnaeus (2013-12-18)."Största hotet kommer från vänster" (https://www.sydsvenskan.se/2013-12-18/storsta-h otet-kommer-fran-vanster). 7. "Archived copy" (https://web.archive.org/web/20111001073801/http://mobil.svt.se/2.33538/1.1752021/10_afa-anhan gare_begardes_haktade). Archived from the original (http://mobil.svt.se/2.33538/1.1752021/10_afa-anhangare_bega rdes_haktade) on 1 October 2011. Retrieved 2014-04-07. 8. "Slåss med knogjärn" (http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/article5784027.ab). Aftonbladet.se. Retrieved 24 August 2017. 9. "16 vänsterextremister åtalade efter samarbete kring ouppklarade brott - Säkerhetspolisen" (http://www.sakerhetspoli sen.se/publikationer/fallstudier-och-artiklar-fran-arsbocker/politisk-extremism/-16-vansterextremister-atalade-efter-sa marbete-kring-ouppklarade-brott.html). www.sakerhetspolisen.se (in Swedish). Retrieved 2018-02-06. 10. Loren Balhorn The Lost History of Antifa (https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/antifascist-movements-hitler-nazis-k pd-spd-germany-cold-war)" Jacobin May 2017 11. "Samtalskompassen - Våldsbejakande vänsterextremism: Ideologi" (http://samtalskompassen.samordnarenmotextre mism.se/valdsbejakande-extremism/valdsbejakande-vansterextremism/ideologi/). Samtalskompassen.samordnarenmotextremism.se. Retrieved 2017-08-24. 12. http://edition.cnn.com/videos/us/2017/08/17/antifa-unmasking-anti-facists-orig-nws.cnn 13. https://www.hd.se/2017-05-02/tre-garningsman-filmade-och-spottade-mot-vansterpartiets-1-maj-tag 14. "Wayback Machine" (https://web.archive.org/web/20070211032651/http://www.antifa.se/files/aktivitetsguide.pdf) (PDF). Web.archive.org. 11 February 2007. Archived fromthe original (http://www.antifa.se/files/aktivitetsguide.pdf) (PDF) on 11 February 2007. Retrieved 24 August 2017. 15. "Afa riktar ilska mot Migrationsverket" (https://web.archive.org/web/20151203193738/http://www.svt.se/nyheter/afa-ri ktar-ilska-mot-migrationsverket) (in Swedish). 1 January 2006. Archived fromthe original (http://www.svt.se/nyheter/ afa-riktar-ilska-mot-migrationsverket) on 3 December 2015. Retrieved 3 December 2015. 16. "Afa tar på sig mordbrand på nazistgård" (http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/afa-tar-pa-sig-mordbrand-pa-nazistgard/) (in Swedish). Dagens Nyheter. 2005-12-28. Retrieved 26 November 2015. 17. (in Swedish) Afa riktar ilska mot Migrationsverket (http://svt.se/svt/jsp/Crosslink.jsp?d=53277&a=516807&lid=senast eNytt_611539&lpos=rubrik_516807) Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20110612062117/http://svt.se/svt/jsp/Cro sslink.jsp?d=53277&a=516807&lid=senasteNytt_611539&lpos=rubrik_516807) 12 June 2011 at the Wayback Machine. SVT 10 januari 2006. 18. (in Swedish) Slåss med knogjärn (http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/article5784027.ab) Aftonbladet 13.9.2009. 19. (in Swedish) Aktivister försökte stoppa möte med Sverigedemokrat (http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=147&a =585621&previousRenderType=6) Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20110611115008/http://www.dn.se/DNet/js p/polopoly.jsp?d=147&a=585621&previousRenderType=6) 11 June 2011 at the Wayback Machine. DN 2 november 2006. 20. "Migration judge threatened by extremists" (http://www.thelocal.se/8043). Thelocal.se. 30 July 2007. Retrieved 24 August 2017. 21. (in Swedish) Domare som utvisat irakier attackerades (https://archive.is/20120524155311/http://www.dn.se/nyheter/s verige/domare-som-utvisat-irakier-attackerades-1.770951) Dagens Nyheter 31 July 2007 22. [1] (http://www.sapo.se/publicerat/nyhetsarkiv/nyheter2007/hotmotfortroendevaldanyrapport.5.59a6ce1f116807f3408 8000356.html) 23. (in Swedish) "Archived copy" (https://web.archive.org/web/20110612102920/http://svt.se/svt/jsp/Crosslink.jsp?d=226 20&a=1221280&lid=puff_1221455&lpos=rubrik). Archived from the original (http://www.svt.se/svt/jsp/Crosslink.jsp? d%3D22620%26a%3D1221280%26lid%3Dpuff_1221455%26lpos%3Drubrik) on 12 June 2011. Retrieved 2010-01-17. Ruotsin TV 24. "Afa tar på sig våld mot ND-politiker" (http://stockholm.expressen.se/nyheter/1.1461755/afa-tar-pa-sig-vald-mot-nd-p olitiker). Stockholm.expressen.se. Retrieved 24 August 2017. 25. "090215: Stoppa AFA" (http://www.expressen.se/ledare/1.1466908/090215-stoppa-afa). Expressen.se. Retrieved 24 August 2017.

External links

AntiFascistisk Aktion – Sweden (in Swedish)

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Antifascistisk_Aktion&oldid=824329375"

This page was last edited on 6 February 2018, at 18:23.

Text is available under theCreative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of theWikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization. cantdocartwheels March 25th, 2005 15:44 Surely it would be more appropriate to ask how some individualist anarchists could claim to be libertarians when they draw so much inspiration from Proudhon, a mad anti-semite who thought women were inferior to men by a certain %, or adventurist pseudo-insurrectionists like Bakunin, both of whom seem to have had no notion of building any form of democratic mass movement. As for the claim that Marx was an “authoritarian bastard,” it hardly seems very informed by any reading of his works or understanding of his ideas. I suspect it is probably motivated by the same sort of hysterical liberal whining about the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat,” despite the fact that the German word used was Dictat, which simply means “rule.” What can be more democratic than popular rule, rather than the rule of a small insurrectionist clique or the fetishisation of the individual over society. Marx’s ideas on the state shifted and changed over time, like any true social revolutionary he was willing to change his ideas when he saw that he had ben incorrect. So while his earlier writings had been fairly statist in their approach, coming from the traditions of the German left at the time, he came to realise that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes” after witnessing the destruction of the Paris commune by the state machinery of France. Likewise any true Marxist would allow their ideas on organisation and society to change over time, unlike a Leninist who tries to recreate step by step an unsuccessful revolution in backward conditions that happened over 80 years ago, or some mad idealist anarchist who holds to some abstracted 19th-century idea about craft production hat has absolutely no bearing on reality. https://libcom.org/forums/thought/libertarian-marxism Mao-Spontex

English

Etymology

From Mao and spontaneist.

Noun

Mao-Spontex (uncountable)

1. (communism) A neo-Leninist, Maoist, and libertarian theory and political movement in Western Europe from 1960 to 1970 advocating for democratic centralism and revolutionary spontaneity from the lower classes.

Retrieved from "https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Mao-Spontex&oldid=60972973"

This page was last edited on 29 October 2020, at 01:43.

Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Revolutionary spontaneity

Revolutionary spontaneity, also known as spontaneism, is a revolutionary socialist tendency that believes the social revolution can and should occur spontaneously from below by the working class itself, without the aid or guidance of a vanguard party and that it cannot and should not be brought about by the actions of individuals such as professional revolutionaries or political parties who might attempt to foment such a revolution.

In his work What Is to Be Done? (1902), Vladimir Lenin argued fiercely against revolutionary spontaneity as a dangerous revisionist concept that strips away the disciplined nature of Marxist political thought and leaves it arbitrary and ineffective.[1] Rosa Luxemburg and the Spartacist League which had attempted to overturn capitalism during the 1919 German Revolution would become main targets of Lenin's attacks after World War I.[2]

Spontaneism remained a popular theory in opposition to the Third International's democratic centralism and influenced the autonomist movement in the 1970s. Its influences can be felt in some parts of today's alter- globalization movement.

Mao-Spontex

The term Mao-Spontex refers to a political movement in the Marxist and libertarian movements in Western Europe from 1960 to 1970. The neologism is composed of Maoist and revolutionary spontaneity/spontaneist. Thus, the complete and accurate writing of this term would be Mao-spontaneity.

Mao-Spontex came to represent an ideology promoting the ideas of Maoism, along with some ideas from Marxism and Leninism, but rejecting the total idea of Marxism–Leninism. Lenin's work What Is to Be Done? especially is criticized as dated and Lenin's critique of spontaneity is rejected. Lenin's idea of democratic centralism is supported as a way to organize a party, but a party must also have constant conflict inside of it to remain revolutionary. The revolutionary party discussed must also always be from a mass worker's movement.[3]

See also

Anarchism Crowd psychology Impossibilism Invisible dictatorship Left communism in China Luxemburgism Marxism Spontaneous order Immediatism

References 1. Lenin, Vladimir (1901). What Is to Be Done?. "The Spontaneity of the Masses and the Consciousness of the Social Democrats" (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/wi tbd/ii.htm). Marxists Internet Archive. Retrieved 30 April 2019. 2. Kurasje Council Communism. "Spontaneity and Organisation" (https://www.marxists.org/archiv e/mattick-paul/1949/spontaneity.htm). Marxists Internet Archive. Retrieved 30 April 2019. 3. "Investigation into the Maoists in France" (https://www.marxists.org/archive/levy-benny/1971/inv estigation.htm). Marxists Internet Archive. Retrieved 30 April 2019.

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