Its A Trap!
The argument that “Autonomous Spaces” are ineffective and can be expressed as simply as this:
- We are animals that require certain means of subsistence or we die.
- The means of subsistence is also the means of production
- Capitalism is a totality which controls and determines the means of production.
- To exist autonomously from it is to exist autonomously from the means of production.
Conclusion: an autonomous space and in-fact a rejection of the class war of Political Economy in favour of a purely industrial class war is a utopian trap and will kill us.
We must instead smash capitalism, not hide from it. Destruction can not be done through isolated acts of industrial sabotage but through the capture of power and hegemony by the working class.
i think that yr view on autonomous spaces is at best, limited, at worst ignoring a long history of autonomous spaces being staging ground for actual resistance to capitalism (specifically autonomous spaces in Greece, Italy, Germany, etc.). Not to be argumentative but we also don’t need the means of production in the first world in order to meet subsistence (ask any autonomous-Marxist, anarchist, crust punk, etc.) so much is wasted that so much is available… inflexible dogmatism is more dangerous than anything and the idea that we, the proletarians, can simply seize the means of production and abolish the state and the bourgeois in one fell swoop is, given this stage of capitalist development, laughable.
some one took the bait. Swwweeet.
i assume your talking about gaining subsistence thought the cast-offs of capitalism right? hoe many single income/single parent/any familes can live like that? none.
the whole movement is elitist. it is the politics of the elect. “we the young (and often wealthy) can afford to live outside of capital and as such are aboslved from its corasive influence” fuck that shit.
The politics of the liberated space is an extension of lifestyle anarchist counter-revolution.
the process of occupying a “space” is revolutionary, this is self evident. To occupy a factory and stop the production of capital is tremendous. For workers to choose self determination and produce according to democratic means, to form a workers co-op is a radical step. To occupy a hospital and refuse to allow its closure against the logic of capital – choosing the lives of our class not the profit of the bourgeois is revolutionary and i would never question that. to stand against capital is a heroic act.
The self contradiction of “occupation” is that capitalism is its own flow of determination, its own dialectical totality and as such it can’t be countered by fortifications. Once the factory is occupied, eventually it must start up its labour once again, still determined by the flow of capital, only now it is a cancer, the proletarian revolutionaries create the means of their own oppression once again because to eat they must sell themselves, only now with the problem of being a threat to the system and the system will unite against it (see La Fabrica Sin Patron in Argentina). The other option again is to simply refuse to make capital, however, the system will flow around the occupied space and the people with in it will leach the life from the comrades outside. The third option is abandonment of the space back to capital so there can be no victory in stagnation.
While this example may seem to fit only to the factory model, i challenge any one to find me a place under the domination of capitalism not in the business of the production of capital or a space not occupied by Capitalism.
David Cameron’s big society calls out for people to occupy their services for just this reason – the space will produce capital at the expense of the worker no matter what only in the Big Society they do not need a boss to yoke them.
The Occupations and economic blockades can only be used as weapons, while the class war remains a gorrilla war used as tools of sabotage not as fortresses.
We the workers own nothing, that is how we know ourselves, we are nomadic, ripped from the earth by capital and as such a stationary war over land is not in our nature so the field of our conflict is in the means of mode of production not geography. General Strike, or that action of the whole class regardless of geographical location that stops the flow of capital is the mechanism by which we show our strength and assume the position of Dual Power calling the bourgeois out to fight for geography once we have thrown of the shackles of being workers at all.
Fight for the Working Class. (geography be damned)
(my rule of thumb is when picturing revolutionaries, make them a single mothers of colour with a disabled child – is she able to take part in this revolutionary act? if not its not revolution its adventurism.)
This is definitely worth reading through. It’s important that as a part of the revolutionary struggle against capitalism, we mustn’t fetishise individual or localised acts of rebellion (petty theft, autonomous spaces, black bloc). We have to recognise what part they do or even can play within the broader class struggle. We must consider the effect they have on building, reinforcing and advancing class conscience and seizing the means of production.
If an act doesn’t or can’t do these things we have to separate from paradigms of thought that laud these actions. While significant for a select milieu of individuals in breaking free from forms of thinking about ones own position relative to the state and class, they often aren’t and won’t be significant in building class solidarity.
The phrase “The Revolution is in the mind” is true only so far. Once you as an individual have reached the turning point of understanding, that must be married with actions as a part of the class to realise that revolution materially.
To put it another way, I agree with marxandsparks.
Philosophy of Praxis 