Trayectorias
de la autonomia*
Paths of Autonomy
"Paths of autonomy"? When
asked to speak on this subject, I was a bit dismayed. The "paths," in
question I take to be the historical trajectories of various struggles for
autonomy. By "autonomy" I understand the quality or state of being
self-governing, or self-determining, and by "self" I understand not the self-originating,
self-determining, rational individual constructed by Enlightenment liberal humanism, but rather a diversity of self-defined collectivities
made up of social individuals. Given these understandings, "paths of autonomy" embraces
a great deal. Such paths — created by people's struggles to be autonomous from
this or that institution, regime, nation state or social system — have been
many and diverse. Of central interest must be how those people struggled, what
they achieved and the insights and limitations of their thoughts about their
actions. At the same time, neither their actions nor their thoughts can be
adequately understood without a clear view of the actions and arguments of
those against whom they struggled. Finally, and most importantly, of course, we
want to know all these things to be able to judge the relevance of this history
for our current struggles. The subject seems unspeakably huge, sweeping through
much of known human history and across the face of the earth. Even if we limit
our attention to bottom-up struggles for autonomy within the capitalist era —
as I proposed to do — a serious, thorough treatment of the histories of the
many paths of struggle could certainly fill a multi-volume encyclopedia. In
what follows, therefore, I provide only a brief sketch of the history of such
struggles for autonomy and of the thinking of those engaged in them.
As a prelude, we should keep in
mind that the resistance of people like us to such subordination and the battle
for autonomy began long before capitalism! Our struggles for autonomy today, against
the efforts of the managers of capitalism to subordinate the amazing variety of
our traditions, customs, desires, habits and other relationships to their
uniform set of rules for organizing the world are only the latest chapter in a
long, dignified and what should be an honored history. Our ancestors fought
against ancient slavery, feudal bondage, indentured servitude, cultural
genocide, gender, racial, and ethnic oppression long before our more recent forbearers
began fighting against capitalism. Instead of being dismayed by the degree of
success capitalists have achieved, we should take heart by remembering how, in
the long sweep of historical retrospect, they are only the latest would-be eternal
masters of our world — and as our ancestors defeated all the earlier would-be
overlords, so too are we, or those who come after us, likely to defeat these. The
imagination and creativity of our species have proven to be almost boundless and
have, ultimately, broken free of every earlier attempt to constrain and harness
them to a singular, hegemonic way of being.
That said, because methods of
domination have differed over time, so too have our struggles for autonomy from
domination. So while we can draw inspiration, energy and sometimes lessons from
the entire long history of those struggles, the part most relevant to our own situation
concerns those fought against our own would-be masters: the policy-makers and managers,
or functionaries, of capitalism. Although the history of such struggles is relatively
short compared to the much longer historical battle for autonomy, it provides
the richest history of efforts and ideas upon which we can draw for our own
purposes today.
Starting with their earliest
efforts, everywhere, and in every period, where the functionaries of capital
have sought to impose the capitalist organization of life upon society people
have resisted. Sometimes that resistance has come from above, from existing
ruling classes whose power to dominate and exploit has been organized
differently with different sets of rules. But it is not from their resistance that
we have the most to learn; it is rather from the legacy of struggles from below
that we can draw.
The early capitalist accumulation
of wealth and the power to control the means of production, subordinate people
to their labor markets and endless work may have reasonably been called
"primitive" — they were, after all, just learning how to impose their new
methods of exploitation — but the struggles of those upon whom these new conditions
were forced were rarely new, or "primitive". Such a label has been, primarily,
the result of judging past efforts in the light of later more "modern" efforts
— and has often reflected considerable ignorance of earlier times. As more and
more research has expanded our knowledge and understanding of those early
struggles, the more we have come to recognize how sophisticated they often
were, how their forms and methods drew upon existing networks of cultural ties,
practices and communication or crafted new ones using the most modern,
available tools. The same has continued to be true throughout the history of
capitalism as it has been spread across the face of the earth, as its
functionaries have sought to impose their new rules on more and more of us, to
subordinate our lives to their way of being. Resistance and experimentation
with alternatives have continued, building on past experience and inventing new
methods.
Misrepresentations
and Blindness
Unfortunately, both the
heralds of capitalism — quick to trumpet its successes — and its detractors — equally
quick to lament and condemn its victories — have either obscured or been blind
to the efficacy of people's resistance, to their creativity in launching new
initiatives in the wake of momentary defeat and to their ability to combine the
old and the new to elaborate alternatives to capitalist ways. With respect to
capital, it has generally been in its interest to misrepresent or hide from
public view the capabilities of its enemies. Those who have resisted its
impositions have been represented as backward, ignorant, underdeveloped, and as
bandits, barbarians, savages, delinquents, and criminals. Such
characterizations have been integral to its discourses in which all resistance,
or alternatives, to its own policies have been denigrated, dismissed and
attacked. Nowhere has this been more obvious — or demonstrated so thoroughly by
scholars — than in colonial discourse. But the same has been true throughout
the history of capitalism, everywhere.
At the same time, on the
other side of the barricades, as it were, lamentations about the brutality of
capitalist rule, from accounts of the "bloody legislation against the
expropriated" to denunciations of colonialism and imperialism, have often
amounted to paeans to capitalist power and too quickly dismissed resistance as
so futile as to barely warrant attention.
Think, for example, of the doctrine
of the proletarianization of the
peasantry, long held by orthodox Marxist historians and anthropologists. That
doctrine prevented many from recognizing either the depth, or the successes, of
rural resistance to capitalist efforts to decimate communities and reduce the
survivors to the status of readily available cheap labor. Certainly, in many
areas resistance failed and many communities have been dispersed and destroyed.
Yet, here we are, several hundred years after the rise of capitalism and six
years into the 21st Century, and not only have a vast array of
indigenous peoples survived and continue to resist, but in many areas we must
recognize how the self-organization of those peoples has been generating a
veritable indigenous renaissance. Not only has this renaissance been renewing
long standing challenges to capitalism and posing a multiplicity of alternatives
but it has been doing so in ways that have resonated among other kinds of people
in struggle. Here in
Think, too, of all those analyses of crisis in capitalism that
have dwelled solely upon so-called "internal laws of motion" considered
one-sidely in terms of the interactions among businesses — analyses of
disproportionality, of over-accumulation, of the tendency of the rate of profit
to fall, and of under-consumption. Virtually every traditional variation of
these theories have either failed to recognize our struggles or take them into
account. They have been formulated with no regard to how our struggles against
capital may have been determinant in the evolution of these tendencies to
crisis; they have never questioned how our struggles for autonomy from the
mechanisms of capitalist domination may have ruptured those mechanisms and
precipitated wider problems. Yet, for the last thirty years we have lived in a
period of generalized crisis clearly brought on by an international cycle of
interlinked struggles that have indeed ruptured capitalist reproduction in
virtually every dimension. The neoliberalism we resist today is the capitalist
response to the crisis of Keynesianism we brought on yesterday.
Think of the old theories of imperialism, often built
on those one-sided theories of crisis and focused on the capitalist search for
markets, for cheaper raw materials and for more profitable investment outlets.
Nowhere in any of these theories did our struggles play a role except as
by-products, as resistance to our victimization. Yet, rarely has it been
clearer than today how our struggles in some areas have driven capital foraging
around the earth for easier pickings. From "runaway shops" to "outsourcing" business
has been desperate to pit those among us who are weaker against those among us
who are stronger. And who has not noticed how quickly our strength has been
growing where it has been thought weakest, as in
Finally, think of the arrogant political theories of self-aggrandizing
intellectuals and professional politicians who have argued that we poor victims
should subordinate our feeble struggles to their leadership, pretending to
alone have the insight to lead us to an understanding of our own real desires
and needs beyond mere economic, gender, racial or ethnic demands. Such leaders —
whether social democrats or would-be revolutionaries - have long told us how
they alone could formulate policies that would bring both an end to capitalism
and the construction of a socialist path to communism. Yet, for more than a
century now such "leadership", even in full control of the state, has proved
powerless to formulate or implement effective policies to transcend capitalism.
Worse, they have formulated and imposed policies that actually strengthened the
accumulation of capital in brutal ways. As a result, struggles for real autonomy
have proliferated and grown, crafting diverse currents of resistance, creativity
and imagination that have either swept away those architects of socialism, or left
them talking to themselves as the tides of history have flooded past.
Awakenings
Fortunately, here and there,
from time to time, there have been those who have recognized the strength of
people's resistance, appreciated their creativity, sometimes joined their
efforts and sometimes added their written words to the angry cries from below. The
red threads of such recognition and appreciation of the ability of people not
only to resist victimization but to take the initiative and fight for better,
freer, more self-determined lives have run through the entire history of opposition
to capitalism. A few of those threads have been theoretical, others can be
found in critical commentaries on various revolutionary periods and episodes.
For example, in Marx and
Engels' work — up to and including the Communist
Manifesto (1848) — we find analyses of the fundamental autonomy of the
working class (e.g., living labor) vis-á-vis capital (e.g., dead labor) — although
such analyses existed alongside arguments that workers should support bourgeois
struggles against absolutism in Europe. The later position was abandoned in the
wake of their experiences in failed 1848 Revolution in
As their most substantial
treatment of peasant struggles, Engel's book, The Peasant War in Germany deserves comment. Just as a variety of
earlier communalistic social movements had previously challenged feudal powers,
so too did the peasants, miners, soldiers and clerics who rose up in 1525
against enclosure, taxation and repressive authority and who conceived
egalitarian "communist" alternatives. On the one hand, Engels celebrated this
struggle as an anticipation of the eventual transcendence of capitalism. On the
other hand, as he later admitted, his own preoccupation with economic forces
led him to downplay the role of religion in those struggles — among both
peasants and their major spokespersons, e.g., Thomas Müntzer, the theologian
who joined, fought and died with the rebels. While even today we still have
little or no testimony from the hundreds of thousands who rebelled, we do have
new research and Müntzer's own letters that reveal how the desires of the time
to create autonomous egalitarian communities were steeped in religious visions
drawn from the New Testament. We also, of course, still have, among us, various
autonomous Christian communities, e.g., the Amish, the Mennonites and the
Hutterites, some of whom engage in similar egalitarian and communal practices.
First in the Grundrisse (1857) and then in the first
volume of Capital (1867) Marx was
able to work out a much elaborated theoretical analysis to support the
conclusion that the working class had the autonomous power to overthrow
capitalism and create a new world. This new work buttressed his much earlier
vision in the 1844 Manuscripts that
the communism of present struggles could lead to communism beyond capitalism. He
also provided historical analyses of how workers struggles had driven down the
length of the working day and had so repeatedly contested the capitalist
organization of labor as to drive technological change and reduce socially
necessary labor time. Even by the late 1860s, however, his and Engels' analyses
of peasant struggles were no more elaborated than they had been almost two
decades earlier. In Marx's later writings, however, alongside his appreciation
of the moments of autonomous struggle within the Paris Commune (1871), we also
find, in his letters (1881) to one of his Russian translators, Vera Zasulich, that
his studies of available materials on peasant life and struggles in Russia led
him to conclude that the autonomous self-organization in the peasant mir, or commune, might provide "the
fulcrum for the social regeneration of Russia" and "an element of superiority
over the countries enslaved by the capitalist system."
As for the history of
autonomous struggle in the great revolutions of the 20th Century —
those that took place in
Here in For some decades now, however,
so-called "bottom-up" and "subaltern" historians have been helping us to reconsider
such struggles, by digging out new sources, reinterpreting old ones and figuring
out how to reconstruct the histories of autonomous struggle from below. Theirs
has been a difficult task when so few of the voices of those who have struggled
in the past have been recorded. Their work has, however, restored some of our
lost legacy. Thanks to Rodney Hilton, for
example, the crisis of feudalism that opened the door to capitalism has been
seen less and less as the outcome of demographic changes or the spread of
markets, and more and more as the result of struggles from below. His work on
the peasant rebellions of the late medieval period, e.g., the English Rising of
1381, has demonstrated not only an emerging class consciousness within the
spreading revolts, but clear conceptions of alternative, more egalitarian ways
of organizing society — conceptions derived from their struggles (both legal
and illegal) against feudal exploitation, from ancient beliefs in freedom in
status and tenure and from the radical Christian movement of the time, e.g.,
John Ball, the Lollard priest, with his insistence on social equality. Thanks to Christopher Hill we
now understand a great deal more about the struggles of the Diggers or True
Levelers during the English Revolution in the mid-17th Century. They
— like the peasants in Thanks to Peter Linebaugh and
Marcus Rediker we also now have a much better grasp of how the struggles of
workers, seamen, peasants, slaves, and convicts circulated throughout England
and across the Atlantic Oceans in the 17th and 18th
Centuries and how those struggles repeatedly broke loose from capitalist
control to found experiments in autonomous self-governance on both land and at
sea (Maroon colonies and pirate communities). Similarly, the work of historians
such as George Rawick, who was able to compile some twenty volumes of slave
narratives, has revealed multiple, hitherto little known, terrains of
self-activity, both on the plantation and off. Within this history of
struggle, alongside the refusal to be moved, has also been escape, exodus from
places where past struggle has yielded defeat or few rewards to places of greater
opportunity. This is an aspect of the history of the frontier — throughout the It is also true that such
escape and the founding of new communities has sometimes brought one group
seeking autonomy into conflict with another seeking the same thing.
Unfortunately, our different struggles for autonomy have not always been
complementary. Capitalism has long done its best to pit people against each
other in a complex hierarchy of income and power. As a result, struggles for
autonomy often clash as the struggles of one group have an impact on those of
others. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the case of the "frontier" in the On the other side of the
world, similar efforts can be found in the works of historian Ranajit Guha and
his fellow crafters of "subaltern" studies in Subaltern and post-colonial
studies have also been one of the domains in which historical consideration of
autonomous struggles soon included recognition and appreciation of the autonomy
of women's struggles amongst other challenges to colonial and post-colonial capitalism.
Guha himself has spoken of the necessity of listening not just to the "small
voices" of peasants, artisans and workers, but to those of women in particular.
More deeply, writers such as Kamala Visweswaran, Susie Tharu and Tejaswini
Nirnanjana have examined those voices, the efforts to silence them, and the
problematic intersections of gender, caste, class and community particularity
within the history of bottom-up struggles. In the West, with few
exceptions, it has taken the initiative of anti-patriarchal feminist movements
to open the eyes of many "critical" theorists, including most Marxists, to the
autonomous character of many women's struggles. As mentioned earlier, beginning
with Marx himself some Marxists were willing to recognize, at least to a
degree, the autonomy of the working class vis-á-vis capital. Even when they
thought the eventual "gravediggers" of capitalism needed leadership, they
assumed that class could not only overthrow capital but construct a new world.
Unfortunately, because their concept of class was tightly bound to that of
"class consciousness" and class consciousness was, in turn, conceived as an
undifferentiated embrace of the "general class interest" (as opposed to concerns
with the concrete "economic" interests of particular segments of the class),
the only response of too many would-be Marxist revolutionaries to the
autonomous demands of women (or of any particular subset of the working class)
was to argue, often dismissively, for their subordination to the "general class
interest," i.e., to their mostly male leadership. With such an attitude, it is
not surprising that among the works of Marxist historians — including some
praised above — there has been, until recently, a veritable dearth of attention
to or analyses of the specificity of women's situations (whether in the sphere
of production or in that of reproduction) and of their struggles. For the most
part, feminists, not Marxists, began to delve into the particularities of
women's struggles, in both the past and present. The rich results of their
work, however, inevitably led some to diverse, albeit often tense, but highly
productive marriages of feminism and Marxism. Not surprisingly, such
marriages have tended to emerge among those who recognized, and valorized,
other forms of autonomy. For example, in the Against the post-WWII period
of the Keynesian orchestration of the class struggle through local productivity
deals and a global hierarchy of development overseen by the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank, workers proved capable, over time, of
building enough strength to refuse the deals, at every level. The ability of
workers not only to fight successfully on the capitalist terrains of the wage
and working conditions but also to carve out new spaces and times for their own
activities beyond came to be theorized in terms of "self-valorization" - an
appropriation and inversion of a term Marx used to describe capitalist expanded
reproduction. Indeed, recognizing how these confrontations were spreading
throughout society led to the concept of the "social factory" and, eventually
to that of the "socialized worker." From such worker activity in the big
factories of the Actually taking that step,
however, was spurred less by logic than by the impressiveness of such
autonomous action when it erupted. It was one thing to recognize the existence
of a "social factory" but quite another to embrace the autonomous character of
struggles outside the labor movement. In the The second such wave, in
Europe as well as in the United States, was that of students who challenged the
power structures of the educational system, the dominant cultural values promulgated
by that system and (in the U.S.) the way they were being disciplined for future
jobs or drafted for war against apparently legitimate struggles of peasants in
Southeast Asia. Students systematically disrupted schools and blocked induction
centers but they also fought for new fields of study that corresponded to their
own interests, whether within schools or outside them. In the The third wave was made up of
the struggles of women — prompted in part by continued patriarchal behavior on
the part of men in the Black, student and labor movements where women were every
bit as active as men but their concerns marginalized. Women began to organize
themselves autonomously within existing struggles, but also to fight against
gender discrimination. They also began the process of sorting out the character
of their own desires and to define new paths to their fulfillment. While many have refused to
recognize the diverse but interlinked struggles of the unwaged as moments of
"working class" struggle — preferring to think of them as "new social
movements" — others have come to see how these autonomous efforts were
rupturing the fabric of capitalist social reproduction and thus to broaden
their concept of working class to include those who struggle against the
production and reproduction of labor power as well as those who struggle at the
"point of production" of other commodities. The key theoretical analysis of
this broader concept grew out of the experience of Italian women in Potere Operaio ( The recognition of the
integral role of unwaged housework in capitalist exploitation inevitably led to
the analysis of the interconnections among all kinds of unwaged reproductive
and productive labor, thus providing more precise understanding of the
interconnections among all kinds of autonomous struggles in both spheres. The
analysis of the relationship between unwaged domestic labor and waged work was
soon extended to unwaged school work and the unwaged work of peasants. These
analyses have generated new understanding of the sources and consequences of
phenomena as diverse as student unrest, peasant revolts, the refusal of
procreation, struggles around immigration — in both source and destination
regions and countries — and resistance to neoliberal policies of structural
adjustment. Given the origins of this new understanding, gender divisions and
the specific roles of women have usually been integral to the analyses of all
these different currents of struggle. These analyses have also led
to an improved theoretical basis for the re-examination of the autonomy of women's
roles in history, of the sort being done by some in subaltern and post-colonial
studies. A recent and important example of such re-examination is Silvia
Federici's Caliban and the Witch (2004)
that provides a detailed sketch of the scope and perniciousness of capitalist
efforts within "primitive accumulation" to eliminate women's autonomy and power,
mostly in What has changed? With the full recognition and
appreciation of the diversity of current paths taken in the struggle for
autonomy and, at the same time, of the cumulative ability to rupture the fabric
of the social factory and begin to elaborate alternatives has come, not
surprisingly, efforts to grasp the sources of that ability in recent decades.
What changed? In what ways were people able to forge enough strength to rupture
the Keynesian orchestration of the social factory and bring on crisis? Part of the answer clearly
lies in the organizational strength flowing from the acceptance of the
legitimacy of separate autonomous self-organization among diverse groups in
struggle. Although not without conflict, the emergence of autonomous struggles
meant a multiplication of total effort because many who had previously stayed
out of movements that did not valorize their concerns found new, more direct
and more promising paths toward achieving changes in the things that mattered
to them. Women who had shunned male-dominated struggles, or blacks who had
heard nothing from white "revolutionaries" that spoke to the particularity of
their situation, founded or joined new autonomous organizations. The formation
of separate organizations clearly challenged existing ones who found their
programs and their methods rejected. Some responded merely with anger and
antagonism, but others were goaded into changes that made it possible for the
old groups and the new ones to complement each other and the struggle as a
whole to be strengthened — a process of "political recomposition" indeed. In
was through such dynamics that anti-war student groups in the U.S., dominated
by whites, Black student organizations and feminist groups came to make
alliances and collaborate in struggles against the war, against government
COINTELPRO repression of the Black Panthers, against apartheid, against gender
discrimination and abuse, for new spaces within universities for "African-American
studies," or "women's studies" and for expanded spaces and resources in the
wider community for those trying to elaborate autonomous cultural projects. To
the degree that many of these efforts were at least partially successful, e.g.,
programs founded that permitted women to study the history and issues of their
own struggles or the creation of battered women's centers, the movements
themselves were strengthened, and so too was the sum of the movements. Part of the answer also lies
in the new abilities that people in struggle developed in the midst of combat,
especially new abilities to communicate with each other, on the job and off, within
autonomous struggles and across struggles. On the job, the capitalist
tendency to respond to workers' struggles via reorganization of the division of
labor has, for a long time, involved changes in technology and the substitution
of machines for labor. But, as Marx pointed out in Capital, machines are the embodiment of labor - not just the manual
labor that produced their corporeal forms but the mental labor of those who
designed and figured out how to build them. Remember the passage from Marx's
discussion of the labor process in Chapter 7: "At
the end of every labor process, a result emerges which had already been
conceived by the workers at the beginning, hence already existed ideally. Man
not only effects a change of form in the materials of nature: he also realizes
his own purpose in those materials. And this is a purpose he is conscious of .
. ." At the same time, the degree
of separateness between mental and manual labor must not be overstated. On the
one hand, "mental labor" such as that of scientists, engineers or
doctors generally requires a variety of "manual" skills that are
often quite intricate and learned only through practice - such as the proper handling
laboratory equipment or surgical tools. For example, while the
conceptualization of a research project may be primarily "mental",
omnipresent laboratory "protocols", like cooking recipes, spell out
exactly the step-by-step sequence of manual operations to be carried out in the
experiments required by the research. Each step may require mental judgments
but the proper execution of those operations require manual experience and
acquired skill to be successful. On the other hand, so-called
"manual" workers have always developed concrete understandings of new
labor processes beyond those of the engineers and scientists who designed them
— understandings without which the processes would fail or be much less
productive. An engineer, for example, may decide that costs could be reduced by
positioning screws in one place rather than another. But the experience of
repair workers may reveal that such positioning vastly complicates and thus
lengthens the work-time of repair. Although the division of labor may be such
that some individuals are paid to conceive the product and the mode of
producing it and others are paid to implement that mode, all are workers, all are
engaged in the labor process. The growing importance of machinery, or science
and technology more generally, can be thought of as a rise in the ratio of
mental to manual labor. But it is misconceived to interpret this rising ratio
as a marginalization of labor, tout court,
or to conclude from that marginalization that Marx's labor theory of value is
no longer relevant, as Antonio Negri and others have done. The displacement of
workers by machines, and the reduction of manual labor to machine-tending of
the sort that Marx evoked in the Grundrisse's
"fragment on machines" is only the displacement of manual by
mental labor, the displacement of manual gestures by conceptual and
communicative actions. The General
Intellect? Moreover, while an assembly
line may be so organized as to virtually eliminate most direct communication
among workers carrying out relatively deskilled tasks, mental labor cannot be
organized in such a fashion. Mental labor has always been inherently social and
communicative. Our thinking is always with shared ideas. We build on ideas we
have learned from others. If we invent new concepts or come up with new
insights we send them out into the world to let others test them for us.
Research and development, or R&D, as it is known in the But what exactly is the
nature of this "general intellect"? Is there truly such a thing? It is much too
indeterminate, I think, to merely equate the notion of a general intellect with
the mental abilities of human beings, e.g., with "the linguistic-cognitive
faculties common to the species," or with "the simple faculty of thought
and verbal communication," as Paolo Virno has done. These have always been
characteristics of our species. While "abstract
knowledge — scientific knowledge" may have become an ever more important
productive force in our capitalist world, Marx's specification of a
"general" intellect implies the existence of more
"specific" intellects. Clearly, the history of humanity is a history
of different kinds of "specific intellects", i.e., a wide variety of
kinds of shared knowledge, mental activities, intellectual paradigms, world views,
and cosmological visions. However, if one system of knowledge has become
dominant in a given period — such as our own — one can reasonably ask how and
to what degree? Over ten years before Marx
coined the term "general intellect" in his notebooks of 1857, he and
Engels addressed, in the German Ideology
(1845-46), the issue of general or dominant ideas. They famously wrote:
"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas." Those
ideas "rule" precisely because they become generally accepted and
define the dominant mind-set of the epoch. But while that early formulation
argues that this comes to be true because the ruling class has the power to
impose its ideas, it doesn't delve deeply into exactly what is involved in that
imposition, neither how those "ruling ideas" are shaped by specialists
to form a more or less consistent whole nor how a new, more universal hegemony
— the socially recognized "general" character of those ideas and the
intellect that produces and utilizes them - is actually achieved — displacing
previous ideas and intellects, both "ruling" ones and any existing
alternatives (which can no more be assumed away in the past than they can in
the present). Clearly, despite the best
efforts of all ruling classes, there have long been barriers to the imposition
of "ruling ideas," to the integration of mental activity into a
hegemonic whole and to the genesis of anything that might be called a "general"
intellect of humanity as a whole. Although the array and pattern of the
different kinds of mental activity, of "specific intellects" has
changed over time, through gentle influence and violent conquest, there seems
no good a priori reason to think that
any particular set of "ruling ideas" — including those generated
within capitalism - has ever achieved complete hegemony either locally or
universally. That said, the relative success of capitalism in realizing its
tendencies toward totalization — the conquest and imposition of its own form of
social organization on most of humanity — has probably been more successful
than any previous social system at generating a truly "general" intellect. Such success has been the
result of the tendency of capitalism to marginalize (often to the point of
destruction) or to convert or instrumentalize alternative local knowledges and
world views deemed incompatible with its own logic. As the result of
considerable research we know a great deal about precisely how "the ruling
ideas" of the capitalist epoch have been shaped and diffused throughout
the capitalist world. We also know a great deal about how alternatives have
been denied, dismissed, destroyed or adjusted to become variations within the
"general intellect" of capital. Work on colonial and post-colonial
confrontations between "Western" or capitalist knowledge systems and
indigenous ones has produced documented case studies of such dismissal and
destruction. Recent tendencies toward the
"mining," or better "pirating," of indigenous bio-knowledge by profit-seeking
multinational corporations are simply contemporary examples of such instrumentalization,
ones that are, perhaps, more thorough and systematic than in past periods of
capitalist exploitation. In their current efforts, as in the past, the wider
value-systems and world views of the mental activities within which those
knowledges were developed are largely ignored and discarded, and their authors threatened
with impoverishment, dispersion and subsumption if not annihilation. The
genesis of what Marx called a "general" intellect has thus involved the
imposition of a very capitalist organization
of knowledge and mental activity as labor
to the exclusion of alternatives. The result, of course, has
been an ever widening and networked resistance both among the indigenous and
between them and others opposed to these processes. Not surprisingly, many of
the struggles for autonomy whose history I have been sketching have included efforts
to preserve, recuperate or elaborate knowledges and world views that constitute
alternatives to the hegemonic "general intellect" being fabricated by capitalism
and celebrated by its critics. There are, of course, other
obstacles to this fabrication of a "general" intellect beyond the resistance of
the indigenous and their supporters to expropriation and cultural genocide. For
example, the exact nature of discoveries made by workers involved in R&D is
often kept secret by capitalist firms seeking competitive advantages or by governments
seeking strategic advantages. Those "intellectually property rights"
capitalists use to monopolize knowledge stolen from their waged employees or
from unwaged indigenous peoples also prevent others from using that knowledge —
thus limiting the integration and thus the "generalization" of
knowledge. Also, rigid divisions of mental labor, created and imposed in order
to divide and control mental workers, result in ignorance about developments
outside an individual or group's narrow specialty — an ignorance that limits
the imagination and creativity of any one individual or group. Moreover, at
many levels — but especially at that of so-called "manual labor" —
the capitalist priority of command has often resulted in managers only
grudgingly recognizing workers' intimate, hands-on knowledge — usually as a result
of the failure of their own plans in the absence of worker intervention and
adjustment - and either being blind to or dismissive of workers' inventiveness
in labor processes. Given the antagonistic, exploitative and alienated context
of all capitalist imposed work, including mental work, individual workers or
small networks of workers, sometimes apply their creativity and develop new
knowledges and processes that they keep secret from their employers. To the
degree that these new approaches are deployed in acts of resistance, of
sabotage, they remain antagonistically outside of capitalist command. In all
the above cases, however, to the degree that various forms of knowledge and
abilities, however isolated or hidden, do contribute to raising productivity
they can be seen as moments of a mosaic of commanded "intellects".
What is repeatedly missing is capital's ability to integrate them into a
"general" intellect that is in any sense unified. The importance of
intellectual labor grew in the 1960s not only with spreading mechanical
automation but also with the rapidly expanding commodification of "services" —
everything from the provision of entertainment to the expansion of the health
and financial industries. That expansion, in turn, was brought on by the
changing composition of people's desires and struggles. The rapid expansion of
the health industry, for example, was partly a response to the growing refusal
of women to stay at home and provide nursing and other medical services. Now, service
commodities, as every economist knows, tend to be produced by "labor intensive"
methods. But the labor intensiveness is not just in the production of TV shows
and movies, the nursing of the sick or the shuffling of papers. Every one of these
industries is highly dependent on a wide variety of intellectual and affective skills
and extensive communication both among producers and between producers and
"customers." Moreover, to whatever degree there has been a tendency to
substitute machinery for labor in service production, it has involved, once
again, the substitution of one kind of intellectual labor for another, e.g. the
replacement of financial paper shufflers by computer programmers and operators. Something like this has also
been true "off the job," i.e., in the sphere of the production and reproduction
of labor power whether in schools, home or communities. This is, perhaps, most
obvious in schools, especially at the university level where the training of
future labor power feeds into and powers research and development. Schooling
has become, more or less in tandem with the substitution of intellectual for
manual labor in production, more and more about learning first, how to tap into
the circuits of information and communication and then, how to contribute to
them. But going to school involves more than the acquisition of cognitive skills,
it also involves the learning of affective skills, of how to deal with others —
skills learned first at home and then refined in schools and in the larger
community. Over time, as Michel Foucault
and later Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari pointed out, capital has sought to
subtly manipulate such skill acquisition in its own interest. Foucault's study
of Bentham's proposal for the management of prisons via panopticon arrangements
led to his investigations into how such mechanisms of micro-control were spread
throughout society, the bodies and brains of those living within it. In the
process he revealed hitherto invisible arrangements of bio-power through which
individual lives were subtly managed through induced forms of internalized
control. On the other hand, the more
we develop our abilities to think, to gather information and to communicate, the
greater our ability to struggle autonomously. Looking back over the history of
autonomous struggles against capitalism we can see that, more often than not,
the weakness of various movements has stemmed, at least in part, from their
isolation and inability to connect with and learn from others and thus
reinforce their numbers and widen their struggles. Conversely, one of the
striking things about the struggles that threw the Keynesian era of capitalism
into crisis in the late 1960s and early 1970s was precisely the ability of
people to use their communicative skills to build complex networks capable of
mobilizing vast numbers of people, in many autonomous movements, more or less
simultaneously. Diverse analyses of both this
new subjectivity in struggle, and of the capitalist response to it, led some
European Marxists to reformulate their concepts of class struggle in the
language of Spinoza: in the place of "working class" or the "socialized worker"
they now speak of "multitude"; in the place of the creative force of living
labor they now speak of the constitutive power of the general intellect or
"mass intellectuality" - with the multitude's power to create being distinguished from the capitalist Power to command. Although developing over some twenty years of
research and thinking in The attractiveness of the
concept of multitude derives, it seems to me, first, from the way it summarizes
in a word precisely the kinds of multiple but linked autonomous struggles that
have emerged in recent years, but second, because the analyses which have
framed it also argue that the strength of such struggles have the potential to
grow in the future and to re-craft social relationships beyond the constraints
of capitalism — in short it has recast the Marxist revolutionary vision on the
basis of recent developments in our abilities to collaborate autonomously from
capital. On the other hand, there are considerable differences as to
difficulties involved in actually realizing these potentialities, given the
methods developed by capital over the last three decades to control and channel
these new abilities. Hardt and Negri, despite their analysis of capital as
Empire operating on a global scale, are optimistic, some would even say
triumphalist, while Virno and some others, like Bifo, are much less so. Possible Autonomy? Given the above, what can we
say already, now, at the beginning of this conference, about possible autonomy,
or possible autonomies? The most obvious things, I think, are these: Foremost and most generally, both
past and present demonstrate that we need not be just reactive victims who can
only resist; we can often take the initiative and attack. We can, as so many
have done before us and are still doing around us, define our desires, figure
out what we think will satisfy them and fight for whatever changes we deem
necessary for their satisfaction, individually and collectively. There are
times, of course, when we are thrown on the defensive and can do little more
than resist, but we must always be looking for openings to retake the
initiative. Various currents of our struggles have in the past hurled capital
into profound crisis; our goal must be to combine those currents and create
such a tsunami of linked and complementary struggles as to make the capitalist
recovery of command impossible and our complete autonomy possible. Taking the initiative means
breaking out of whatever institutional frameworks capital has built to confine
and channel our energy and redefining the terrain of struggle in our own terms.
Such frameworks have been numerous, and so have been the struggles to escape
them. Within the conflicts sketched above we can identify several such
struggles. First, capital's efforts to manipulate our desires in its own
interest, via advertising, marketing and the creation of wage, racial, ethnic
and gender hierarchies have been fought in every phase of the cultural
revolutions of the last half century that have challenged virtually every
dimension of the capitalist organization of our lives. Second, those legal relationships of property designed
to separate us and keep us separated from the means of production, have been
defied by efforts to reverse enclosures or take control of the means of
production. This includes the refusal and subversion of "intellectual
property" through both direct appropriation and the free sharing of ideas,
inventions and the activities that generate them. Third, the labor markets in which we are all
supposed to sell some aspect of ourselves have been sometimes refused or
participation in them has been subordinated to other goals. Fourth, the subordination of life to work, has been resisted in factories
and offices by waged workers and in homes and schools by women and children. Fifth, the ideologies of domination through which
capital has sought to accustom us to subservience have been resisted by
religious movements to escape dominant state-church hierarchies and by those
who have liberated such concepts as liberty, freedom and equality from
capitalist use and recast them in terms of real autonomy. More generally there
has been a refusal of any imposed "general intellect" and an embrace
of both diversity in ideas and dialog between them. Sixth, the constitutions that confine our rights
and freedoms within the capitalist rules of the game have been contested by struggles
that have gone beyond civil disobedience of particular laws to demand a
complete reorganization of collective life. Seventh, those spatial territorializations (displacement or
confinement) designed to disperse or isolate us have been resisted by those
who have refused to be driven off the land or by those who have chosen the
mobility of exodus to redefine the terrain of their struggles. Eighth, trade unionism that began as a form of collective worker
self-activity but was reshaped by capital into an instrument of its control has
been bypassed by the struggles of rank & file workers and by the extension
of their shop floor struggles to the wider community. Ninth, the formal electoral arena of party politics
that confides politics to professionals and excludes most people from effective
participation in political life, has been challenged by struggles for
participatory democracy via plebiscites or grassroots encounters. Tenth, those hierarchal gender relationships that have been
shaped to pit men against women, and women against men, for the benefit of
business control and profit have been challenged, ruptured and bypassed by the
struggles of women in both production and reproduction. Eleventh, those racial and ethnic divisions that have also
been orchestrated to pit us against each other have been undermined by Black
and Chicano struggles in the Clearly, at this point in
history, as in the past, the paths to autonomy are as diverse as the obstacles
set up to block them. At the same time, while the character of the blockages
may reveal that we all have a common enemy — capitalism — there is no reason to
think that our desires are all the same or to think that any one new system
will satisfy them all. This point is, I think, well captured in the contemporary
slogan "One No, Many Yeses!" "Many Yeses" means the autonomous, self-construction
of each unique "Yes!" by a multiplicity of self-defined social individuals and
collectivities. We should no long think in terms of replacing the current
"system" with another, singular "system" motivated by a common, singular
consciousness or hegemonic "general intellect", i.e., socialism or
communism, but rather with many different ways of doing and being and a
politics of negotiating the differences among them. At the same time, we don't
just have a disconnected mosaic of separate struggles and projects. We have,
instead, amazing flows of dialog, debate, exchange of experience and mutual
aid. These are being woven through encounters, collective demonstrations and
internet communication into a fabric of interaction and collaboration that
holds the potential for crafting a whole new set of social and political
relationships that can both replace capitalist ones and realize our many,
autonomous but interconnected ways of organizing our lives. Harry Cleaver October 2006
* Keynote address to the
Conference on La Autonomía Posible: Reinvencion
de la política y emancipación at the Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México, October 24-26 2006.