AUTONOMISM AS A GLOBAL SOCIAL MOVEMENT

Patrick Cuninghame

"Despite the consensus opinion that alterglobalism is in crisis and apparently without a clear objective or vehicle for promoting global change through the ineffective World Social Forum “model,” a significant anticapitalist tendency continues to remain active. However, questions remain over autonomism’s ability to avoid ghettoizing itself and provide more than intense internal criticism of other more institutionalized and “vertical” currents. Autonomism originated in Europe in the seventies and eighties, specifically around the Autonomia and Autonomen radical social movements in Italy and Germany. Based on Italian workerist theories of worker self-management and autonomy from the mediating institutions of both capital and labor, the movement has since absorbed strong influences from radical feminism, the North American counterculture, French poststructuralism, neoanarchism, Mexican neo-Zapatism, and the Argentinean workerrecuperated factory and self-management movements."

JOBNAME: No Job Name PAGE: 1 SESS: 26 OUTPUT: Mon Oct 11 14:47:40 2010 SUM: 790A152D /v2451/blackwell/journals/wusa_v13_i4/02wusa_305 Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited Journal Code: WUSA Proofreader: Emily Article No: 305 Delivery date: 08 October 2010 Page Extent: 14 Copyeditor: Rhys 1 AUTONOMISM AS A GLOBAL 2 3 SOCIAL MOVEMENT wusa_305 451..467 4 5 Patrick Cuninghame 6 7 8 Despite the consensus opinion that alterglobalism is in crisis and apparently without a clear objective or 9 vehicle for promoting global change through the ineffective World Social Forum “model,” a signiﬁcant 10 anticapitalist tendency continues to remain active. However, questions remain over autonomism’s ability to 11 avoid ghettoizing itself and provide more than intense internal criticism of other more institutionalized and 12 “vertical” currents. Autonomism originated in Europe in the seventies and eighties, speciﬁcally around the 13 Autonomia and Autonomen radical social movements in Italy and Germany. Based on Italian workerist 14 theories of worker self-management and autonomy from the mediating institutions of both capital and labor, 15 the movement has since absorbed strong inﬂuences from radical feminism, the North American counter- 16 culture, French poststructuralism, neoanarchism, Mexican neo-Zapatism, and the Argentinean worker- 17 18 recuperated factory and self-management movements. 19 20 In Empire (2000), Multitude (2004), and Commonwealth (2009), Michael 21 Hardt and Toni Negri, intellectuals close to the movement who would none- 22 theless probably reject the Gramscian notion of “organic intellectual,” have 23 produced a polemical theory of globalization that frames a new global collective 24 actor, “the multitude,” as a critique of the dominant historical privileged subjects 25 of “the people” and “the proletariat.” They also claim that the multitude is the 26 counterhegemonic antagonist of “Empire,” the emerging form of global, net- 27 worked, deterritorialized sovereignty, with the military biopolitics of the U.S. 28 and the economic biopower of the transnational corporations at its heart. 29 Today autonomism can be seen as a global network of alliances between 30 occupied social centers and media activists in Europe, Zapatistas and Piqueteros 31 in Latin America, Black Blockers in North America, cyber hacktivists in Japan, 32 and autonomous workers, unemployed youth, students, dispossessed peasants, 33 and urban squatter movements in South Korea, South Africa, and India who 34 have preferred to coordinate their anticapitalist global days of actions through 35 the structure of People’s Global Action (PGA) rather than the World Social 36 Forum (WSF), united in their disparity and diversity by the overriding principle 37 and practice of autonomy from all forms of capitalist institution, authority, or 38 power, but also along the lines of the autonomy of one section of the multitude 39 from the rest in order to prevent their absorption by traditional socialist 40 “workers’ centrality”, for example, women, immigrants, and youth. WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society · 1089-7011 · Volume 13 · December 2010 · pp. 451–464 © The Authors WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society © 2010 Immanuel Ness and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. JOBNAME: No Job Name PAGE: 2 SESS: 26 OUTPUT: Mon Oct 11 14:47:40 2010 SUM: 50B58D50 /v2451/blackwell/journals/wusa_v13_i4/02wusa_305 452 WORKINGUSA: THE JOURNAL OF LABOR AND SOCIETY 1 Through a critical examination of contemporary global social movement 2 (GSM) theories and autonomist movement texts and discourses, the article will 3 ascertain if autonomism can in fact be considered a GSM in itself or must it in 4 reality be seen as a loose transnational network of shifting alliances too dispersed 5 to be named as such and which in any case would itself reject such generalizing 6 “catchall” criteria. Second, the article will brieﬂy outline autonomism’s histori- 7 cal trajectory. Third, the questions of rivals, competitors, and the criticisms of 8 autonomism within alterglobalism and global anticapitalism are dealt with. The 9 possible options and future directions of autonomism before the present crisis of 10 GSMs form the article’s ﬁnal section. 11 12 GSM Theories and Autonomism 22 13 14 Autonomism has made connections with similar movements around the 15 world since the mid-1990s when the GSM sector began to accelerate its mobi- 16 lizations against neoliberal globalism. However, the question remains as to 17 whether it can in fact be considered a GSM—that is, an international network of 18 movements globally coordinated around a common theme—or is it in reality a 19 much looser and more conjectural transnational network, too disparate and 20 dispersed to be named as such, many of whom would reject both the term 21 “autonomism” and the use of such generalizing “catchall” labels as “global social 22 movement.” 23 In order to answer this question we need to review brieﬂy the main theories 24 about GSMs. According to Ghimire (2005), there are ﬁve types of GSMs, 25 organized around (1) debt relief; (2) trade; (3) Tobin tax; (4) anticorruption; and 26 (5) fair trade: 27 28 Of particular interest regarding these movements is their attempt to combine 29 advocacy campaigns with concrete alternatives by way of action and practical 30 application [. . .] Likewise, these movements have numerous overlapping 31 agendas, thereby providing a collective identity. Yet, it is unclear if this conver- 32 gence has actually led to a stable alliance and if essential claims are put forward 33 in a coordinated manner [. . .] (G)iven that transnational activism associated 34 with these movements as well as ‘alternative’ globalization as a whole seeks to 35 move beyond conventional opposition strategies to proposing alternatives and 36 to work with the existing system [. . .] bilateral bodies and international devel- 37 opment institutions have gradually begun to pay attention to the reformist 38 transnational movements, [but] this has not resulted in any signiﬁcant policy 39 impulse. There are major ideological limitations of the system to readily accom- 40 modate such demands. 33 41 42 Writing from an institutional perspective, Ghimire also suggests that: 43 44 [W]hile the public inﬂuence of these movements has increased, taken as a 45 whole; their actions remain highly spontaneous and informal, with a low level of 46 institutionalization. At the same time, there are few signs of stable interactions 47 between formal political bodies and social movements. While critical internal JOBNAME: No Job Name PAGE: 3 SESS: 26 OUTPUT: Mon Oct 11 14:47:40 2010 SUM: 57F21B6F /v2451/blackwell/journals/wusa_v13_i4/02wusa_305 CUNINGHAME: AUTONOMISM AS A GLOBAL SOCIAL MOVEMENT 453 1 1 divisions persist between reformist and radical forces, these and the ‘anti- 2 globalization’ movement as a whole have come under increased ﬁnancial pres- 3 sure, and their social base remains highly unstable. 44 4 5 Such claims stand in opposition to those of Negri and Cocco (2006, 16), who 6 identify a new form of governance and interdependence between radical social 7 movements and the weak state form in Latin America, which is at the root of the 8 continental upsurge in conﬂict against neoliberalism: “[T]he innovation resides 9 in the fact that the governments of Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela—now with 10 that of Evo Morales in Bolivia—are not the representation of a ‘national’ project, 11 but rather they are the expression of a multiple movement.”1 12 Frundt, cited in Ghimire (2005), applies three strands of movement theory 13 to actual and potential cross-border movement strategies in the Americas. These 14 are “the structural relevance of political opportunities, the mobilization of net- 15 works as a resource, and the emphasis [given] by New Social Movement theory 16 on framing and reﬂexive identity [. . .] each strand offers important insights, one 17 clarifying limitations, a second demarcating and cultivating supporters, and a 18 third motivating participation. Taken together, the strands comprise a dynamic 19 basis for solidarity that enriches organizing strategies and gains measurable 20 victories” (Frundt 2005). 55 21 Another aspect of GSM theory is posed by Schulz (1998) in relation to the 22 dynamics of the Zapatista uprising in 1994 in Chiapas, Mexico, a key event for 23 anticapitalist GSMs in general and autonomism in particular: 24 25 the insurgent indigenous peasants of Chiapas rose up in arms under conditions 26 of relative economic and political deprivation at a particularly opportune 27 moment after developing a project of insurgency and acquiring signiﬁcant 28 organizational strength. Militarily, the Zapatistas would not have been able to 29 hold out long against the overwhelming force of the federal army. But enormous 30 media attention and massive national and international protest prevented the 31 regime from military crackdowns. The Zapatistas’ ability to link personal, 32 organizational, and informational networks has helped to gain crucial support. 33 Using globalized means of communication, they were able to disseminate their 34 messages around the world where they touched a chord in the discourse of an 35 incipient global civil society linked by non-governmental organizations, fax 36 machines, and the internet. 66 37 38 Thus, one of the core social movement organizations of global autonomism, 39 the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) in Chiapas, Mexico, has been 77 40 a catalyst for GSM theory from the outset. Therefore I would argue that 41 autonomism, despite some internal opposition to such claims and indeed to 42 Zapatism itself, can be seen as a GSM of a new type, neither structured as a social 43 category, such as the global women’s movement, nor formally coordinated from 44 a ﬁxed center, such as the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Internationals, or even, arguably, the 45 WSF. Avoiding ideological justiﬁcations and based more on practical consider- 46 ations, a group of autonomist movements began to coalesce globally in the 47 mid-1990s, particularly around the First and Second Gatherings for Humanity JOBNAME: No Job Name PAGE: 4 SESS: 26 OUTPUT: Mon Oct 11 14:47:40 2010 SUM: 51808755 /v2451/blackwell/journals/wusa_v13_i4/02wusa_305 454 WORKINGUSA: THE JOURNAL OF LABOR AND SOCIETY 1 and Against Neoliberalism in Chiapas in 1996 and in the Spanish State in 1997, 2 the latter leading to the formation of PGA, a GSM that predated the WSF by 3 four years and that refused to have a central coordinating committee precisely to 4 avoid the pitfalls of such centralization in the past. 5 6 Autonomism as a Social Movement 7 8 As a starting point, it must be stressed that autonomism’s “autonomy” is not 9 the separation of the rural–urban working class (conceptualized as the Spinozian 10 “multitude” rather than the Marxian proletariat by Negri and Hardt) from 11 capitalism. Rather, it is class self-determination and self-management within 12 capitalism, thus taking the form of a counterpower and “exodus”2, rather than 13 entrenched, static, resistance to capitalism. In fact the word “autonomy” is 14 derived from ancient Greek autonomos, meaning “someone who lives according 15 to their own law.” So autonomy is not independence, rather it is the interdepen- 16 dence of the various sectors of the multitude inside, against and beyond capital. 17 Thus, independence is intended primarily for autarchic forms of life, completely 18 separated from the community, while the autonomous deals with life within 19 society but under self-government. 20 Autonomism has developed from neo-Marxist sources, but here I will 21 conﬁne myself to its trajectory during the twentieth century. The Wobblies (the 22 anarcho-syndicalist International Workers of the World revolutionary syndical- 23 ist trade union) organized immigrants, highly mobile and newly arrived in the 24 U.S., to ﬁght robber-baron capitalism, state repression, and racist trade union- 25 ism which only organized white, Anglo-American qualiﬁed “craft workers.” 26 Following the First World War, the German, Italian, and Hungarian council 27 communisms criticized the authoritarian and antiworker nature of the Bolshevik 28 “revolution as putsch” and organized revolutions based on workers’ councils, or 29 Soviets, denouncing the state capitalist and despotic nature of the Soviet Union 30 from its beginning and not just under Stalin. In the ﬁfties, the French and U.S. 31 dissident libertarian/post-Trotskyite journals Socialisme ou Barbarie of Claude 32 Lefort, Cornelius Castoriadis, Guy Debord, and Jean-Francois Lyotard and 33 Correspondence of the Johnson–Forrest Tendency of CLR James and Raya 34 Dunayevskaya (Trotsky’s former secretary) ﬁercely criticized the limits both of 35 the vanguardist, democratic-centralist communist parties and of the Trotskyite 36 4th International, with their trend toward bureaucratic elitism, as revolution 37 But above all, it was the politico-social laboratory that was the Italy of the 38 sixties and seventies that most deeply marked autonomism as an ideology and 39 ﬁnally as a GSM. The late 1950s witnessed the emergence of a new type of 40 worker: internal migrants from southern Italy, of peasant origin, outside the 41 socialist tradition of the skilled industrial workers of the north, who arrived as 42 anticommunist strikebreakers but quickly became protagonists of revolt against 43 neofascist and corporative trade unions. Above all, they had a cultural, almost 44 ontological, rejection of the repetitive, serial, disciplined, and toxic labor 45 imposed by the assembly line of the Fordist factory. JOBNAME: No Job Name PAGE: 5 SESS: 26 OUTPUT: Mon Oct 11 14:47:40 2010 SUM: 54334454 /v2451/blackwell/journals/wusa_v13_i4/02wusa_305 CUNINGHAME: AUTONOMISM AS A GLOBAL SOCIAL MOVEMENT 455 1 Quaderni Rossi (QR/Red Notebooks), a neo-Marxist sociological journal, was 2 founded in 1959 by trade unionists and intellectuals from the Communist and 3 Socialist parties, concerned by the inability of their organizations to understand, 4 much less organize these new outbreaks of worker rebellion. They based their 88 5 research on a rereading of Marx and a reinterpretation of his “workers’ enquiry” 6 methodology, combined with the methodology of co-research from the sociol- 7 ogy of action, received from the U.S. and France where important co-researched 8 studies of car factory workers were published in the forties and ﬁfties. So was 9 born operaismo or Italian workerism. 10 Following the three-day long Revolt of Piazza Statuto in 1962 in Turin, 11 when FIAT car workers attempted to burn down the ofﬁces of the most pro- 12 management trade union confederation, QR divided on the question of con- 13 verting their originally purely investigative interventions into political action. 14 Thus were initiated political developments that led to the founding of the 15 neo-Leninist extra-parliamentary group Potere Operaio (Workers’ Power) in 16 1969, which after 1973 was to dissolve itself into the broader experience of the 17 new social movements of the seventies. 18 However, the most important theoretical contribution was that of Mario 19 Tronti in his 1964 essay “Lenin in England” (1979/1964), which called for a 99 20 “Copernican inversion of perspective” within Marxism: instead of ﬁrst studying 21 capital and then labor, as had always been its practice hitherto, Marxists had to 22 depart from the exclusive capacity of “living labor” to produce surplus value, 23 before researching the “dead labor” of capital. The latter depended, vampire- 24 like, on living labor, while living labor historically sought to free itself from 25 capital’s dependence, forcing it to continuously innovate new forms of exploi- 26 tation and social command, leading to separate but related cycles of political and 27 technical class composition–decomposition–recomposition within the overall 28 class struggle. 29 The theory of technical and political class composition is developing dra- 30 matically: each new form of refusal and rebellion against work that the working 31 class invented forced capital to repress it both politically and technically through 32 the alteration of the relationship between machinery and living labor within the 33 factory, even at the risk that this alteration could result in an economic crisis. 34 Thus, the main problem for revolutionaries, according to Tronti, was not the 35 apparent passivity, conformism, apathy, and subordination of workers to capital, 36 as posed both by orthodox Marxism–Leninism and the Critical Theory of the 37 Frankfurt School. 38 Rather, it was the question of organizing the underlying antagonism of labor 39 in an explicitly political form. Even so, for Tronti the political organizations 40 most suited to this task remained the Communist Party and the historic labor 41 movement, though renovated and cleansed of their reformist–social democrat 42 tendencies. For other “operaists,” the historic labor movement had been insti- 43 tutionalized and incorporated by capital through the Fordist–Keynesian pact 44 of producers, and thus new antagonistic organizational forms were required. 45 Initially in the sixties this was based on “Workers centrality” and the Fordist JOBNAME: No Job Name PAGE: 6 SESS: 26 OUTPUT: Mon Oct 11 14:47:40 2010 SUM: 5162373C /v2451/blackwell/journals/wusa_v13_i4/02wusa_305 456 WORKINGUSA: THE JOURNAL OF LABOR AND SOCIETY 1 “massworker.” Successively in the 1970s, a decentralized and horizontal move- 2 ment emerged—Autonomia—whose social composition was based on what 3 Negri (1979) called the post-Fordist “socialized worker.” 4 According to Hardt and Negri’s (2000) highly controversial theory of 5 “Empire,” the real opponent of “Empire” is the “Multitude,” a collective subject 6 that does not substitute the “proletariat” or the “people” but rather has absorbed 7 them within its deterritorialized plurality that is disconnected from national 8 territories. An example of this phenomenon would be the massive waves of 9 migration from the global South to the North that coincide with and were 10 catalyzed by the post-Fordist global division of labor after about 1980 and 11 represent the most signiﬁcant change in global class composition since 1945. But 12 the new class composition that Empire exists to control and exploit is the 13 so-called “immaterial worker.” It is immaterial because it produces intangible 14 products in the form of symbols, knowledge, information, and affects. 15 Within the ﬁeld of immaterial labor, affective labor is the most valuable 16 form, though usually low paid and often unpaid. Affective labor is a form of 17 “biopower”; a concept innovated by Foucault (1998). However, many autono- 18 mist thinkers disagree with the concepts of Empire, Multitude, bio power, and 19 bio politics, considered much closer to the French poststructuralism of Deleuze, 20 Guattari, and Foucault than to Italian workerism. The Italian philosopher Paolo 21 Virno (2004), a former activist in Autonomia in the seventies and political 22 prisoner in the eighties, has criticized the limits of the concept of Empire, which 23 other autonomist thinkers have seen as premature and too tied to the “new 24 economy” and sustainable capitalism of Clintonism, swept aside by the return of 25 the “neocons” and the old, territorialized “petrolarchy.” 26 Nor is the multitude necessarily a phenomenon antagonistic to capitalism, 27 according to the same author. He has a more ambiguous view of the currently 28 prevailing values and attitudes of hyperindividualism, cynicism, opportunism, 29 and fear (Virno 1996). Another autonomist theorist, Franco Berardi, a former 30 free radio activist in the 1970s and cyber activist since the 1990s, is much more 31 pessimistic than Negri about the prospects for revolutionary change. In his book 32 on the New Economy and the “cognitariat,” Berardi (2001) identiﬁes a para- 33 doxical transition from the refusal of Fordist work in the 1970s to the love of 34 post-Fordist telematic work in the twenty-ﬁrst century, where work has become 35 the most stimulating part of many people’s lives, as long as they are not neoslave, 36 criminalized immigrants. He has also recently described the last thirty years of 37 media activism as a complete failure.3 State monopolies over information and the 38 use of censorship have been overturned thanks to autonomist media activism, 39 but only to allow the corporate media conglomerates of Berlusconi and 40 Murdoch to take advantage of the liberated media space. 41 However, what uniﬁes autonomist thought, beyond its criticism of orthodox 42 Marxism and of course of neoliberal capitalism, is the perception that Marxist 43 historical concepts and categories are undergoing radical transition. Faced with 44 this situation of extreme uncertainty and unpredictability, the best strategy 45 seems to be the Zapatista one of “walking by asking”, avoiding dogmatism and JOBNAME: No Job Name PAGE: 7 SESS: 26 OUTPUT: Mon Oct 11 14:47:40 2010 SUM: 535003B3 /v2451/blackwell/journals/wusa_v13_i4/02wusa_305 CUNINGHAME: AUTONOMISM AS A GLOBAL SOCIAL MOVEMENT 457 1 rigid thinking though a process of continual reﬂexivity in order to discover 2 possible paths of exodus from capitalism (Cuninghame 2007). 3 4 Rivals, Competitors, and Criticisms within Alterglobalism 5 and Anticapitalism 6 7 The re-emergence of autonomism—a movement which had suffered severe 8 criminalization and repression in Italy after 1978—since the late 1980s and 9 particularly through the birth of the global anticapitalist movement following 10 the Battle of Seattle in 1999 has led to a series of critiques from its political rivals 11 within alterglobalism. The main targets have been Hardt and Negri’s books on 12 Empire and Multitude, but there has also been political and not just theoretical 13 criticism of autonomist strategy. The attacks have come from four directions: 14 from intellectuals connected to Trotskyite groups such as the British Socialist 15 Workers Party (SWP) and the French League Communiste Révolutionnaire; 16 from Latin American left-nationalism, outraged by Hardt and Negri’s assertion 17 that the nation-state and therefore populist nationalism have been rendered 18 obsolete by the postnational capitalism of Empire; from within autonomism and 19 from forms of neo-Marxism closely related to it such as “Open Marxism,” in 20 particular from John Holloway; and ﬁnally from the more radical–liberal stream 21 of alterglobalism, as represented by the environmental journalist George 22 Monbiot of The Guardian, who accuse autonomism of playing politics with 23 climate change and of anarchist utopianism. 24 Alex Callinicos (2001), the guru of the SWP, has been particularly active in 25 his denunciations of autonomism and of the theories of Empire and Multitude: 10 10 26 27 One of the main currents in the anti-capitalist movement is autonomism. This 28 has two main political characteristics: (1) the rejection of the Leninist concep- 29 tion of organisation; and (2) the adoption of substitutionist forms of action in 30 which a politically enlightened elite acts on behalf of the masses. Autonomism 31 is in fact a diverse political formation. The most notorious version is repre- 32 sented by the anarchist Black Bloc, whose pursuit of violent confrontation with 33 the state played into the police’s hands at Genoa. [. . .] More attractive is the 34 Italian autonomist coalition Ya Basta!, which combines an uncompromising 35 rejection of the political establishment—including the parties of the reformist 36 left—with, on the one hand, the adoption of imaginative forms of non-violent 37 direct action and, on the other, contesting municipal elections, sometimes 38 successfully. 39 Ya Basta!, which itself acts as an umbrella for different views and emphases, 40 overlaps with the Tute Bianche, known after the white overalls they used to wear 41 on demonstrations, most famously at the Prague S26 protests in September 42 2000. [. . .] Autonomism, [. . .] is a living political force. [. . .] But the idea of 43 exemplary action on behalf of the masses remains inﬂuential, whether in the 44 Black Block’s cult of street violence or the Tute Bianche’s more peaceful tactics. 45 These actions function as a substitute for mass mobilisation. In analyses such as 46 Hardt and Negri’s the working class—reshaped in the transformations of the 47 past few years but still very much a real force—is either dissolved into the JOBNAME: No Job Name PAGE: 8 SESS: 26 OUTPUT: Mon Oct 11 14:47:40 2010 SUM: 55B41122 /v2451/blackwell/journals/wusa_v13_i4/02wusa_305 458 WORKINGUSA: THE JOURNAL OF LABOR AND SOCIETY 1 amorphous multitude or denounced as a privileged labour aristocracy. The 2 activists act in the name of one and try to bypass or confront the other. [. . .] 3 Toni Negri is still the key theorist of autonomism [. . .] the inﬂuence of his ideas 4 is an obstacle to the development of a successful movement against the global 5 capitalism whose structures he seeks to plot in Empire. 6 7 Callinicos (2003) also blames the hostility of the anticapitalist movement toward 8 all political parties, including his own, on autonomism: 9 10 A signiﬁcant section of the anti-capitalist movement has a more or less hostile 11 attitude towards political parties. This reﬂects a variety of factors: for example, 12 the appalling record of the ‘ofﬁcial left’ (social democrats, Communists, and 13 Greens) in ofﬁce, negative experiences with far left organizations, and the 14 inﬂuence of autonomism. The result is a movementism that, for example, has 15 led to the formal exclusion of political parties from the World Social Forum and 16 attempts to extend this ban to the European Social Forum. 17 18 However, the criticisms by Callinicos and the SWP, particularly the accusations 19 of elitism, have since rebounded against that party following the ﬁasco of the 20 2004 European Social Forum (ESF), when the SWP colluded with the Labour 21 Party to exclude not just autonomists but all civil society and social movement 22 organizations from participating in the planning and administration of the event, 23 so leading to the organization of an alternative London ESF and the subsequent 24 decline of the ESF due to the damage inﬂicted on its credibility as an open, 25 inclusive, plural, transparent, and directly democratic forum. Admittedly, this 26 has been part of a general, global decline in the alterglobalist movement since its 27 highpoint of the February 15, 2003 mass mobilizations against the imminent 28 U.S. invasion of Iraq. 29 Latin American orthodox Marxist apologists for left nationalism, such as 30 Almeyra and Thibaut (2006) and Boron (2005), have accused Hardt and Negri 11 11 31 of being unwitting “postmodernist” supporters of neoliberalism and even of 32 U.S. neoimperialism. Certainly, left nationalism has enjoyed a resurgence in 33 Latin America with the election of the radical Chavez and Evo Morales gov- 34 ernments in Venezuela and Bolivia, as well as several other center-left and 35 “progressive neoliberal” governments in South America. However, as Raul 36 Zibechi (2006) emphasizes, these governments owe their popularity—and in 37 the case of both Chavez and Morales, their political survival—to basically 38 autonomous (not autonomist) social movements, who could potentially with- 39 draw such support if Chavez and Morales fail to deliver on their promises to 40 roll back neoliberalism. 41 Furthermore, Zibechi (2008) questions the ability of particularly Morales, 42 given the state of virtual civil war in Bolivia, or of the increasingly embattled 43 Chavez to implement such change by means of state power: 44 45 Those like us who distrust the state as a tool with which to build a new world, 46 can learn from these ongoing crises. [. . .] Experience tells us that movements 47 can take two paths to change the world: to become state bureaucracies or remain JOBNAME: No Job Name PAGE: 9 SESS: 26 OUTPUT: Mon Oct 11 14:47:40 2010 SUM: 5406DC9F /v2451/blackwell/journals/wusa_v13_i4/02wusa_305 CUNINGHAME: AUTONOMISM AS A GLOBAL SOCIAL MOVEMENT 459 1 as movements. The ﬁrst is a path trodden for over a century, the other offers no 2 guarantees, but you can be assured, at least, that it is the surest path so that the 3 future does not slip away from our hands.”4 4 5 The two main autonomist movements in Latin America, the Zapatistas in 6 Mexico and a section of the piqueteros and self-managed recuperated factories in 7 Argentina, have remained aloof from the Chavez and Morales governments, 8 rejecting anticapitalist strategies based on the taking of power and change from 9 above. 10 Yet another type of criticism of Negri and Hardt’s theories of Empire and 11 Multitude has come from an unexpected quarter, from within autonomism itself, 12 in the shape of the “open Marxist,” John Holloway, who accuses them of 13 promoting divisive and self-defeating identity politics, of “being” rather than 14 “doing,” through the idea of Multitude in particular, based on Deleuze’s theory of 15 deterritorialization and the plurality of singularities. Holloway (2002b) attacks 16 Hardt and Negri by arguing that both “empire” and “imperialism” are invalid 17 concepts when seeking to analyze contemporary global capitalism: “What is 18 objectionable in Hardt and Negri’s argument that imperialism has been replaced 19 by empire is the assumption that the concept of imperialism used to be valid—but 20 then this reﬂects the ambiguous relation to Lenin that has always been present in 21 Negri’s writings and indeed in much autonomist writing [. . .].” 22 In reply and as part of an often acerbic debate between Negri and Holloway 23 and within autonomism itself over the validity of the theories of Empire and 24 Multitude and their place within global anticapitalist struggle, Negri (2006) 25 outlines the limits of Holloway’s (2002a) “scream” of negative dialectics in his 26 book Change the World Without Taking Power: 27 28 Holloway’s line represents the best of the opposition to attempts by a certain 29 institutional Latin American left to ﬂatten within the categories of nation and 30 development the relation between biopower and biopolitical potential. Yet, it 31 remains limited by its negative dialectical framework. Negativity is not just a 32 mere “scream;” it is rather, desire, a multitudinary necessity to continuously 33 afﬁrm joy, peace, and communism. 34 35 Hardt and Negri have defended their core concepts in Multitude (2004) and 36 other writings and interviews from these and other critiques, notably by Call- 37 inicos, whose views dovetails with those of Latin American left nationalists and 38 orthodox Marxists. However, they have adapted their original stance, which was 39 almost exultant at the prospect of the death of the nation-state and its despotic 40 sovereignty in Empire (2000), particularly in the light of the process of reterri- 41 torialization of Empire under the U.S. unilateralist policy of “global war against 42 terrorism” since 9/11. They now see Empire as a continuum of imperialism, its 43 ultimate stage, rather than a complete rupture. 44 The nation-state is certainly not dead, and in the case of the advanced 45 capitalist countries, has reinforced its Hobbesian repressive role as the global 46 “society of control,” replacing Foucault’s “society of discipline,” while extracting 47 itself from its social and redistributive functions by transferring them to the JOBNAME: No Job Name PAGE: 10 SESS: 26 OUTPUT: Mon Oct 11 14:47:40 2010 SUM: 5264D576 /v2451/blackwell/journals/wusa_v13_i4/02wusa_305 460 WORKINGUSA: THE JOURNAL OF LABOR AND SOCIETY 1 market-led nongovernmental organization sector. However, for the great major- 12 12 2 ity of nation-states, real independence and self-determination are now a mirage, 3 and they are visibly losing control over their national economies—the very 4 essence of state power—to the supranational organisms and transnational cor- 5 porations that form the backbone of Empire. Any attempt to break with the 6 global economic status quo can be punished with capital ﬂight, a fall in stock 7 exchange values, currency devaluation, and the extraction of foreign investment 8 in a matter of hours thanks to the ITC revolution. Thus, their thesis stands that 13 13 9 those political actors who wish to radically alter society and economy will need 10 to struggle simultaneously at both local and global levels, seeking to build new 11 nodes in the network of the multitude, while struggling for state power through 12 insurrectionism or electoralism seems doomed to failure. 13 The neo-Zapatistas of the EZLN and its base communities in Chiapas, also 14 nominally left nationalists, would seem to agree. They sent no delegates to Evo 15 Morales’ presidential inauguration in Bolivia in 2005 on the grounds that they 16 are opposed to all top-down, state-controlled change, including by the left. 17 Instead, they have promoted change from “below and to the left” through the 18 Other Campaign at the Mexican national level and the Zezta International 19 globally, both organized following the Sixth Declaration in 2005. In Chiapas, 20 they have continued to consolidate the Juntas de Buen Gobierno ( JBG, Good 21 Government Councils) and Caracoles (core Zapatista communities that actively 22 interface with the outside world) since their establishment in 2003, replacing the 23 Aguascalientes meeting places and Autonomous Municipalities established fol- 24 lowing the revolt in 1994. 25 These local initiatives are based on the neo-Zapatista principles of “govern- 26 ing by obeying” (mandando obedeciendo) and “everything for everyone, nothing 27 for us” (todo para todos, para nosostros nada), in stark contrast to the corruption, 28 impunity, and authoritarianism that continues to dominate ofﬁcial Mexican 29 political culture, despite the only formal “transition to democracy” in 2000. As 30 a result, the JBG, based on annual elections and revocable delegation, have 31 managed, with the support of the alterglobal movement, to set up schools, 32 hospitals, and even a university without any government support and despite 33 continuing harassment by paramilitary and state forces, now under the control 34 of the center-left PRD (Partido de la Revolucion Democratica/Party of the Demo- 35 cratic Revolution) governor of Chiapas. 36 The heart of this social revolution from below has been the self- 37 transformation of indigenous women in the Zapatista communities, who have 38 passed from a passive obedience to men still evident in the 1990s to active, 39 militant, autonomy, self-determination, and participation in every aspect of 40 economic, social, cultural, and political life. However, the paradox remains that 41 while neo-Zapatism advances at the local and global level, it has been unable to 42 break through the state’s military, political, and economic cordon sanitaire and 43 consolidate in other parts of Mexico, despite the best efforts of the Other 44 Campaign and the growing presence of autonomous social movements, particu- 45 larly the Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (Popular Assembly of the JOBNAME: No Job Name PAGE: 11 SESS: 26 OUTPUT: Mon Oct 11 14:47:40 2010 SUM: 537FD676 /v2451/blackwell/journals/wusa_v13_i4/02wusa_305 CUNINGHAME: AUTONOMISM AS A GLOBAL SOCIAL MOVEMENT 461 1 Peoples of Oaxaca) (Cuninghame 2007). This is due mainly to the capturing of 2 the social movement sector by the populist, nationalist, anti-neoliberal cam- 3 paigning of Lopez Obrador, the defeated PRD presidential candidate in 2006, 4 who has convincingly claimed that the 2006 elections were fraudulent and who 5 has conducted a so far successful campaign to block the privatization of PEMEX, 6 the state-owned oil company and jewel of the Mexican economy, through his 7 directly controlled proxy-social movement, the Convencion Nacional Democratica 8 (National Democratic Convention). 9 He has been actively supported by most of the verticalist, left nationalist, 10 extra-parliamentary left, despite the fact that neither he nor the deeply divided 11 PRD are in fact anti-neoliberal since they continue to support NAFTA. Now, in 14 14 12 the de facto state of emergency existing in Mexico due to the failed “war against 13 drugs” of President Calderon, which has already cost over 3,000 lives in 2008 14 and is causing political destabilization, and with increased military activity in 15 Chiapas, the neo-Zapatista movement faces the imminent prospect of war and 16 repression, unless the alterglobalist movement can mobilize global public 17 opinion to prevent it, as stated by the organizations that participated in the July 18 2008 International Caravan in Solidarity with the Zapatista Communities in 19 Chiapas: 20 21 The Mexican Army’s decision to invade La Garrucha, Rancho Alegre (known as 22 Chapuyil), Hermenegildo Galeana and San Alejandro [in June 2008] represents 23 more than the violation of the Dialogue, Conciliation and Peace in Chiapas Law 24 (1995), the Mexican Constitution (Article 29), the American Human Rights 25 Declaration (Articles 21 and 29b) and the International Civil and Political 26 Rights Convention (Articles 14 and 27). It also represents a change in the 27 strategy against the Zapatistas. In view of this, we are extremely concerned for 28 the physical and physiological integrity of our indigenous Zapatista brothers 29 and sisters. The Mexican Government is attacking the right of indigenous 30 peoples to freely organize by attempting to use the outrageous accusation that 31 the Zapatistas cultivate marijuana. As the Mexican State looks for mechanisms 32 to legitimise open warfare, it is clear that its real objective is the destruction of 33 the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN). 15 15 34 35 While the multitude is a collective actor in formation, the product of the end 36 of the certainties of the clearly deﬁned social classes, and antagonists of the 37 modern era, working class and peasant organizations have been instrumental in 38 the center-left gaining power in various Latin American countries since 2000. 39 However, they have achieved this almost always in alliance with the social 40 movement sector, and by acting as social movements themselves in the cases of 41 the Brazilian Workers Party (PT) in Brazil, the Movimiento al Socialismo in 42 Bolivia, and of Chavez’ popular support base in Venezuela (Negri and Cocco 43 2006). 44 Negri’s opinion of Chavez has changed too: once considered suspect for 45 his statism and militarist origins, he is now reconsidered in the light of his 46 dependence on the popular movements of the barrios (the product of the JOBNAME: No Job Name PAGE: 12 SESS: 26 OUTPUT: Mon Oct 11 14:47:40 2010 SUM: 4D959992 /v2451/blackwell/journals/wusa_v13_i4/02wusa_305 462 WORKINGUSA: THE JOURNAL OF LABOR AND SOCIETY 1 Caracazo, the 1989 social revolt in Caracas), after the abortive coup attempt in 2 2002 by the oligarchy and sections of the army, under the probable orchestration 3 of the CIA. Thus, a multitude, a monster with many heads where no one social 16 16 4 movement, party, or political force seems to dominate and does seem to be the 5 basis of both the more radical and the progressive governments in Latin America 6 coming to and staying in power, despite their ambiguous relationship. 7 A fourth type of criticism has come from the more pragmatic and less 8 ideological sections of alterglobalism, as represented by George Monbiot 9 (2008), The Guardian reporter, who accuses the autonomist organizers of this 10 year’s Climate Change Camp in Kent, southern England of playing utopian 11 politics with the climate change issue: 17 17 12 13 Ewa [Jasiewicz] rightly celebrates the leaderless, autonomous model of organ- 14 ising that has made this movement so effective. The two climate camps I have 15 attended—this year and last—were among the most inspiring events I’ve ever 16 witnessed. I am awed by the people who organised them, who managed to 17 create, under extraordinary pressure, safe, functioning, delightful spaces in 18 which we could debate the issues and plan the actions which thrust Heathrow 19 and Kingsnorth into the public eye. [. . .] But in seeking to extrapolate from this 20 experience to a wider social plan, she makes two grave errors. The ﬁrst is to 21 confuse ends and means. She claims to want to stop global warming, but she 22 makes that task 100 times harder by rejecting all state and corporate solutions. 23 It seems to me that what she really wants to do is to create an anarchist utopia, 24 and use climate change as an excuse to engineer it. 25 26 Monbiot returns to the old dividing line of whether or not radical social 27 movements should at some point agree to work with the state to resolve a 28 problem of impending urgency. 29 The real dividing line is the issue of instrumental politics: do “the ends 30 justify the means”? However, as Adamovsky (2007) points out, one of the most 31 important differences between the new anticapitalism—of which autonomism is 32 an integral part—and the old anticapitalism of traditional socialism has been the 33 rejection of instrumentality and the insistence that the means and ends must 34 both be justiﬁable. 35 36 Conclusion 37 38 Options and Future Directions 39 40 It is clear that the global anticapitalist justice movement is in difﬁculties after 41 ﬁve years of relative decline, following the upsurge between Seattle 1999, Genoa 42 2001, and ending with the February 15th Global Day of Action against the War 43 in Iraq. The growing dissatisfaction over the organization of this year’s polyva- 44 lent WSF is a case in point, as is the fact that global autonomism has virtually 45 withdrawn from the WSF, given the insistence of a controlling clique (ATTAC 18 18 46 [defunct in 2007], Le Monde Internacional [the French Socialist Party], and the JOBNAME: No Job Name PAGE: 13 SESS: 26 OUTPUT: Mon Oct 11 14:47:40 2010 SUM: 837B07C8 /v2451/blackwell/journals/wusa_v13_i4/02wusa_305 CUNINGHAME: AUTONOMISM AS A GLOBAL SOCIAL MOVEMENT 463 1 PT) to centralize decision making. Autonomism has been affected by this 2 present phase of demobilization and return to private life, although it still retains 3 a considerable ability to mobilize and organize, as shown by this year’s Climate 4 Change Camps. 5 A further problem has been the increase in the repression of autonomist 6 movements around the world, particularly of the Zapatistas in Mexico, who 7 expect to be attacked by the Mexican Army as part of its “war against drugs” at 8 any moment. This has obviously led to some disarticulation of autonomism as a 9 GSM, although it has responded by organizing an International Caravan to 10 Chiapas in July (2008). Furthermore, the criticisms of Berardi about the failure 11 of media activism imply a rethinking of media activism and its effectiveness 12 under its present form, essentially that of Indymedia. The most important 13 question is to avoid a return to the ghetto of the 1980s and early 1990s. 14 15 Patrick Cuninghame is a sociologist at the Universidad Autonoma Metro- 16 politan in Mexico City. He is presently on the editorial committee of 17 “Argumentos” and “Societies without Borders.” He has published articles on 18 Autonomist Marxism, the Sociology of Work, and social movements. His next 19 publication in 2011 will be in the Ours to Master and Own: Workers Councils: from 20 the Commune to the Present collection. Address Correspondence to Patrick Cun- 21 inghame, Area of Work Studies, Department of Social Relations, Universidad 22 Autónoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco, Mexico City. Telephone: ••. E-mail: 23 pcuninghame@hotmail.com 19 19 24 25 Notes 26 27 1. Author’s translation. 28 2. “By Exodus we want to indicate the form of struggle that is based not in direct opposition but in a kind of 29 struggle by subtraction-a refusal of power, a refusal of obedience. Not only a refusal of work and a refusal 30 of authority, but also emigration and movement of all sorts that refuses the obstacles that block movements 31 and desire.” (Hardt and Negri 2000b) 32 3. Interview with the author, Mexico City, May 23, 2008. 33 4. Author’s translation. 34 35 References 36 37 Adamovsky, E. 2007. Autonomous politics and its problems. Choike: A Portal on Southern Civil Societies, 38 http://www.choike.org/documentos/adamovsky_autonomous.pdf (accessed September 2008). 20 20 39 Almeyra, G., and E. Thibaut. 2006. Zapatistas: Un nuevo mundo en construccion. Buenas Aires: Editorial Maipue. 40 Berardi, F. 2001. La fabbrica dell’infelicità. New economy e movimento del cognitariato. Rome: DeriveApprodi. 41 Boron, A. 2005. Empire and imperialism. A critical reading of Michael Hardt and Toni Negri. London: Zed Books. 42 Callinicos, A. 2001. Toni Negri in perspective. International Socialism 92 (Autumn), http://pubs. 43 socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj92/callinicos.htm; (accessed September 2008). 21 21 44 ———. 2003. Regroupment, realignment, and the revolutionary left. http://www.istendency.net/pdf/ 45 Regroupment.pdf (accessed September 2008). 46 Chesters, G., and I. Welsh 2006. Complexity and social Movements: Multitudes at the edge of chaos. London: 47 Routledge. 22 22 JOBNAME: No Job Name PAGE: 14 SESS: 26 OUTPUT: Mon Oct 11 14:47:40 2010 SUM: 3384E84C /v2451/blackwell/journals/wusa_v13_i4/02wusa_305 464 WORKINGUSA: THE JOURNAL OF LABOR AND SOCIETY 1 Cuninghame, P. 2007. Reinventing an/other anti-capitalism in Mexico: The Sixth Declaration of the EZLN 2 and the ‘Other Campaign’. The Commoner, 12 (Summer):79–109. 3 della Porta, D. 2006. The global justice movement: Cross-national and transnational perspectives. New York: 4 Paradigm. 23 23 5 Foucault, M. 1998. The history of sexuality, vol.1: The will to knowledge. London: Penguin. 6 Frundt, H. J. 2005. Movement theory and international labour solidarity. Labour Studies Journal 30 (2):19. 24 24 7 Ghimire, K. B. 2005. The contemporary global social movements: Emergent proposals, connectivity and 8 development implications. Programme area: Civil society and social movements (2000–2005). Paper No.: 19. 9 Geneva: UNRISD, 15 August. 10 Gun Cuninghame, P. 2005. Autonomia in the seventies: The refusal of work, the party and politics. Cultural 11 Studies Review [Special issue on contemporary Italian political theory, University of Melbourne], 11 (2): 12 77–94. 25 25 13 ———. 2007. L’autonomia nel Regno Unito: produzione, composizione di classe e antagonismo dal 1970. In 14 Gli Autonomi: Le storie, le lotte, le teorie, Vol. II, ed. S. Bianchi, and L. Caminiti, trans. M. Trotta, 377–93. 15 Rome: DeriveApprodi. 26 26 16 Hardt, M., and A. Negri 2000. Empire. New York: Harvard University Press. 17 ———. 2000b. Negri/Hardt chat about Empire. Nettime List-Archives http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/ 18 nettime-l-0005/msg00022.html (accessed •• ••, ••). 27 27 19 ———. 2004. Multitude: War and democracy in the age of empire. New York: Penguin Books. 20 ———. 2009. Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 21 Holloway, J. 2002a. Change the world without taking power: The meaning of revolution today. London: Pluto Books. 22 ———. 2002b. Time to revolt. Reﬂections on Empire. The Commoner (October 2002), http:// 23 www.commoner.org.uk/time_%20to_revolt.htm (accessed January 2003). 24 International Caravan in Solidarity with the Zapatista Communities in Chiapas 2008. Final declaration. El 25 Kilombo Intergalactico (July 5, 2008), http://www.elkilombo.org/documents/zstatementjuly08.html 26 (accessed September 2008). 27 Katsiaﬁcas, G. 2006. The subversion of politics: European autonomous social movements and the decolonization of 28 everyday life. London: AK Press. 28 28 29 Kingsnorth, P. 2004. One no, many yeses: A journey to the heart of the global resistance movement. London: Free 30 Press. 29 29 31 Mertes, T. 2004. A movement of movements. New York: Verso. 30 30 32 Monbiot, G. 2008. Identity politics in climate change hell. The Guardian (August 23), http:// 33 www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/21/climatechange.kingsnorthclimatecamp (accessed 34 August 2008). 35 Negri, A. 1979. A note on the social worker. In Working class autonomy and the crisis: Italian Marxist texts of the 36 theory and practice of a class Movement: 1964–1979, ed. Red Notes/CSE Books, 37–8. London:Red 37 Notes/CSE Books. 31 31 38 ———. 2006. John Holloway’s Change the World Without Taking Power. Interactivist Info Exchange (September 39 16, 2006), http://slash.autonomedia.org/node/5376 (accessed September 2008). 40 Negri, A., and G. Cocco 2006. Global: Biopoder y luchas en una América latina globalizada. Barcelona: Paidos. 41 Notes from Nowhere, ed. 2003. We are everywhere: The irresistible rise of global anti-capitalism. London: Verso. 32 32 42 Schulz, M. S. 1998. Collective action across borders: Opportunity structures, network capacities, and com- 43 municative praxis in the age of advanced globalization. Sociological Perspectives 41 (3):587–616. 44 Tronti, M. 1979/1964. Lenin in England. In Working class autonomy and the crisis: Italian Marxist texts of the 45 theory and practice of a class movement: 1964–1979, ed. Red Notes/CSE Books, 1–6. London: Red Notes/ 46 CSE Books. 33 33 47 Virno, P. 1996. Do you remember counterrevolution? In Radical thought in Italy: A potential politics, ed. P. Virno, 48 and M. Hardt, 241–59. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 49 ———. 2004. A grammar of the multitude. For an analysis of contemporary forms of life. New York: Semiotext(e), 50 http://www.generation-online.org/c/fcmultitude3.htm (accessed September 2008). 34 34 51 Zibechi, R. 2006. Latin America now: An interview with Raul Zibechi. Written by B. Dangl, translated by G. 52 Higgs, Upside Down World (August 16, 2006) http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/392/60/ 53 (accessed September 2008). 35 35 54 ———. 2008. El estado en el centro de la tormenta. La Jornada, (Friday, September 26, 2008) http:// 55 www.jornada.unam.mx/2008/09/26/index.php?section=opinion&article=020a1pol (accessed •• ••, ••). 36 36 JOBNAME: No Job Name PAGE: 15 SESS: 26 OUTPUT: Mon Oct 11 14:47:40 2010 SUM: 3706B611 /v2451/blackwell/journals/wusa_v13_i4/02wusa_305 AUTHOR QUERY FORM Dear Author, During the preparation of your manuscript for publication, the questions listed below have arisen. Please attend to these matters and return this form with your proof. Many thanks for your assistance. Query Query Remark References 1 AUTHOR: A short title running head was not supplied. 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W orking usa The Journal of Labor and Society AUTONOMISM AS A GLOBAL SOCIAL MOVEMENT wusa_305 451..464 Patrick Cuninghame Despite the consensus opinion that alterglobalism is in crisis and apparently without a clear objective or vehicle for promoting global change through the ineffective World Social Forum “model,” a signiﬁcant anticapitalist tendency continues to remain active. However, questions remain over autonomism’s ability to avoid ghettoizing itself and provide more than intense internal criticism of other more institutionalized and “vertical” currents. Autonomism originated in Europe in the seventies and eighties, speciﬁcally around the Autonomia and Autonomen radical social movements in Italy and Germany. Based on Italian workerist theories of worker self-management and autonomy from the mediating institutions of both capital and labor, the movement has since absorbed strong inﬂuences from radical feminism, the North American counter- culture, French poststructuralism, neoanarchism, Mexican neo-Zapatism, and the Argentinean worker- recuperated factory and self-management movements. In Empire (2000), Multitude (2004), and Commonwealth (2009), Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, intellectuals close to the movement who would none- theless probably reject the Gramscian notion of “organic intellectual,” have produced a polemical theory of globalization that frames a new global collective actor, “the multitude,” as a critique of the dominant historical privileged subjects of “the people” and “the proletariat.” They also claim that the multitude is the counterhegemonic antagonist of “Empire,” the emerging form of global, net- worked, deterritorialized sovereignty, with the military biopolitics of the U.S. and the economic biopower of the transnational corporations at its heart. Today autonomism can be seen as a global network of alliances between occupied social centers and media activists in Europe, Zapatistas and Piqueteros in Latin America, Black Blockers in North America, cyber hacktivists in Japan, and autonomous workers, unemployed youth, students, dispossessed peasants, and urban squatter movements in South Korea, South Africa, and India who have preferred to coordinate their anticapitalist global days of actions through the structure of People’s Global Action (PGA) rather than the World Social Forum (WSF), united in their disparity and diversity by the overriding principle and practice of autonomy from all forms of capitalist institution, authority, or power, but also along the lines of the autonomy of one section of the multitude from the rest in order to prevent their absorption by traditional socialist “workers’ centrality”, for example, women, immigrants, and youth. WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society · 1089-7011 · Volume 13 · December 2010 · pp. 451–464 © The Authors WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society © 2010 Immanuel Ness and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 452 WORKINGUSA: THE JOURNAL OF LABOR AND SOCIETY Through a critical examination of contemporary global social movement (GSM) theories and autonomist movement texts and discourses, the article will ascertain if autonomism can in fact be considered a GSM in itself or must it in reality be seen as a loose transnational network of shifting alliances too dispersed to be named as such and which in any case would itself reject such generalizing “catchall” criteria. Second, the article will brieﬂy outline autonomism’s histori- cal trajectory. Third, the questions of rivals, competitors, and the criticisms of autonomism within alterglobalism and global anticapitalism are dealt with. The possible options and future directions of autonomism before the present crisis of GSMs form the article’s ﬁnal section. GSM Theories and Autonomism Autonomism has made connections with similar movements around the world since the mid-1990s when the GSM sector began to accelerate its mobi- lizations against neoliberal globalism. However, the question remains as to whether it can in fact be considered a GSM—that is, an international network of movements globally coordinated around a common theme—or is it in reality a much looser and more conjunctural transnational network, too disparate and dispersed to be named as such, many of whom would reject both the term “autonomism” and the use of such generalizing “catchall” labels as “global social movement.” In order to answer this question we need to review brieﬂy the main theories about GSMs. According to Ghimire (2005, 5), there are ﬁve types of GSMs, organized around (1) debt relief; (2) trade; (3) Tobin tax; (4) anticorruption; and (5) fair trade: Of particular interest regarding these movements is their attempt to combine advocacy campaigns with concrete alternatives by way of action and practical application [. . .] Likewise, these movements have numerous overlapping agendas, thereby providing a collective identity. Yet, it is unclear if this conver- gence has actually led to a stable alliance and if essential claims are put forward in a coordinated manner [. . .] (G)iven that transnational activism associated with these movements as well as ‘alternative’ globalization as a whole seeks to move beyond conventional opposition strategies to proposing alternatives and to work with the existing system [. . .] bilateral bodies and international devel- opment institutions have gradually begun to pay attention to the reformist transnational movements, [but] this has not resulted in any signiﬁcant policy impulse. There are major ideological limitations of the system to readily accom- modate such demands. Writing from an institutional perspective, Ghimire (ibid.) also suggests that: [W]hile public inﬂuence of these movements has increased, taken as a whole; their actions remain highly spontaneous and informal, with a low level of institutionalization. At the same time, there are few signs of stable interactions between formal political bodies and social movements. While critical internal CUNINGHAME: GLOBAL AUTONOMISM 453 divisions persist between reformist and radical forces, these and the ‘anti- globalization’ movement as a whole have come under increased ﬁnancial pres- sure, and their social base remains highly unstable. Such claims stand in opposition to those of Negri and Cocco (2006, 16), who identify a new form of governance and interdependence between radical social movements and the weak state form in Latin America, which is at the root of the continental upsurge in conﬂict against neoliberalism: “[T]he innovation resides in the fact that the governments of Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela—now with that of Evo Morales in Bolivia—are not the representation of a ‘national’ project, but rather they are the expression of a multiple movement.”1 Frundt, cited in Ghimire (2005), applies three strands of movement theory to actual and potential cross-border movement strategies in the Americas. These are “the structural relevance of political opportunities, the mobilization of net- works as a resource, and the emphasis [given] by New Social Movement theory on framing and reﬂexive identity [. . .] each strand offers important insights, one clarifying limitations, a second demarcating and cultivating supporters, and a third motivating participation. Taken together, the strands comprise a dynamic basis for solidarity that enriches organizing strategies and gains measurable victories” (Frundt 2005, 19). Another aspect of GSM theory is posed by Schulz (1998, 601) in relation to the dynamics of the Zapatista uprising in 1994 in Chiapas, Mexico, a key event for anticapitalist GSMs in general and autonomism in particular: the insurgent indigenous peasants of Chiapas rose up in arms under conditions of relative economic and political deprivation at a particularly opportune moment after developing a project of insurgency and acquiring signiﬁcant organizational strength. Militarily, the Zapatistas would not have been able to hold out long against the overwhelming force of the federal army. But enormous media attention and massive national and international protest prevented the regime from military crackdowns. The Zapatistas’ ability to link personal, organizational, and informational networks has helped to gain crucial support. Using globalized means of communication, they were able to disseminate their messages around the world where they touched a chord in the discourse of an incipient global civil society linked by non-governmental organizations, fax machines, and the internet. Thus, one of the core social movement organizations of global autonomism, the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) in Chiapas, Mexico, has been a catalyst for GSM theory from the outset. Therefore I would argue that autonomism, despite some internal opposition to such claims and indeed to Zapatism itself, can be seen as a GSM of a new type, neither structured as a social category, such as the global women’s movement, nor formally coordinated from a ﬁxed center, such as the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Internationals, or even, arguably, the WSF. Avoiding ideological justiﬁcations and based more on practical consider- ations, a group of autonomist movements began to coalesce globally in the mid-1990s, particularly around the First and Second Gatherings for Humanity 454 WORKINGUSA: THE JOURNAL OF LABOR AND SOCIETY and Against Neoliberalism in Chiapas in 1996 and in the Spanish State in 1997, the latter leading to the formation of PGA, a GSM that predated the WSF by four years and that refused to have a central coordinating committee precisely to avoid the pitfalls of such centralization in the past. Autonomism as a Social Movement As a starting point, it must be stressed that autonomism’s “autonomy” is not the separation of the rural–urban working class (conceptualized as the Spinozian “multitude” rather than the Marxian proletariat by Negri and Hardt) from capitalism. Rather, it is class self-determination and self-management within capitalism, thus taking the form of a counterpower and “exodus”2, rather than entrenched, static, resistance to capitalism. In fact the word “autonomy” is derived from ancient Greek autonomos, meaning “someone who lives according to their own law.” So autonomy is not independence, rather it is the interdepen- dence of the various sectors of the multitude inside, against and beyond capital. Thus, independence is intended primarily for autarchic forms of life, completely separated from the community, while the autonomous deals with life within society but under self-government. Autonomism has developed from neo-Marxist sources, but here I will conﬁne myself to its trajectory during the twentieth century. The Wobblies (the anarcho-syndicalist International Workers of the World revolutionary trade union) organized immigrants, highly mobile and newly arrived in the U.S., to ﬁght robber-baron capitalism, state repression, and racist trade unionism which only organized white, Anglo-American qualiﬁed “craft workers.” Following the First World War, the German, Italian, and Hungarian council communisms criticized the authoritarian and antiworker nature of the Bolshevik “revolution as putsch” and organized revolutions based on workers’ councils, or Soviets, denouncing the state capitalist and despotic nature of the Soviet Union from its beginning and not just under Stalin. In the ﬁfties, the French and U.S. dissident libertarian/post-Trotskyite journals Socialisme ou Barbarie of Claude Lefort, Cor- nelius Castoriadis, Guy Debord, and Jean-Francois Lyotard and Correspondence of the Johnson–Forrest Tendency of CLR James and Raya Dunayevskaya (Trotsky’s former secretary) ﬁercely criticized the limits both of the vanguardist, democratic-centralist communist parties and of the Trotskyite 4th International, with their trend toward bureaucratic elitism as revolution. But above all, it was the politico-social laboratory that was the Italy of the sixties and seventies that most deeply marked autonomism as an ideology and ﬁnally as a GSM. The late 1950s witnessed the emergence of a new type of worker: internal migrants from southern Italy, of peasant origin, outside the socialist tradition of the skilled industrial workers of the north, who arrived as anti-communist strikebreakers but quickly became protagonists of revolt against neofascist and corporative trade unions. Above all, they had a cultural, almost ontological, rejection of the repetitive, serial, disciplined, and toxic labor imposed by the assembly line of the Fordist factory. CUNINGHAME: GLOBAL AUTONOMISM 455 Quaderni Rossi (QR/Red Notebooks), a neo-Marxist sociological journal, was founded in 1959 by trade unionists and intellectuals from the Communist and Socialist parties, concerned by the inability of their organizations to understand, much less organize these new outbreaks of worker rebellion. They based their research on a rereading of Marx and a reinterpretation of his “workers’ enquiry” methodology (1880), combined with the methodology of co-research from the sociology of action, received from the U.S. and France where important co-researched studies of car factory workers were published in the forties and ﬁfties. So was born operaismo or Italian workerism. Following the three-day long Revolt of Piazza Statuto in 1962 in Turin, when FIAT car workers attempted to burn down the ofﬁces of the most pro- management trade union confederation, QR divided on the question of con- verting their originally purely investigative interventions into political action. Thus were initiated political developments that led to the founding of the neo-Leninist extra-parliamentary group Potere Operaio (Workers’ Power) in 1969, which after 1973 was to dissolve itself into the broader experience of the new social movements of the seventies. However, the most important theoretical contribution was that of Mario Tronti in his 1964 essay “Lenin in England” (1979/1964), which called for a “Copernican inversion of perspective” within Marxism: instead of ﬁrst studying capital and then labor, as had always been its practice hitherto, Marxists had to depart from the exclusive capacity of “living labor” to produce surplus value, before researching the “dead labor” of capital. The latter depended, vampire- like, on living labor, while living labor historically sought to free itself from capital’s dependence, forcing it to continuously innovate new forms of exploi- tation and social command, leading to separate but related cycles of political and technical class composition–decomposition–recomposition within the overall class struggle. The theory of technical and political class composition is developing dra- matically: each new form of refusal and rebellion against work that the working class invented forced capital to repress it both politically and technically through the alteration of the relationship between machinery and living labor within the factory, even at the risk that this alteration could result in an economic crisis. Thus, the main problem for revolutionaries, according to Tronti, was not the apparent passivity, conformism, apathy, and subordination of workers to capital, as posed both by orthodox Marxism–Leninism and the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. Rather, it was the question of organizing the underlying antagonism of labor in an explicitly political form. Even so, for Tronti the political organizations most suited to this task remained the Communist Party and the historic labor movement, though renovated and cleansed of their reformist–social democrat tendencies. For other “operaists,” the historic labor movement had been insti- tutionalized and incorporated by capital through the Fordist–Keynesian pact of producers, and thus new antagonistic organizational forms were required. Initially in the sixties this was based on “Workers centrality” and the Fordist 456 WORKINGUSA: THE JOURNAL OF LABOR AND SOCIETY “mass worker.” Successively in the 1970s, a decentralized and horizontal move- ment emerged—Autonomia—whose social composition was based on what Negri (1979) called the post-Fordist “socialized worker.” According to Hardt and Negri’s (2000) highly controversial theory of “Empire,” the real opponent of “Empire” is the “Multitude,” a collective subject that does not substitute the “proletariat” or the “people” but rather has absorbed them within its deterritorialized plurality that is disconnected politically from national territories. An example of this phenomenon would be the massive waves of migration from the global South to the North that coincide with and were catalyzed by the post-Fordist global division of labor after about 1980 and represent the most signiﬁcant change in global class composition since 1945. But the new class composition that Empire exists to control and exploit is the so-called “immaterial worker.” It is immaterial because it produces intangible products in the form of symbols, knowledge, information, and affects. Within the ﬁeld of immaterial labor, affective labor is the most valuable form, though usually low paid and often unpaid. Affective labor is a form of “biopower”; a concept innovated by Foucault (1998). However, many autono- mist thinkers disagree with the concepts of Empire, Multitude, bio power, and bio politics, considered much closer to the French poststructuralism of Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault than to Italian workerism. The Italian philosopher Paolo Virno (2004), a former activist in Autonomia in the seventies and political prisoner in the eighties, has criticized the limits of the concept of Empire, which other autonomist thinkers have seen as premature and too tied to the “new economy” and sustainable capitalism of Clintonism, swept aside by the return of the “neocons” and the old, territorialized “petrolarchy.” Nor is the multitude necessarily a phenomenon antagonistic to capitalism, according to the same author. He has a more ambiguous view of the currently prevailing values and attitudes of hyperindividualism, cynicism, opportunism, and fear (Virno 1996). Another autonomist theorist, Franco Berardi, a former free radio activist in the 1970s and cyber activist since the 1990s, is much more pessimistic than Negri about the prospects for revolutionary change. In his book on the New Economy and the “cognitariat,” Berardi (2001) identiﬁes a para- doxical transition from the refusal of Fordist work in the 1970s to the love of post-Fordist telematic work in the twenty-ﬁrst century, where work has become the most stimulating part of many people’s lives, as long as they are not neoslave, criminalized immigrants. He has also recently described the last thirty years of media activism as a complete failure.3 State monopolies over information and the use of censorship have been overturned thanks to autonomist media activism, but only to allow the corporate media conglomerates of Berlusconi and Murdoch to take advantage of the liberated media space. However, what uniﬁes autonomist thought, beyond its criticism of orthodox Marxism and of course of neoliberal capitalism, is the perception that Marxist historical concepts and categories are undergoing radical transition. Faced with this situation of extreme uncertainty and unpredictability, the best strategy seems to be the Zapatista one of “walking by asking”, avoiding dogmatism and CUNINGHAME: GLOBAL AUTONOMISM 457 rigid thinking though a process of continual reﬂexivity in order to discover possible paths of exodus from capitalism (Cuninghame 2007). Rivals, Competitors, and Criticisms within Alterglobalism and Anticapitalism The re-emergence of autonomism—a movement which had suffered severe criminalization and repression in Italy after 1978—since the late 1980s and particularly through the birth of the global anticapitalist movement following the Battle of Seattle in 1999 has led to a series of critiques from its political rivals within alterglobalism. The main targets have been Hardt and Negri’s books on Empire and Multitude, but there has also been political and not just theoretical criticism of autonomist strategy. The attacks have come from four directions: from intellectuals connected to Trotskyite groups such as the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the French League Communiste Révolutionnaire; from Latin American left-nationalism, outraged by Hardt and Negri’s assertion that the nation-state and therefore populist nationalism have been rendered obsolete by the postnational capitalism of Empire; from within autonomism and from forms of neo-Marxism closely related to it such as “Open Marxism,” in particular from John Holloway; and ﬁnally from the more radical–liberal stream of alterglobalism, as represented by the environmental journalist George Monbiot of The Guardian, who accuse autonomism of playing politics with climate change and of anarchist utopianism. Alex Callinicos (2001), the guru of the SWP, has been particularly active in his denunciations of autonomism and of the theories of Empire and Multitude: One of the main currents in the anti-capitalist movement is autonomism. This has two main political characteristics: (1) the rejection of the Leninist concep- tion of organisation; and (2) the adoption of substitutionist forms of action in which a politically enlightened elite acts on behalf of the masses. Autonomism is in fact a diverse political formation. The most notorious version is repre- sented by the anarchist Black Bloc, whose pursuit of violent confrontation with the state played into the police’s hands at Genoa. [. . .] More attractive is the Italian autonomist coalition Ya Basta!, which combines an uncompromising rejection of the political establishment—including the parties of the reformist left—with, on the one hand, the adoption of imaginative forms of non-violent direct action and, on the other, contesting municipal elections, sometimes successfully. Ya Basta!, which itself acts as an umbrella for different views and emphases, overlaps with the Tute Bianche, known after the white overalls they used to wear on demonstrations, most famously at the Prague S26 protests in September 2000. [. . .] Autonomism, [. . .] is a living political force. [. . .] But the idea of exemplary action on behalf of the masses remains inﬂuential, whether in the Black Block’s cult of street violence or the Tute Bianche’s more peaceful tactics. These actions function as a substitute for mass mobilisation. In analyses such as Hardt and Negri’s the working class—reshaped in the transformations of the past few years but still very much a real force—is either dissolved into the 458 WORKINGUSA: THE JOURNAL OF LABOR AND SOCIETY amorphous multitude or denounced as a privileged labour aristocracy. The activists act in the name of one and try to bypass or confront the other. [. . .] Toni Negri is still the key theorist of autonomism [. . .] the inﬂuence of his ideas is an obstacle to the development of a successful movement against the global capitalism whose structures he seeks to plot in Empire. Callinicos (2002) also blames the hostility of the anticapitalist movement toward all political parties, including his own, on autonomism: A signiﬁcant section of the anti-capitalist movement has a more or less hostile attitude towards political parties. This reﬂects a variety of factors: for example, the appalling record of the ‘ofﬁcial left’ (social democrats, Communists, and Greens) in ofﬁce, negative experiences with far left organizations, and the inﬂuence of autonomism. The result is a movementism that, for example, has led to the formal exclusion of political parties from the World Social Forum and attempts to extend this ban to the European Social Forum. However, the criticisms by Callinicos and the SWP, particularly the accusations of elitism, have since rebounded against that party following the ﬁasco of the 2004 European Social Forum (ESF), when the SWP colluded with the Labour Party to exclude not just autonomists but all civil society and social movement organizations from participating in the planning and administration of the event, so leading to the organization of an alternative London ESF and the subsequent decline of the ESF due to the damage inﬂicted on its credibility as an open, inclusive, plural, transparent, and directly democratic forum. Admittedly, this has been part of a general, global decline in the alterglobalist movement since its highpoint of the February 15, 2003 mass mobilizations against the imminent U.S. invasion of Iraq. Latin American orthodox Marxist apologists for left nationalism, such as Almeyra and Thibaut (2006) and Boron (2005), have accused Hardt and Negri of being unwitting “postmodernist” supporters of neoliberalism and even of U.S. neoimperialism. Certainly, left nationalism has enjoyed a resurgence in Latin America with the election of the radical Chavez and Evo Morales gov- ernments in Venezuela and Bolivia, as well as several other center-left and “progressive neoliberal” governments in South America. However, as Raul Dangl (2006) emphasizes, these governments owe their popularity—and in the case of both Chavez and Morales, their political survival—to basically autono- mous (not autonomist) social movements, who could potentially withdraw such support if Chavez and Morales fail to deliver on their promises to roll back neoliberalism. Furthermore, Zibechi (2008) questions the ability of particularly Morales, given the state of virtual civil war in Bolivia, or of the increasingly embattled Chavez to implement such change by means of state power: Those like us who distrust the state as a tool with which to build a new world, can learn from these ongoing crises. [. . .] Experience tells us that movements can take two paths to change the world: to become state bureaucracies or remain CUNINGHAME: GLOBAL AUTONOMISM 459 as movements. The ﬁrst is a path trodden for over a century, the other offers no guarantees, but you can be assured, at least, that it is the surest path so that the future does not slip away from our hands.”4 The two main autonomist movements in Latin America, the Zapatistas in Mexico and a section of the piqueteros and self-managed recuperated factories in Argentina, have remained aloof from the Chavez and Morales governments, rejecting anticapitalist strategies based on the taking of power and change from above. Yet another type of criticism of Negri and Hardt’s theories of Empire and Multitude has come from an unexpected quarter, from within autonomism itself, in the shape of the “open Marxist,” John Holloway, who accuses them of promoting divisive and self-defeating identity politics, of “being” rather than “doing,” through the idea of Multitude in particular, based on Deleuze’s theory of deterritorialization and the plurality of singularities. Holloway (2002b) attacks Hardt and Negri by arguing that both “empire” and “imperialism” are invalid concepts when seeking to analyze contemporary global capitalism: “What is objectionable in Hardt and Negri’s argument that imperialism has been replaced by empire is the assumption that the concept of imperialism used to be valid—but then this reﬂects the ambiguous relation to Lenin that has always been present in Negri’s writings and indeed in much autonomist writing [. . .].” In reply and as part of an often acerbic debate between Negri and Holloway and within autonomism itself over the validity of the theories of Empire and Multitude and their place within global anticapitalist struggle, Negri (2006) outlines the limits of Holloway’s (2002a) “scream” of negative dialectics in his book Change the World Without Taking Power: Holloway’s line represents the best of the opposition to attempts by a certain institutional Latin American left to ﬂatten within the categories of nation and development the relation between biopower and biopolitical potential. Yet, it remains limited by its negative dialectical framework. Negativity is not just a mere “scream;” it is rather, desire, a multitudinary necessity to continuously afﬁrm joy, peace, and communism. Hardt and Negri have defended their core concepts in Multitude (2004) and other writings and interviews from these and other critiques, notably by Call- inicos, whose views dovetails with those of Latin American left nationalists and orthodox Marxists. However, they have adapted their original stance, which was almost exultant at the prospect of the death of the nation-state and its despotic sovereignty in Empire (2000), particularly in the light of the process of reterri- torialization of Empire under the U.S. unilateralist policy of “global war against terrorism” since 9/11. They now see Empire as a continuum of imperialism, its ultimate stage, rather than a complete rupture. The nation-state is certainly not dead, and in the case of the advanced capitalist countries, has reinforced its Hobbesian repressive role as the global “society of control,” replacing Foucault’s “society of discipline,” while extracting itself from its social and redistributive functions by transferring them to the 460 WORKINGUSA: THE JOURNAL OF LABOR AND SOCIETY market-led nongovernmental organization sector. However, for the great major- ity of nation-states, real independence and self-determination are now a mirage, and they are visibly losing control over their national economies—the very essence of state power—to the supranational organisms and transnational cor- porations that form the backbone of Empire. Any attempt to break with the global economic status quo can be punished with capital ﬂight, a fall in stock exchange values, currency devaluation, and the extraction of foreign investment in a matter of hours thanks to the Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) revolution. Thus, their thesis stands that those political actors who wish to radically alter society and economy will need to struggle simultaneously at both local and global levels, seeking to build new nodes in the network of the multitude, while struggling for state power through insurrectionism or elector- alism seems doomed to failure. The neo-Zapatistas of the EZLN and its base communities in Chiapas, also nominally left nationalists, would seem to agree. They sent no delegates to Evo Morales’ presidential inauguration in Bolivia in 2005 on the grounds that they are opposed to all top-down, state-controlled change, including by the left. Instead, they have promoted change from “below and to the left” through the Other Campaign at the Mexican national level and the Zezta International globally, both organized following the Sixth Declaration in 2005. In Chiapas, they have continued to consolidate the Juntas de Buen Gobierno ( JBG, Good Government Councils) and Caracoles (core Zapatista communities that actively interface with the outside world) since their establishment in 2003, replacing the Aguascalientes meeting places and Autonomous Municipalities established fol- lowing the revolt in 1994. These local initiatives are based on the neo-Zapatista principles of “govern- ing by obeying” (mandando obedeciendo) and “everything for everyone, nothing for us” (todo para todos, para nosostros nada), in stark contrast to the corruption, impunity, and authoritarianism that continues to dominate ofﬁcial Mexican political culture, despite the only formal “transition to democracy” in 2000. As a result, the JBG, based on annual elections and revocable delegation, have managed, with the support of the alterglobal movement, to set up schools, hospitals, and even a university without any government support and despite continuing harassment by paramilitary and state forces, now under the control of the center-left PRD (Partido de la Revolucion Democratica/Party of the Demo- cratic Revolution) governor of Chiapas. The heart of this social revolution from below has been the self- transformation of indigenous women in the Zapatista communities, who have passed from a passive obedience to men still evident in the 1990s to active, militant, autonomy, self-determination, and participation in every aspect of economic, social, cultural, and political life. However, the paradox remains that while neo-Zapatism advances at the local and global level, it has been unable to break through the state’s military, political, and economic cordon sanitaire and consolidate in other parts of Mexico, despite the best efforts of the Other Campaign and the growing presence of autonomous social movements, CUNINGHAME: GLOBAL AUTONOMISM 461 particularly the Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca) (Cuninghame 2007). This is due mainly to the capturing of the social movement sector by the populist, nationalist, anti-neoliberal cam- paigning of Lopez Obrador, the defeated PRD presidential candidate in 2006, who has convincingly claimed that the 2006 elections were fraudulent and who has conducted a so far successful campaign to block the privatization of PEMEX, the state-owned oil company and jewel of the Mexican economy, through his directly controlled proxy-social movement, the Convencion Nacional Democratica (National Democratic Convention). He has been actively supported by most of the verticalist, left nationalist, extra-parliamentary left, despite the fact that neither he nor the deeply divided PRD are in fact anti-neoliberal since they continue to support the North Ameri- can Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Now, in the de facto state of emergency existing in Mexico due to the failed “war against drugs” of President Calderon, which has already claimed over 28,000 lives since 2006 (Reuters 2010), and is causing political destabilization. With increased military activity in Chiapas, the neo-Zapatista movement faces the imminent prospect of war and repression, unless the alterglobalist movement can mobilize global public opinion to prevent it, as stated by the organizations that participated in the July 2008 International Caravan in Solidarity with the Zapatista Communities in Chiapas: The Mexican Army’s decision to invade La Garrucha, Rancho Alegre (known as Chapuyil), Hermenegildo Galeana and San Alejandro [in June 2008] represents more than the violation of the Dialogue, Conciliation and Peace in Chiapas Law (1995), the Mexican Constitution (Article 29), the American Human Rights Declaration (Articles 21 and 29b) and the International Civil and Political Rights Convention (Articles 14 and 27). It also represents a change in the strategy against the Zapatistas. In view of this, we are extremely concerned for the physical and physiological integrity of our indigenous Zapatista brothers and sisters. The Mexican Government is attacking the right of indigenous peoples to freely organize by attempting to use the outrageous accusation that the Zapatistas cultivate marijuana. As the Mexican State looks for mechanisms to legitimise open warfare, it is clear that its real objective is the destruction of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN). While the multitude is a collective actor in formation, the product of the end of the certainties of the clearly deﬁned social classes, and antagonists of the modern era, working class and peasant organizations have been instrumental in the center-left gaining power in various Latin American countries since 2000. However, they have achieved this almost always in alliance with the social movement sector, and by acting as social movements themselves in the cases of the Brazilian Workers Party (PT) in Brazil, the Movimiento al Socialismo in Bolivia, and of Chavez’ popular support base in Venezuela (Negri and Cocco 2006). Negri’s opinion of Chavez has changed too: once considered suspect for his statism and militarist origins, he is now reconsidered in the light of his 462 WORKINGUSA: THE JOURNAL OF LABOR AND SOCIETY dependence on the popular movements of the barrios (the product of the Caracazo, the 1989 social revolt in Caracas), after the abortive coup attempt in 2002 by the oligarchy and sections of the army, under the probable orchestration of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Thus, a multitude, a monster with many heads where no one social movement, party, or political force seems to dominate, does seem to be the basis of both the more radical and the progressive governments in Latin America coming to and staying in power, despite their ambiguous relationship with anti-capitalist social movements. A fourth type of criticism has come from the more pragmatic and less ideological sections of alterglobalism, as represented by George Monbiot (2008), The Guardian reporter, who accused the autonomist organizers of the 2008 Climate Change Camp in Kent, southern England of playing utopian politics with the climate change issue: Ewa [Jasiewicz] rightly celebrates the leaderless, autonomous model of organ- ising that has made this movement so effective. The two climate camps I have attended—this year and last—were among the most inspiring events I’ve ever witnessed. I am awed by the people who organised them, who managed to create, under extraordinary pressure, safe, functioning, delightful spaces in which we could debate the issues and plan the actions which thrust Heathrow and Kingsnorth into the public eye. [. . .] But in seeking to extrapolate from this experience to a wider social plan, she makes two grave errors. The ﬁrst is to confuse ends and means. She claims to want to stop global warming, but she makes that task 100 times harder by rejecting all state and corporate solutions. It seems to me that what she really wants to do is to create an anarchist utopia, and use climate change as an excuse to engineer it. Monbiot returns to the old dividing line of whether or not radical social movements should at some point agree to work with the state to resolve a problem of impending urgency. The real dividing line is the issue of instrumental politics: do “the ends justify the means”? However, as Adamovsky (2007) points out, one of the most important differences between the new anticapitalism—of which autonomism is an integral part—and the old anticapitalism of traditional socialism has been the rejection of instrumentality and the insistence that the means and ends must both be justiﬁable. Conclusion Options and Future Directions It is clear that the global anticapitalist justice movement is in difﬁculties after seven years of relative decline, following the upsurge between Seattle 1999, Genoa 2001, and ending with the February 15th 2003 Global Day of Action against the War in Iraq. The growing dissatisfaction over the organization of the 2008 polyvalent WSF is a case in point, as is the fact that global autonomism has CUNINGHAME: GLOBAL AUTONOMISM 463 virtually withdrawn from the WSF, given the insistence of a controlling clique (Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens [ATTAC] [defunct in 2007], Le Monde Internacional [the French Socialist Party], and the PT) to centralize decision making. Autonomism has been affected by this present phase of demobilization and return to private life, although it still retains a considerable ability to mobilize and organize, as shown by this year’s Climate Change Camps. A further problem has been the increase in the repression of autonomist movements around the world, particularly of the Zapatistas in Mexico, who expect to be attacked by the Mexican Army as part of its “war against drugs” at any moment. This has obviously led to some disarticulation of autonomism as a GSM, although it responded by organizing an International Caravan to Chiapas in July (2008). Furthermore, the criticisms of Berardi about the failure of media activism imply a rethinking of media activism and its effectiveness under its present form, essentially that of Indymedia. The most important question is to avoid a return to the ghetto of the 1980s and early 1990s. Patrick Cuninghame is a sociologist at the Universidad Autonoma Metro- politan in Mexico City. He is presently on the editorial committee of “Argumentos” and “Societies without Borders.” He has published articles on Autonomist Marxism, the Sociology of Work, and social movements. His next publication in 2011 will be in the Ours to Master and Own: Workers Councils: from the Commune to the Present collection. Address Correspondence to Patrick Cun- inghame, Area of Work Studies, Department of Social Relations, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco, Mexico City. Telephone: +52-55- 54837000 ext. 3110. E-mail: pcuninghame@hotmail.com. Notes 1. Author’s translation. 2. “By Exodus we want to indicate the form of struggle that is based not in direct opposition but in a kind of struggle by subtraction-a refusal of power, a refusal of obedience. Not only a refusal of work and a refusal of authority, but also emigration and movement of all sorts that refuses the obstacles that block movements” (Hardt and Negri 2000b). 3. Interview with the author, Mexico City, May 23, 2008. 4. Author’s translation. References Adamovsky, E. 2007. Autonomous politics and its problems. 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