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Title: On Workers Autonomy Author: Miguel AmorĂłs Date: 2005 Language: en Topics: Spain, 1970s, assemblies, Autonomous Marxism, wildcat strike Source: Retrieved on 8th May 2021 from https://libcom.org/library/workers-autonomy-miguel-amoros Notes: Transcript of two presentations delivered on January 23 and February 10, 2005 in Barcelona. Spanish text available online at: http://www.alasbarricadas.org/noticias/?q=node/3938
The word “autonomy” has been used in connection with the cause of
proletarian emancipation for many years. In The Communist Manifesto Marx
defined the workers movement as “the autonomous [independent] movement
of the immense majority in the interest of the immense majority”. Later,
Proudhon, reflecting on the experiences of 1848, asserted in On the
Political Capacity of the Working Classes (1865) that for any class to
act in a specific manner it would have to fulfill three requirements for
autonomy: it should be conscious of itself, that as a consequence of
this consciousness it should affirm “its idea”, that is, that it should
be aware of “the law of its existence” and that it should know how “to
express it in words and to explain it by means of reason”, and that it
should draw practical conclusions from this idea. Both Marx and Proudhon
were witnesses to the influence of the radical bourgeoisie on the ranks
of the workers and tried to get the proletariat to politically separate
itself from this influence. In 1890, in London, there was a group of
German anarchist exiles whose journal was called Autonomy, which
emphasized individual liberty and the independence of political groups.
In 1920 the Marxist Karl Korsch designated “industrial autonomy” as a
higher form of socialization which he would later discover in the
libertarian collectives of 1936. The theoretician of workers councils,
Pannekoek, spoke instead of “self-activity” (like Marx), referring to
the independent action of the workers, their self-government, which is
the same as workers autonomy. Today, the use of the words “autonomy” or
“autonomous” in all kinds of situations and with the most diverse
intentions is more a factor of confusion than of clarification. They can
be found issuing from the mouth of a member of the civil society
movement or a nationalist, pronounced by a college student follower of
Toni Negri or spoken by a squatter…. The words therefore define
different realities and respond to distinct concepts. The Autonomous
Anticapitalist Commandos took that name in order to indicate their
non-hierarchical character and to distance themselves from the ETA. The
gelatinous Castoriadis (in conformance the dictionary definition of the
word) called the responsible citizen of a society capable of providing
itself with its own laws “autonomous”, a kind of bourgeois with angel’s
wings, but in other milieus one calls oneself “autonomous” if one does
not want to define oneself as an anarchist, in order to avoid the
reductionism implied by that term, and the follower of an Italian
fashion trend which is manifested in various and quite dissimilar
versions, the worst of them being the one invented by professor Negri in
1977 when he was a creative Leninist, is also an “autonomist”…. Workers
autonomy possesses an unequivocal meaning which was revealed during a
particular period of real history: as such, it appeared on the peninsula
at the beginning of the seventies as the fundamental conclusion of the
class struggle of the previous decade.
It was not by chance that when the workers began to radicalize their
movement they demanded “autonomy”, that is, their independence from
external representatives, whether from the vertical bureaucracy of the
state, the opposition parties or the clandestine trade union groups. For
them this meant acting in common, directly managing their own affairs
with their own rules, making their own decisions and defining their
strategy and their tactics in the struggle: in short, constituting
themselves as a revolutionary class. The modern workers movement, i.e.,
the one which appeared after the civil war, arose during the sixties,
once the movement that was represented by the CNT and the UGT had run
its course. Most of the workers who comprised it were from a peasant
background, having immigrated to the cities where they resided in the
outskirts of the urban areas in “cheap housing” in apartment blocks and
shacks. After 1958, when Franco’s first Development Plan was
implemented, industry and services underwent a strong burst of growth
which was translated into a generalized demand for labor. The ensuing
depopulation of the countryside and the demise of traditional
agriculture were accompanied by the birth of a new type of worker in the
urban shantytowns. The conditions of the exploitation of the working
population of that era—low wages, long hours, sub-standard housing, long
commutes, deficient infrastructure, illiteracy, servile
habits—transformed these workers into an abandoned and marginal class
which nonetheless knew how to start all over and defend its dignity.
Their protest was filtered through the churches and the interstices of
the Vertical Trade Union, which were soon both revealed to be stifling
dead ends. In Madrid, Vizcaya, Asturias, Barcelona and other cities, the
workers, together with their representatives elected within the
framework of the law of the Francoist factory committees, began to meet
in assemblies to address labor issues, establishing an informal network
of contacts which constituted the basic framework for the original
“Workers Commissions”. These commissions operated within the existing
legal framework although, given the limitations of the latter, often
exceeded these bounds or ignored them altogether when necessary. The
informal structure of the Workers Commissions, their self-established
reformist limitations and their Catholic-Vertical cover were at first
effective during an intensively repressive era; they launched important
strikes that aroused a new class consciousness under the shadow of the
Law of Collective Agreements. But as class consciousness became more
pronounced, the workers struggle was not understood simply as a fight
against the boss, but as a fight against capital and the state in the
form of Franco’s dictatorship. The final goal of the struggle was
nothing less than “socialism”, or the appropriation of the means of
production by the workers themselves. After May ’68, the word used was
“self-management”. The Workers Commissions had to assume this goal and
radicalize their methods by opening their doors to all the workers. The
Franco regime soon became aware of the danger and suppressed the Workers
Commissions; the militant workers parties—the PCE and the FLP—soon
noticed their usefulness as political instruments and recuperated them.
The only possibility for trade unionism was that offered by the regime,
which was why the PCE and its Catholic allies took advantage of the
opportunity by constructing one trade union within the other, official
one. The increasing influence of the PCE after 1968 bolstered the
reformist trends in the Commissions and helped prevent their
radicalization. The consequences would have been grave had the PCE’s
implantation been more deeply rooted: on the one hand, the workers
representation was separated from the assemblies and escaped the control
of the rank and file. Action became the exclusive prerogative of the
supposed leaders. Furthermore, the workers movement was circumscribed by
a legalist practice, avoiding any resort to strikes whenever possible,
and the strike was only used as a demonstration of the leader’s power.
The workers struggle lost its recently acquired anti-capitalist
character. Finally, the struggle was depoliticized as the communists
assumed control of the leadership of the movement. The political goals
were changed from those of “socialism” to those of bourgeois democracy.
The script was clear: the “Workers Commissions” had become interlocutors
for the bosses in labor negotiations, totally bypassing the workers.
This supposed trade union dialogue was nothing but the reflection of the
institutional political dialogue pursued by the PCE. Stalinist reformism
did not emerge victorious, but provoked a split in the workers movement
by dragging the most moderate and supine fraction of the workers into
bourgeoisification; however, class consciousness had developed
sufficiently to allow the most advanced sectors of the working class to
advocate more suitable tactics, first within and then outside of the
Commissions, triggering the formation of more combative rank and file
organizations known, depending on their location, as “circles”,
“commission platforms”, “workers committees” or “autonomous workers
groups”. For the first time, the word “autonomous” was used in the
Barcelona area to emphasize the independence of a group which supported
direct democracy against the parties and any organization alien to the
class. Furthermore, since a legal loophole permitted the formation of
neighborhood associations, the struggle spread to the residential
districts and penetrated the arena of everyday life. In this case as
well, in the shantytowns and poorer neighborhoods, the question was
posed concerning whether to remain within the institutional framework of
the existing groups or to organize neighborhood committees and to treat
the neighborhood assembly as a representative institution.
The Franco regime’s resistance to even the slightest reformist proposal
made the strikes that followed the 1969 construction workers strike in
Granada, as savage and as hard-fought as they always were at that time,
impossible to conduct under the aegis of legality that the Stalinists
wanted to preserve. The anti-capitalist workers understood that, instead
of waiting at the doors of the CNS to find out the results of the
measures taken by their legal representatives, what had to be done was
to convene assemblies in the factories themselves or their neighborhoods
and elect their delegates there, delegates that were not to be
permanent, but revocable at any time. If only in order to resist
repression a delegate had to be elected for the period between
assemblies, and a strike committee’s mandate was valid for as long as
the strike lasted. The assembly was sovereign because it represented all
the workers. The old tactic of forcing the boss to negotiate with
“illegal” assembly delegates, by spreading the struggle to other
branches of industry or by transforming the strike into a general strike
by means of “pickets”, that is, by “direct action”, found supporters
every time. Along with solidarity, class consciousness made great
progress, while demonstrations ever more scandalously confirmed this
advance. The workers had lost their fear of repression and confronted it
in the streets. Each demonstration was not only a protest against the
bosses, but, by constituting a breach of public order, was also a
challenge to the political authority of the state. If the proletariat
wanted to move forward it had to separate itself from all those who
spoke in its name—who were legion due to the proliferation of groups and
parties to the left of the PCE—and who attempted to lead it. The
proletariat had to “self-organize”, or “conquer its autonomy”, as was
said in May 1968. People then began to speak of “proletarian autonomy”,
of “autonomous struggles”, meaning struggles which took place on the
margins of the parties, and of “autonomous groups”, groups of
revolutionary workers carrying out autonomous practical activities
within the working class with the clear objective of contributing to the
class’s “becoming conscious”. Even taking their historical and
ideological differences into account, the autonomous groups could only
be just like the “affinity” groups of the old pre-1937 FAI. The early
seventies saw the conclusion of the industrialization process undertaken
by the Francoist technocrats, with the undesired result of the
crystallization of a new working class which was increasingly more
convinced of its historic possibilities and which was ready to fight.
The fear of the proletariat compelled the Franco regime to implement a
perpetual authoritarianism, against which even the new bourgeois and
religious values conspired. After the death of the dictator, the
repression was relaxed just enough to allow the outbreak of an
unstoppable strike wave all over the country. Stalinist trade union
reformism was completely swamped. The constant assemblies held to
resolve the real problems of the workers on the job, in their
neighborhoods and even in their homes, did not face a bureaucratic
apparatus that could restrain them. The links between the Commissions
and communist party leaders were only tolerated when they did not cause
an inconvenience, as the latter were obliged to convene assemblies if
they wanted to exercise even the least control over the movement. The
working class masses began to become aware of their role as the
principle subject in the unfolding events and rejected a political-trade
unionist regulatory approach to the problems of their real lives. In
1976 the ideas of self-organization, generalized self-management and
social revolution could easily express the immediate desires of the
masses. The road was still open. The social dynamic of the assemblies
encouraged the workers to take their affairs into their own hands,
beginning with their own autonomy. This autonomous mode of action, which
led the masses to dare to venture onto what had previously been
territory that was off-limits, was sure to bring about real panic in the
ruling class, which machine-gunned the workers in Vitoria, liquidated
the conservatives’ version of reform of Francoism, dissolved the
Vertical Trade Union along with the Commissions within it and legalized
the parties and trade unions. The Moncloa Pact signed by all the parties
and trade unions was a pact against the assemblies. We shall not pause
here to narrate the subsequent vicissitudes of the assembly movement, or
to count the number of fallen workers; it suffices to say that the
movement was defeated in 1978 after three years of arduous struggles.
The Labor Law promulgated by the new “democratic” regime in 1980
constituted a legal condemnation of the assemblies. The trade union
elections provided a contingent of professional representatives who,
with the assistance of the accommodationist assemblyists, hijacked the
leadership of the struggles. This does not mean that the assemblies
disappeared; what actually disappeared was their independence and their
autonomy, and this deviation was followed by an irreversible degradation
of class consciousness which not even the resistance to the economic
restructuring of the eighties could halt.
The theory that was best able to serve workers autonomy was not
anarcho-syndicalism, but councilist theory, of the kind formulated by
the Dutch and German revolutionary communists who drew upon the Russian
and German experiences. The structure of the “unitary trade unions”
corresponded to a long-superseded stage of Spanish capitalism in which
small businesses were predominant and a peasant majority subsisted on
the margins. Spanish capitalism was then expanding and the trade union
was an eminently defensive proletarian institution. Those who are
acquainted with pre-civil war history are aware of the problems which
were caused by the trade union mentality when the workers had to defend
themselves from the bosses’ terrorism between 1920 and 1924, or when
they had to resist the state corporative institutions that the Primo de
Rivera dictatorship sought to impose, or during the years 1931–1933 when
the workers tried to go on the offensive by means of insurrections.
Organizing trade unions in 1976, even “unitary” trade unions, in a
highly developed capitalism that was undergoing a crisis, meant
integrating the workers into a shrinking labor market and carrying on
with the mission of the Workers Commissions of the Franco regime.
Syndicalism, even if it claims to be revolutionary, has no choice but to
carry out defensive actions within capitalism. “Direct action” and
“direct democracy” were no longer possible in the shadow of the trade
unions. Modern conditions of struggle required another form of
organization adapted to the new times because, when faced with a
paralyzed capitalist offensive, the proletariat must go on the
offensive. The assemblies, pickets and strike committees were the
appropriate unitary institutions. What they needed in order to become
Workers Councils was more widespread and more consistent coordination
and the consciousness of what they were doing. It could have happened at
any moment: in Vitoria, Elche, Gavà …but it was not enough. To what
extent, then, did councilist theory, as the most realistic expression of
the workers movement, assist the “class called to action” to become
conscious of the nature of its project by indicating the way forward?
Very little. The theory of the councils had many more unconscious
practitioners than actual supporters. The assemblies and representative
committees were spontaneous organs of the struggle which were not yet
fully conscious of their simultaneous role as effective organs of
workers power. As the strikes spread, the functions of the assemblies
were enlarged and embraced questions that did not involve the workplace.
The power of the assemblies affected all the institutions of Capital and
the State, including the parties and the trade unions, which worked
together to neutralize it. It seems that the only ones who were not
aware of this power were the workers themselves. The slogan, “All power
to the assemblies”, meant no power to the parties, the trade unions and
the State, or else it was meaningless. By not seriously examining the
problems to which its own power gave rise the workers offensive never
quite gelled. It was easier for the workers to renounce their primordial
antipathy to trade unionism and to avail themselves of those customary
intermediaries between Capital and Labor, the trade unions. In the
absence of any revolutionary perspectives the assemblies became useless
and boring and the Workers Councils unviable. The Council system can
only function as a form of struggle of a revolutionary working class,
and in 1978 that class turned its back on a second revolution.
An enormous strategic error that undoubtedly contributed to the defeat
was the decision by the majority of the autonomous activists in the
factories and neighborhoods to participate in the reconstruction of the
CNT with the naĂŻve expectation that they would thereby create a rallying
point for all antiauthoritarians. A mountain of collective coordination
evaporated. The experiment quickly failed but the price paid in
demobilization was high. The vulgar workerism that was manifested in the
“class autonomy” tendency also contributed to the defeat, with its
support for collaboration with the trade unions and submerging the
assemblies in the trade union morass of separate partial reforms and the
self-management of misery (transforming bankrupt factories into
cooperatives, running “autonomous” electoral candidates, supporting
mixed trade union-assembly representation, using conciliatory language,
etc.). It is characteristic of those times that the revolutionaries were
correct in saying that the greatest enemies of the proletariat posed as
supporters of the assemblies in order to more easily sabotage them. This
was true of dozens of groupuscules and “movements”. “Italian-style”
autonomy had little influence, however, since its importation as a
Leninoid ideology took place at the end of the period of the assemblies
and its intoxicating effects took hold post festum. In reality, what was
imported from Italy were not the practices of the 1977 movement in
various Italian cities which was baptized as “Autonomia Operaia”, but
the most backward and spectacular aspect of that “autonomy”, which
corresponded to the decomposition of Milanese Bolshevism—Potere
Operaio—and especially the literary masturbations of those whom the
press celebrated as its leaders, i.e., Negri, Piperno, Scalzone…. In
short, very few groups were consistently engaged in the active defense
of workers autonomy, besides the Workers for Proletarian Autonomy
(libertarian councilists), a few factory collectives (e.g., those at
Fasa-Renault, Roca Radiators, Barcelona longshoremen….) and the
Autonomous Groups. We shall pause now to examine the latter in more
detail.
The “1,000” organization, or MIL (Movimiento Ibérico de Liberación), a
pioneer in so many things, gave itself the name of “Autonomous Combat
Groups” (GAC) in 1972. The armed struggle made its debut with the
purpose of helping the working class, not replacing it. They took the
name “autonomous” from the groups that were engaged in 1974 to support
and win the release of the MIL prisoners—which the police called the
OLLA—and the groups that followed in their footsteps in 1976, which,
after a debate in the Segovia prison, adopted the name “Grupos
Autónomos” or GGAA (in 1979). Although hindsight is, as they say, 20–20,
we must nonetheless point out that the pretense of being the “armed
faction of the revolutionary proletariat” was not just debatable but
also false as a matter of principle. All the groups, whether or not they
engaged in armed struggle, were separate groups that only represented
themselves, which is what “autonomous” really meant in that context.
This kind of autonomy, by the way, would have had to question the
existence within the MIL of a specialization of tasks that divided the
membership into theoreticians and activists. The proletariat represents
itself as a class through its own institutions. And it never takes up
arms except when it is necessary, when it is ready to destroy the state.
But in that case, not a fraction but the whole class is armed, forming
its militias, “the proletariat in arms”. The existence of armed groups,
even if they place themselves at the service of wildcat strikes,
contributes nothing to the autonomy of the struggle, insofar as they are
composed of people who are at the margins of the assemblies’ collective
decision making and outside their control. They comprised a separate
power and rather than helping the assemblies they could have posed a
threat to them if they were infiltrated by spies or provocateurs. During
that phase of the struggle, the pickets were sufficient. The most
radical practices of the class struggle were not the expropriations or
the fireworks in businesses and government offices. The really radical
contributions were those efforts that helped the proletariat to go on
the offensive: the generalization of insubordination against all
hierarchy, the sabotage of capitalist production and consumption, the
wildcat strikes, the revocable delegates, the coordination of struggles,
its self-defense, the creation of specifically working class information
networks, the rejection of nationalism and of trade unionism, the
occupations of factories and public buildings, the barricades…. The
contribution to proletarian autonomy made by the groups mentioned above
was limited by their voluntarist stance with regard to the question of
armed struggle.
In the case of the Autonomous Groups, it is clear that they wanted to
move among the masses and pursued their maximum radicalization, but the
clandestine conditions imposed by the armed struggle isolated them from
the masses. They were completely lucid concerning what was needed for
the extension of the class struggle, that is, concerning the question of
proletarian autonomy. They were acquainted with the legacy of May ’68
and condemned all ideology as an element of separation, even the
ideology of autonomy, since in the times of ferment the enemies of
autonomy are the first to proclaim their support for autonomy. According
to one of their communiqués, the group’s autonomy was “not simply a
common practice founded upon a minimum shared framework for action, but
was also based on an autonomous theory corresponding to our way of life,
of struggle, and our concrete needs”.
They took the libertarian “L” to avoid being pigeonholed within the
spectacular anarchism vs. Marxism opposition, as well as to prevent
their recuperation as anarchists by the CNT, which, as a trade union
organization, they considered to be bureaucratic, accommodationist and
tolerant of the existence of wage labor and therefore of capital. They
had no intention of being permanent organizations like the parties
because they rejected power; all truly autonomous groups organized for
certain concrete tasks and dissolved themselves when these tasks were
concluded. The repression abruptly brought them to an end, but the
nature of their practice was revealed as much by their exemplary, and
therefore edifying, errors as by their successes.
An abyss separates the proletarian milieus of the sixties and seventies
from today’s globalized and technology-saturated world. We are living in
a radically different reality built upon the ruins of the previous one.
The workers movement has disappeared, so speaking of “autonomy”, whether
Iberian or any other kind, makes no sense if by doing so we are trying
to attach ourselves to a non-existent image of the proletariat and to
build an illusory program of action upon that image based on someone
else’s shattered ideology. In the worst case this would imply the
resurrection of the Leninist cadaver and the idea of the “vanguard”,
which are diametrically opposed to autonomy. Nor is autonomy a matter of
amusing oneself in cyberspace, or in the “movement of movements”,
demanding the democratization of the established order by participating
in the institutions of the would-be representatives of civil society.
There is no civil society; that society has been broken up into its
constituent elements, the individuals, and the latter are not only
separated from the results and the products of their activity, but they
are also separated from one another. All the freedom which capitalist
society is capable of offering rests not upon the association of
autonomous individuals but upon their separation and ever more complete
dispossession, so that an individual does not discover a means to obtain
his freedom in another individual, but a competitor and an obstacle.
This separation is being consummated by digital technology as virtual
communication. In order to relate to one another, individuals depend
absolutely on technological means, but what they get is not real contact
but a relation in the aether. In its most extreme form, the individuals
who are addicted to such equipment are incapable of carrying on direct
relations with their own kind. Information and communications
technologies have given new life to the old bourgeois project that
sought to achieve the total separation of individuals from one another
and have in turn spawned the illusion of individual autonomy thanks to
the network function which these technologies have made possible. On the
one hand, they create an individual who is totally dependent upon
machines, and therefore neurotic and perfectly controllable; on the
other hand, they impose the conditions in which all social activity
takes place, they define its rhythms and demand a permanent adaptation
to change. Therefore, what has conquered autonomy is not the individual
but technology. Nonetheless, if individual autonomy is impossible under
the current conditions of production, the struggle for autonomy is not
impossible, although it must not be reduced to a strategy for opting out
of the technologically equipped capitalist mode of survival. Refusing to
work, to consume, to use electronic devices, to own a car, to live in
cities, etc., in and of itself constitutes a vast program, but survival
under capitalism imposes its rules. Personal autonomy is not simple
self-sufficiency at the cost of the isolation and marginalization of
those who escape from the cell phone and the email. The struggle against
these rules and constraints is today the ABC of individual autonomy and
can be pursued in many ways, all of them legitimate. Sabotage will be
supplemented by learning a dying craft or practicing barter. As for
collective action, conscious mass movements are impossible today,
because there is no class consciousness. Masses are exactly the opposite
of classes. Without a working class it is absurd to speak of “workers
autonomy”, but it is not absurd to speak of autonomous groups. Current
conditions are not so disastrous as to prevent the organization of
groups for the purpose of carrying out concrete defensive actions. The
advance of spectacular capitalism is always effected by means of
aggression, which must be answered wherever possible: against High Speed
Trains, Wind Farms, incinerators, golf courses, dams, sports stadiums,
highways, power lines, vacation developments, ski resorts, shopping
malls, real estate speculation, temporary and part time work,
genetically modified organisms…. It is a matter of establishing lines of
resistance from which an environment that is opposed to capitalism can
be reconstructed, in which revolutionary consciousness will once again
crystallize. If the world is not ready for grand strategies, if it is
instead ready for guerrilla actions, then the most suitable
organizational formula is that of autonomous groups. This is the kind of
autonomy that is of interest.