‘New autonomous zones’ promote libertarian inequality

The anarchist and autonomista reluctance to take and consolidate power is rooted, I suspect, in the concept of the “free individual” upon which much anarchist and autonomista thinking rests. The critique of radical individualism runs as follows. The concept of the free individual bears the mark of liberal legal institutions (even of private property in the body and the self) spiced with a hefty dose of that personalized protestant religion which Weber associated with the rise of capitalism. To say, as Reclus did with great pride, that he had gone through life as a free individual, was to place himself firmly in the liberal and protestant tradition (Reclus’ father was a protestant minister and for a while Reclus trained for the ministry; see Chardak, 1997). His sort of anarchism has its roots in liberal theory and the Judeo- Christian tradition even as it constructs its anti-capitalism through the negation of the market and a critique of the class and environmental consequences of liberal theory and capitalist practices. There is nothing wrong with this (Marx also constructs largely by way of negation of classical political economy and its liberal and Judeo-Christian roots). But the result is an awkward overlap at times (which exists in both Marx and Proudhon) in which the critique incorporates and mirrors far too much of that which it criticizes. There is a real problem here which Springer evades by denouncing as “oxymoronic” anyone that places anarchist thinking too close to its liberal (and by extension neoliberal) roots as defined, for example, in Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974). This is an issue that has to be rationally unpacked because it has had and potentially will continue to have real consequences. In 1984 two MIT professors, Michael Piore and Charles Sabel, for example, published a book called The Second Industrial Divide (1984). Back in 1848, they argued, industrial capitalism faced a moment of technological possibility in its organization in which it could either move towards mass factory production of the sort that Marx predicted and embraced or take the path that Proudhon advocated, which was the linking together of small, independent workshops in which associated laborers could democratically control their work and their lives. The wrong choice was made after 1848, they claim, and thereafter mass factory production, with all of its evils, dominated industrial capitalism. But in the 1970s new technologies and organizational forms were emerging which posed that same choice anew. With flexible specialization and small batch and niche production, Proudhon’s dream was once more a possibility. Piore and Sabel became fierce advocates for the new forms of industrial organization – termed “flexible specialization” – most classically represented at that time by the emerging industrial districts of the Third Italy. Both Piore and Sabel, armed with their reputations, their MacArthur grants and supported by so-called progressive thinkers and institutions of the time, set out to persuade the unions to embrace the Proudhonian vision rather than oppose the new technologies. Sabel became an influential advisor to the International Labour Organization. Many of us on the Marxist left were deeply troubled by this turn. I added my voice to the critics by arguing in The Condition of Postmodernity (1989; as well as at the AAG in Baltimore in 1987 when Sabel and I clashed fiercely), that flexible specialization was nothing other than a tactic of flexible accumulation for capital. The campaign to persuade or cajole (via the International Monetary Fund) countries to adopt policies for the flexibilization of labor was a sign of this intent (and it still goes on through IMF mandates, as now in Greece). In retrospect it is clear that this scheme, supported by Piore and Sabel and given an aura of progressive radicalism in the name of Proudhon, was a core element of neoliberalization, with all the consequences that flowed for the disempowerment of labor and labor’s declining share of gains from productivity. This left nearly all of the newly produced wealth in the hands of the one percent. We badly need to disabuse ourselves of what Bookchin calls the “Proudhonist myth that small associations of producers….can slowly eat away at capitalism” (2014: 59). The autonomistas, along with Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapelin in The New Spirit of Capitalism (2007), even go so far as to suggest that it was the working class practices of the autonomistas and the anarchists that were taken over by capital to create new forms of control and new networked organizational forms during the 1970s. Capitalist anarchism is a real problem. It has its coherent central theory as set out by Nozick, Hayek and others, and a doctrine of market freedoms. It has turned out not only to be the most successful form of decentralized decision making ever invented – as Marx so elegantly demonstrated in Capital – but also a force for an immense centralization of wealth and power in the hands of an increasingly powerful oligarchy. This dialectic between decentralization and centralization is one of the most important contradictions within capital (see my Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism) and I wish all those, like Springer, who advocate decentralization as if it is an unalloyed good would look more closely at its consequences and contradictions. As I argued in Rebel Cities (2013a), decentralization and autonomy are primary vehicles for producing greater inequality and centralization of power. Once again, Bookchin sort of agrees: “at the risk of seeming contrary, I feel obliged to emphasize that decentralization, localism, self-sufficiency, and even confederation, each taken singly, do not constitute a guarantee that we will achieve a rational ecological society. In fact all of them have at one time or another supported parochial communities, oligarchies, and even despotic regimes” (2014: 73-74). This was, by the way, my main problem with the stance taken by Gibson-Graham in their pursuit of totally decentralized anti- capitalist alternatives.