Organizing for Autonomy: History, Theory, and Strategy for Collective Liberation - Softcover

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CounterPoweris a revolutionary organization committed to building the power of working and oppressed people, from below and to the left. Drawing lessons from past and present movements, they offer an analysis, vision, and strategy to build for social revolution in the heart of empire. They organize to dismantle the imperialist world-system: a system based on the fusion of capitalism, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and the state. With branches throughout the United States, CounterPower has more than a decade of experience helping to build the collective power and autonomy of workers and the oppressed.

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create two, three, many parties of autonomy!

From strike committees to workers’ councils, tenant unions to neighborhood assemblies, the disparate forms of organized autonomy that arise in the midst of a protracted revolutionary struggle will not automatically fuse with communist politics to create a cohesive system of counterpower. Nor will a majority of workers and popular social groups automatically unite with the communist movement. The social forces of heteropatriarchy, capital, colonialism, and the state exert tremendous pressure against the organic emergence of a communist worldview on a mass scale, while reformism, authoritarianism, bureaucratism, and various forms of social chauvinism within the ranks of the movement itself can divert grassroots struggles away from the path to social revolution. What organizational form can co-facilitate the political development of the mass movement in a communist direction, fostering communication, cooperation, and coordination among the emergent forms of organized autonomy across multiple fronts of struggle and sectors of the movement? We believe the answer is found with the construction of independent communist political organizations, orparties of autonomy.

This is not a call for a party in the bourgeois sense of the term: social revolutions are made by the autonomous initiative of the masses, not by counting votes or coup d'état.For bourgeois society, the distinguishing feature of a party“is its willingness or constitutional ability to take power; to achieve its desired ends through the given structure of political power in society.” We rejectthis conception of an “inheritor party” which aims to take control of the existing state machinery, “whether by voluntary handing over of power or as a result of a cataclysm.” In contrast to a bourgeois party, Rosa Luxemburg identified that a revolutionary party of autonomy “is not a party that wants to rise to power over the mass of workers or through them.” Rather, it “is only the most conscious, purposeful part of the proletariat, which points the entire broad mass of the working class toward its historical tasks at every step,” always linking its grassroots political work to the ultimate goal of communism at each phase of the protracted revolutionary struggle. It is a connective party, establishing linkages between different fronts of struggle and sectors of the movement, connecting local and national concerns with an analysis of the world situation and the tasks of the world revolution. Such a party upholds, defends, and advances the autonomy of grassroots social struggles at the base, recognizing that the multitude of workers and popular social groups come to act as a collective revolutionary subject only through the self-management of the revolutionary struggle itself.

A party of autonomy does not stand outside or above the revolutionary process. Rather, such a party is internal to this very process, as an integral and complementary part of a system of counterpower. Thus a party of autonomy is a dialectical product of, and active factor in, the development of revolutionary consciousness, self-organization, and self-activity among the multitude of workers and popular social groups. A party is simply the self-organization of revolutionaries. As Agustín Guillamón has emphasized, for this very reason, multiple revolutionary organizations, groups, and tendencies will emerge in a revolutionary situation, which in their totality constitute the historical party of communism locked in antagonistic struggle against the historical party of imperialism (which is also constituted by multiple organizations, groups, and tendencies). Thiswas grasped by the anarchist Errico Malatesta, who described the historical party of communism as including “all who are on the same side, that is, who share the same general aspirations and who, in one way or another, struggle for the same ends against common adversaries and enemies. But this does not mean it is possible—or even desirable—for all of us to be gathered into one specific association.” Indeed, the diversity of situations encountered by revolutionaries and the prevailing fragmentation of the working class and popular social groups demands a high-degree of organizational flexibility and adaptivity, and thus a multiplicity of party organizations.