Autonomous Zones posted by Richard Seymour

Naomi Klein and a number of similarly minded anti-capitalists have for some time floated the notion of "autonomous zones", perhaps best exemplified by the victory of the Zapatistas, who kicked the army out of Chiapas, one of the poorest areas of Mexico and thereby created a zone in which the state was to some extent by-passed. This was not as peaceful as some of its supporters have suggested: it was less violent than it might have been because the state decided to pursue a strategy of attrition through paramilitary activity, while also pursuing agreements that it had no desire to adhere to. The Zapatistas rightly pressed for agreements on indigenous rights and autonomy to be adhered to and when they weren't, they created 32 autonomous municipalities in Chiapas.

The question of "autonomous zones" is interesting, because although the idea perhaps flows from an anarchist view of the primacy of the state in organising repression and preparing people for exploitation, it presents the possibility both of dual power and of significant breathing space for revolutionaries, who can organise where the state has no monopoly on the means of violence. It is a useful stepping stone toward revolution rather than a final settlement. One also thinks in this regard of the liberation of much of the Nepalese countryside by Maoist rebels. They fully intend to overthrow the monarchy just as soon as they think they can do it without some imperialist power jumping in to recapture the territory for capital.

Point of which:

Throughout the Black diaspora, resistance took the form of runaway slave communities, called maroons (French and English), palenques (Spanish), quilombos (Portugese) and/or mocambos (Ambundu for "hideout"). In late sixteenth century Mexico, for example, African runaway slaves had become such a problem that the Spanish authorities ordered the castration of Black men absent for more than six months. Vigilante systems for patrolling the roads were established in rural areas. The crown granted rewards for the capture of palenque rebels and material incentives were offered to slaves and former fugitives who betrayed their brothers and sisters who were in hiding. In Veracruz, African guerillas regularly destroyed crops, attacked wagons and burned plantation houses to the ground. In the early seventeenth century, a militant palenque of Indians and Africans led by the chief Yanga fought Spanish regulars to a stalemate. Local Spanish authorities were forced to sign a peace treaty with Yanga, which established the legal town of San Lorenzo de los Negros. Between 1731 and 1781, Cuban Blacks created a palenque, Poblado del Cobre, in Oriente Province that comprised over one thousand persons. The greatest maroon of all was Palmares, a series of African quilombos founded in about 1600 and surviving armed assaults by Dutch and Portugese troops until 1694. The Palamarista general Zambi successfully defended the territory until the combined weight of American Indian, Portugese colonial and mestizo soldiers, skilled in guerilla tactics, were hurled against him. After a two-year seige of the major rebel city, 200 Palmarista soldiers committed suicide rather than suffer the humiliation of returning to slavery. Two hundred more Palmaristas were killed in hand-to-hand combat on the final day of fighting, with Zambi succumbing only after he was seriously wounded. On November 20th, 1695, Zambi was decaptitated in a public execution; his head was exhibited before the black slaves "to kill the legend of his immortality." In the United States, wherever the frontier geography permitted the possibility of maroons, Afro-American Zambis were found. At least fifty maroons existed in the US between 1672 and 1864 in the swamps and Appalachian hill country of the Carolinas, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Mississipi, Virginia and Louisiana. (Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, 2000).

So what if they did in fact still have to fight for every inch of space? Instead of colonising the public mind like this:

As the Washington Post once noted, modern democracy works best when the political "parties essentially agree on most of the major issues". The Financial Times put it more bluntly: capitalist democracy can best succeed when it focuses on "the process of depoliticizing the economy." (Quoted, ibid., p.112).

Notwithstanding the Report's well-intentioned warning about the imminent 'meltdown' of democracy, this calamity is actually nothing new - although perhaps more severe now than ever. Examination of the historical record reveals that it has always suited the interests of powerful institutions for the public hand to be kept well away from the helm of policy; the fear of public opinion is ever-present in the minds of the ruling classes.

In 1661, historian Clement Walker complained of English revolutionaries:

"They have made the people thereby so curious and so arrogant that they will never find humility enough to submit to a civil rule."(Quoted, Peter Wintonick and Mark Achbar, 'Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media', Black Rose Books, 1994, p.38)

Closer to the present day, the Australian social scientist Alex Carey summed up the evolution of political power over the last hundred years:

"The twentieth century has been characterised by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy." (Carey, 'Taking the Risk out of Democracy', University of Illinois Press, 1995, p.18)

We should mention that the power of the state has also grown, in order to further the growth of corporate power.

Carey reflected that in the United States: "from 1900 to 1910 Upton Sinclair [the prolific author and 'muckraker'] and others so effectively exposed the exploitation and brutality of American industry that, as Fortune magazine wrote later, 'business did not discover - until its reputation had been all but destroyed - that in a democracy nothing is more important than [public opinion]'." (Ibid., p.80)

Over the years, endless business propaganda attempted to rein in and shape public opinion for corporate ends. Edward Bernays, one of the founders of the modern public relations industry in the 1920s, warned that "the masses promised to become king". This danger could be averted, argued Bernays, by new methods of propaganda: the "engineering of consent". These methods would enable the "intelligent minorities to mold the mind of the masses" thus "regimenting the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers." (Quoted, Noam Chomsky, 'Rogue States', Pluto Press, 2000, p.120)

American historian Elizabeth Fones-Wolf wrote of business's attack on the public in the 1940s and 1950s:

"Manufacturers orchestrated multi-million dollar public relations campaigns that relied on newspapers, magazines, radio, and later television, to re-educate the public in the principles and benefits of the American economic system... This involved convincing workers to identify their social, economic, and political well-being with that of their specific employer and more broadly with the free enterprise system." (Fones-Wolf, 'Selling Free Enterprise - The Business Assault on Labour and Liberalism, 1945-60,' University of Illinois Press, 1994, p.6)

Carey concurs:

"Beginning in 1945, the postwar conservative assault on public opinion revived the two dominant themes of the 1930s campaigns: identification of the traditional American free-enterprise system with social harmony, freedom, democracy, the family, the church, and patriotism; and identification of all government regulation of the affairs of business, and all liberals who supported such 'interference', with communism and subversion." (Carey, op. cit., p.27)

The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) explicitly warned its members that:

"Public policies in our democracy are eventually a reflection of public opinion," so public opinion must be reshaped "if we are to avoid disaster." (Ibid., p.24)