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SF Autonomous Initiative

by Salem (salem [at] indymedia.org)
A new initiative is in the germinal stages of development to form a Autonomist Collective and eventually a People's Union
The following is posted in hopes of starting a dialogue and attracting individuals interested in working toward these ideas:

Autonomous Collective: People Living Outside the System for a Better World
druidsufi [at] mac.com

Autonomy has been the long desired goal of social theorists for ages. Whether it was penned in the words of Thomas Jefferson, Emma Goldman or Hakim Bey, people have desired autonomy while contrained by the boundaries of that which limits their freedom, which in our day and age is the market driven capitalist system, a system which does not value the individual unless the individual is an owner of great wealth to the detriment of other individuals. It is a system based on a destructive form of individualism, not a creative mutually empowering form of individualism as espoused by the Autonomous Collective. The Autonomous Collective means to achieve true liberation by living by a set of core values and using a set of core tactics.

I. AUTONOMOUS CORE VALUES:
1. Freedom without Exploitation: we will seek mutual liberation rather then personal freedom at the expense of others.
2. Mutual Aid without desire for compensation: we will give freely and willingly driven by compassion rather then greed.
3. Autonomy from the State and it’s Taxes: we will not seek it’s benefits nor it’s protections in return for it’s not invading our personal liberties and values.
4. A union based on people not profits: we will help create unions based on people not on profits or industry (see section III).
5. Labor for Growth: we will not allow our labor to be used for exploitative or destructive means, we will use our labor to build social sustainability with ecological harmony.
6. No authority but consensus: we will not participate in political or factional groupings but will work with others for a mutual understanding on how to resolve crisis.

II. AUTONOMOUS TACTICS:
1. Autonomous Living: Food Distribution, Social Housing, Ecological Sustainability, Supporting Peoples Unions. This is a collective based on pariticipating in community while dropping out from the system of economic exploitation, namely capitalism. We aim to actively participate in the general community while not pariticipating in exploitative practices. We will do this through participating in food share programs and food distribution based on non-consumed goods held in surplus by cooperative food stores, community gardens, and other means of food gathering. We will also seek to establish free and open social housing, where people are not expected to pay rent to an land owner but own in trust the property they inhabit, or otherwise have reached a non-monetary based equitable distribution of the space in which they inhabit. We will seek to establish means of production which is also ecologically sustainable, which may be promoting bike shops for transportation and other such alternative modes of transportation. We will seek to unite neighbors together via People’s Unions which will extend the concept of labor to more than just what we do for a living.
2. Direct Action against the Exploitative System. We will first seek to establish these various means of liberation via legal means. However, we will “Fight to Win” we will not simply settle for no. If the State or other institutions of exploitative practices say no to us we will take every means necessary short of harming life to attain liberation via direct action. This topic shall be further elaborated by constituents in the future.


III. DEFINING A UNION OF AUTONOMOUS INDIVIDUALS
In the debate between revolutionary Marxists and revolutionary Anarchists the idea of the position labor unions held in the process toward revolutionary change has been a cleavage point between these two revolutionary groupings. We suggest that both have been wrong that the true revolution is encompassed not via a Marxist dictatorship of the proletariat nor solely through an Anarcho-Syndicalist labor federation although federation is part of the answer. In short, Marx was right about it taking more then Labor Councils and the Anarcho-Syndicalists were right when it came to the necessity of direct democracy rather then dictatorship. We hold that the true liberation of people from exploitative systems, capitalism and communist dictatorships, is the foundations of People’s Unions.

A Peoples’s Union is any organized effort of individuals to take charge of their own affairs directly outside the hierarchies of beauracratic states, or hierarchical unions, or political parties or representatives. It is the direct democratic participation of individuals to seize their own destiny rather than having their destiny dictated to us by powers that have illegitimately seized control of our lives, such as business corporations, powerful political bodies and corrupt social institutions such as the current governments. It is a combination of those that seeks via labor unions to control the means of production and those that seek via activist groups to promote social justice outside the means of production. An example of this direct democratic self management is seen in such organizations as the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty and the Argentine Neighborhood Associations and even in Food Not Bombs groups. An example of what it is not is the current social structures set up by the State during times of personal troubles such as welfare system, where you are demanded to do workfare, demanded to have your finger prints snapped, demanded to be watched over like prisoners while seeking your just compensation via unemployment benefits, welfare and food stamps after years of paying taxes to a bloated government which awards military contracts to business run by wealthy families that have no more allegiance to the community then what it takes to win the next proxy election which will be decided by a small group of powerful people in centers of power.

We envision that the Autonomist Collective would merely be one group in a federation of social, labor and political activists groups that unite to form a Council of People. We envision that when three or more such groups come together to form a council a new People’s Union Local is formed. Thus we as the Autonomist Collective seek to engage other groups such as Food Not Bombs, Homes Not Jails, Neighborhood Associations, NGO’s (like Global Exchange) to begin the formation of the People’s Union San Francisco Local. Further, we envision that there will be organizational divisions within the Union.

1. Service Division: comprised of everything that is not directly related to the means of production, such as food services (i.e. Food Not Bombs), artistic endeavours, medicine, security and the like.

2. Works, this would be the role of the labor unions, to form locally based federations of labor in the model of anarcho-syndicalism. Those engaged in the means of production. It is comprised of members of the People's Union it does not seek to organize industrial workers engaged in capitalist businesses, that is the role of reformist labor unions and of radical independent unions such as the IWW. Rather an individual may be a member of a reformist labor union and a member of the People's Union with obligations to both. For example, a construction worker may go to his 9-5 job but in return for the benefits of free food distribution agrees to a certain number of time credit hours of work serving the needs of the Peoples Union.


The People’s Union is again the combination of labor federations with service federations that promotes direct democracy via consensus with a goal of autonomy from the capitalist system without remanding it’s own noble ideas to dictatorship of the proletariat. It has proven to be an effective means of change, although germinal, in such manifestations as the KWRU, CLAC, OCAP and others.

We ask for your active participation in developing the Autonomist Collective, if you aggree with these principles and goals. Please endorse your membership and become an active pariticipant in the Collective. Membership in the Collective means you aggree to work towards these goals, it does not necessarily mean you will automatically drop out from the capitalist or statist system, although a core group of individuals will have chosen this path. Your responsibilities entail that you will actively engage in one of the tactics outlined above and will further the values and goals of the collective.

AUTONOMIST COLLECTIVE AGENDA:
1. Promote Food Distribution with groups like Food Not Bombs
2. Promote Social Housing with groups like Homes Not Jails
3. Promote Ecological Transportation via Bike Libraries, Critical Mass, etc.
4. Promote Autonomous Economies via People's Unions.
5. Promote and Help Plan an Anti-Capitalist Conference for all Libertarian Leftists whether Marxist, Anarchist or others.
6. Fight the criminalization of those living in Poverty with groups like NoCNC, COH and others.
7. Explicitly Anti-Oppression in Practice, learning from Colors of Resistance, Queer Activists, No One is Illegal and others.


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Thu, Aug 15, 2002 11:38AM
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