To be free, you must have control over your immediate surroundings and the basic matters of your life. No one is more qualifed than you are to decide how you live; no one should be able to vote on what you do with your time and your potential unless you invite them to. To claim these privileges for yourself and respect them in others is to cultivate autonomy.
Autonomy is not to be confused with so-called independence.
in actuality, no one is independent, since our lives all depend on each other. The glamorization of self-suffciency in competitive society is an underhanded way to accuse those who will not exploit others of being responsible for their own poverty; as such, it is one of the most signifcant obstacles to building community. In contrast to this Western mirage, autonomy offers a free interdependence between people who share consensus.
Autonomy is the antithesis of bureaucracy. There is nothing more effcient than people acting on their own initiative as they see fit, and nothing more ineffcient than attempting to dictate everyone’s actions from above – that is, unless your fundamental goal is to control other people. Top-down coordination is only necessary when people must be made to do something they would never do of their own accord. Obligatory uniformity, however horizontally it is imposed, can only empower a group by disempowering the individuals who comprise it. Consensus can be as repressive as democracy unless the participants retain their autonomy. Autonomous individuals can cooperate without agreeing on a shared agenda, so long as everyone benefts from everyone else’s participation. Groups that cooperate thus can contain conficts and contradictions, just as each of us does individually, and still empower the participants.
Let’s leave marching under a single flag to the military.
Finally, autonomy entails self-defense. Autonomous groups have a stake in protecting themselves against the encroachments of those who do not recognize their right to self-determination, and to expand the territory of autonomy and consensus by doing everything in their power to disrupt coercive structures.
Autonomy necessitates that you act for yourself: that rather than waiting for requests to pass through the established channels only to bog down in paperwork and endless negotiations, you establish your own channels instead. If you want hungry people to have food to eat, don’t give money to a bureaucratic charity organization – fnord out where food is going to waste, collect it, and share. If you want affordable housing, don’t try to get the town council to pass a bill – that will take years, while people sleep outside every night; take over abandoned buildings, open them up to the public, and organize a way to defend them when the thugs of the absentee landlords show up. If you want corporations to have less power, don’t petition the politicians they bought to put limits on their own masters – take that power from them yourself. Don’t buy their products, don’t work for them, sabotage their billboards and offces, prevent their meetings from taking place and their merchandise from being delivered.
They use similar tactics to exert their power over you, too – it only looks valid because they bought up the laws and values of your society long before you were born.
Don’t wait for permission or leadership from some outside authority, don’t beg some higher power to organize your life for you. Take the initiative!
