“…there is a trade union version of entryism also being practised. And I think where C.L.R. James even turns away from that, and also turns away from Trotskyism and Leninism, is that he truly does something that we are trying to name our podcast after, which is this thing where he faces the autonomy of the working class. He recognises that the working class, they express themselves autonomously, they express themselves on their own, in self-manifested groups, and they don’t need a party bureaucracy, they don’t need a union bureaucracy and, in fact, a lot of those old left formations do a lot to suppress the free and unsuppressed and autonomous expression of working class politics.” Zara Richter, Podcast: Who are we and what is Facing Autonomy?
The Facing Autonomy collective take their name from both the 1956 book Facing Reality, co-authored by, amongst others, C.L.R. James and Cornelius Castoriadis, which brought together anarchistic ideas of organisation with Marxist theory, and Italian Autonomist Marxism, which emphasised the political strategy of workers self organisation independently of unions and party bureaucracy. In this session we will be joined by Facing Autonomy to explore worker self-organisation, especially in relationship to C.L.R. James, Italian Autonomist Marxism, Left Communism and Anarchism, and to explore what it might mean to us today.
