The journal "Autonomie" ("Autonomy") was established in 1975. It
emerged from the agitational newspaper "Wir Wollen Alles" ("We Want it
All"), which was published by the Operaist-oriented groups
‘Arbeitersache’ (‘Workers’ Cause’) in Munich, ‘Revolutionärer Kampf’
(‘Revolutionary Struggle’) in Frankfurt and ‘Proletarische Front’ (‘The
Proletarian Front’) in Hamburg. Two political lines soon developed
within the editorial board. On the one hand, there was the ‘first-person
politics’ proposed by those in Frankfurt. On the other hand, the
Hamburg group in particular insisted on a ‘working-class standpoint’:
for this group, relating to the subjectivity of the ‘class’ and building
a social-revolutionary organisation should take priority over policies
related to the individual. In 1979, the Frankfurt group issued the last
journal (No. 14) of the old version of Autonomie. Between 1979 and 1985
the Hamburg group published Autonomie: Neue Folge (Autonomy: The New
Edition). It is now available here online for the first time. In fact,
issue No. 12 of the old version of the journal was conceived in Hamburg
and thus has been included in this digitised edition. This issue was
devoted to the subject of regionalism. Alongside this theme, there was
an article on ‘the moral economy’, which took up the British New Left’s
writing on social history.
The Hamburg editorial board was made up of a core of former members
from the ‘Proletarische Front’ organisation. This core was expanded by a
number of people who joined in connection with a campaign for a
suspended sentence for Karl Heinz Roth, a member of the board.
During the first two years, Roth carried out an important and
integrative role on the editorial board. Smaller editorial teams – in
which external authors also played a part – were formed for each
individual issue. All articles were regularly discussed by the main
editorial board, which was supported by a salaried senior editor. The
board’s offices were located in Hamburg-Altona. In 1982, several members
left the editorial board in connection with the ‘Position Paper’
published in issue No. 10.
Apart from issue No. 1, the magazine was self-produced and financed
by donations from the editorial staff. The journal’s circulation was
three thousand – four thousand for some issues. The majority of its
readers came from the protest movements of the 1970s and were
predominantly from North Germany. But there were also some readers from
around several university cities in South Germany, as well as from
Berlin. Reading circles occasionally sprung up and the editorial board
organised a series of events centred on the journal – for example in the
context of the prisoners’ and anti-nuclear movements.
Autonomie: Neue Folge aimed, on the one hand, to develop an expanded
concept of structural violence which referred to the interweaving of
technological violence into every-day life. On the other hand, the
journal sought to work out a new, social-revolutionary understanding of
internationalism and anti-imperialism. Behind these aims stood the
political concept of placing in a broader historical context, and
strategically expanding, the various partial movements active in the
wake of the ‘anti-authoritarian’ revolts of 1968, which mainly agitated
in selective and situational ways.
Autonomie: Neue Folge began in May 1979 with an issue on the Iranian
Revolution. With regard to the People’s Mujahedin and the theoretician
Ali Schariati, the issue attempted to explore the potential of ‘Iranian
mass autonomy’ – as a non-Bolshevik path to social revolution. This
subject was revisited in issues No. 6 (on the Iran-Iraq War, 1980) and
No. 8 (on the People’s Mujahedin, 1981). As is well known, the Iranian
Revolution ended in a counterrevolution of the reactionary Ayatollahs,
in civil war and terror. Back then the editorial board could not
anticipate that the Iranian Revolution was possibly but the first
episode in a revolutionary epoch, which would flow into the Arab
rebellions. The interest in the ‘Middle and Near East’ lapsed.
The theme of social-revolutionary anti-imperialism carried over into
issue No. 10 (‘Anti-Imperialism in the 1980s’, 1982) in which concepts
drawn from the US Operaist left were further developed and the primacy
of the social was contrasted with the classical theory of imperialism.
The topic further found expression in the article ‘Genocide against
Social Revolution’ in the final issue, No. 14 (1985). Not until many
years later was this concept explicitly back-referenced to the Russian
Revolution, which was always implicit within the approach in the
mid-1980s.
In the thematic issues No. 2 through No. 7, there was an attempt to
enter into an exchange with single-issue movements and currents, as well
as to ‘set out markers’ for the reconstruction of an overarching
social-revolutionary agenda. The ‘workers’ standpoint’ was projected
onto a new social subject – the ‘factory society’ became an explanatory
model for the entirety of the social terrain. This began with the issue
on prisons (No. 2, ‘The New Prisons’, 1979) which presented materials on
the prisoners’ movement and recent developments in the detention
systems. This topic was complemented in 1980 by a special issue on
preventive detention. This theme was followed by that of urban planning
in issue No. 3 (‘The Second Destruction of Germany’, 1980) which reached
from the 19th century architectural utopias to the house occupations of
the 1980s, and the issue on the anti-nuclear movement (No.4/5,
‘Resistance Against Nuclear Factories. The Nuclear State’, 1980) which
alongside references to the movement against nuclear power included a
polemic against the institutionalisation of politics by the Greens. The
issues dedicated to medicine, such as special issue No. 2 (‘Medicine and
National Socialism’, 1980) and No. 7 (‘Healthcare Reform, Rape, Forced
Sterilisation, Sick Leave’, 1981) were to provide historical and
contemporary material for the debates in the ‘health movement’ in the
context of the ‘health conferences’ held in Berlin and Hamburg. This
topic was taken up again later in the journal Beiträge zur
nationalsozialistischen Gesundheits- und Sozialpolitik (Contributions to
National Socialist Health and Social Policy).
It was not until the Fiat issue (No. 9, ‘Factories and the New Class
Composition’, 1982) that Autonomie: Neue Folge chimed in with the point
of departure of the 1970s, as expressed in the subtitle ‘Materials
against Factory Society’. The ‘Arbeitersache’ group had related to the
workers at BMW with an anti-Taylorist, anti-Fordist programme.
‘Revolutionärer Kampf’ had done the same with the Opel workers, and
‘Proletarische Front’ had focused on the ports, shipyards and the
Volkswagen workers in Hannover. The experiences of this wave of
struggle, which had culminated in the 1973 Ford strike, were now to be
recalled in order to arrive at a new analysis of the reality of class in
West Germany, of the exploitation of labour and of the regional labour
markets. However, this systematic approach failed to materialise.
Instead there was a separate issue (No. 12, ‘The Italian Model:
Revolutionary Movements at an End?’, 1983) in which the topic of Italy
was broached once more. The matters of labour markets and technology
were differently dealt with in issues No. 11 and No. 13 under the common
title of ‘Imperialism in the Metropolises’ (No. 11, ‘The Compulsion to
Work. New Poverty, 1982) and issue No. 13 (‘The Assault of Technology’,
1983). In parallel with the quasi post-Operaist focus on the
metropolitan class and global mass poverty, since issue No. 3 a debate
had emerged regarding subjectivity and technological violence, which
found its way into various issues. The reference point for this was a
book published in 1981 entitled Leben als Sabotage (Life as Sabotage).
Since 1982 there had been difficult disagreements on the editorial
board. Issues No. 13 and No. 14 were only published by smaller editorial
sub-groups who continued to work together informally. Some members of
the editorial board no longer believed that it was possible to
reconstruct social-revolutionary processes in the global north from a
metropolitan standpoint and therefore focused more on the
social-historical paradigm of mass poverty and anti-imperialist
struggles. This implied different ideas of organisation. The divergent
points of view no longer led to fruitful discussions, but rather to the
dissolution of the editorial board. Appearing after a two-year break
with a new design, the final issue (No. 14, ‘Class History – Social
Revolution?’) was published in 1985. It contained three separate essays:
a historical study of mass poverty and the right of existence; a
contribution to reproductive labour (catching up somewhat, since a
feminist position had not been able to prevail in the editorial board
until then) and a portrayal of the Bretton Woods system as a weapon
against the social revolution.
