Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Cultivating Autonomy
Power, Resistance and the French
Alterglobalization Movement
Gwyn Williams
Abstract This article explores the resistance of alterglobalization activists on the
Larzac plateau in southern France to various forms of power. As part of a technique of resistance activists cultivate themselves as autonomous political
subjects and organize a movement considered to be an autonomous counterpower. In addition to being a political goal, autonomy is problematically tangled
up in many aspects of their lives and is of frequent concern in their efforts to
resist. Autonomy also constitutes a theoretical problem in anthropological
discussions of power and resistance. An autonomous space of resistance is often
assumed by social movement theorists or denied by those who argue that power
and resistance are inseparable. I argue in this article that autonomy, understood
as something socially relative rather than absolute, is produced in the process of
resisting via particular practices through which power and resistance come to
oppose one another.
Keywords antiglobalization alterglobalization autonomy France
hegemony Larzac power resistance social movements
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The Larzac
For over 30 years the Larzac plateau in the south of France has been well
known for its political activism. The Larzac is a sheep farming area that
became famous in the 1970s after the government decided to extend the
military camp on the plateau, provoking a decade of protest on the part of
local peasant farmers threatened with expropriation (see Alland, 2001;
Martin, 1987; Vuarin, 2005). Over the course of the 1970s, the Larzac itself
became what people call a symbol of resistance. What made the Larzac
struggle remarkable is that the farmers often God-fearing, obedient and
conservative formed an alliance with thousands of liberated outsiders
hippies, students, Maoist revolutionaries, radicals from May 68 and ordinary
citizens who saw the struggle of the farmers for their land as part of a much
broader fight against state power, hierarchy, inequality and capitalism. A few
outsiders settled on the plateau, occupying farms the army had managed to
purchase and grazing sheep like their peasant neighbours. They considered
their activities to be both agricultural and political, a demonstration to the
warmongers of the life-sustaining capacity of the land. Many thousands of
others contributed funds, came to help the farmers in the summer, and
participated in an ongoing series of demonstrations, occupations, illegal
construction projects, marches, symbolic protests and mass gatherings, the
largest of which attracted 100,000 people to the plateau. The struggle was a
non-violent one. Although certain outsiders had sometimes violent revolutionary aims, the peasants consciously adopted non-violence as a political
strategy following the visit of a religious leader and Gandhian disciple called
Lanza del Vasto. Asserting their autonomy against the demands of outsiders,
they made non-violence a condition of participation in the struggle.
The struggle lasted ten long years until, finally, the farmers won when
newly elected Socialist President Franois Mitterrand cancelled the camp
extension in 1981. The struggle, however, generated a sort of culture of
protest in the area which continues to this day. Following their victory, the
peasants and the neorural residents of the Larzac decided to return the
solidarity and support received from outsiders during the struggle. They
turned their attention to political battles in the outside world, most notably
the Kanak independence movement in New Caledonia. Today, the
struggles of the Palestinians and the Kurds for self-determination are of
special interest to Larzac activists, as are the battles of people everywhere
against genetically modified crops and neoliberal globalization.
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Twenty years after the exemplary struggle of the 1970s, the Larzac was
thrust back into the national spotlight in the summer of 1999 when a group
of activists dismantled a McDonalds restaurant being built on the
outskirts of Millau, a town of 20,000 at the foot of the plateau, as part of
what they called a non-violent and symbolic protest.3 The action was led
by Jos Bov, Larzac activist and spokesperson of the Confdration
paysanne, the second largest farmers union in France. It was triggered by
the imposition of US import tariffs on a hundred or so European products,
among them Roquefort cheese, the mainstay of the local economy. The
tariffs were a retaliation for a European Union (EU) ruling condemned
by the WTO refusing the importation of hormone-treated meat from the
United States. The tariffs angered local farmers who sell ewes milk to the
Roquefort firms. But the dismantling was much more than a corporatist
protest against the United States by farmers concerned with their livelihoods. McDonalds came to symbolize everything that the activists involved,
many of whom were not farmers, consider wrong with globalization: standardization and the effacement of local diversity; commercialization and
the commodification of the world; the privileging of the private over the
public good; the liberalization of the global economy being driven by the
WTO. Against such neoliberal forces, activists assert that the world is not
a commodity, a phrase popularized in the title of one of Bovs books,
Le Monde nest pas une marchandise,4 and which has become the catch-cry of
the movement.
Extensive media coverage of the McDonalds affair made Bov into a
household name and one of the most celebrated political figures in France.
It helped to cement the Confdration paysanne at the forefront of the
movement and it reinforced the Larzacs reputation as a symbol of resistance. The McDonalds dismantling was seen by the activists I knew as the
beginning of a new era of protest, the event that gave the social movement
a new lease of life and which encouraged activists across the country to say
no to the WTO and the neoliberal economic reforms it promotes. For
many, the WTO is the greatest single cause of the worlds injustice and its
wrongs, and is the power they are concerned to resist. In 2003, Larzac-Millau
activists, with the assistance of activist groups in Paris and elsewhere, organized an enormous gathering on the plateau against the WTO. The gathering, known as Larzac 2003, was held over three days in August and attracted
an estimated 300,000 people to a series of concerts and political forums.
Participation in Larzac 2003 was diverse. In addition to the highly visible
presence of the Confdration paysanne and Attac, one of the major alterglobalization organizations in the country, the gathering involved the stalls
and displays of 150 activist associations and unions from across France,
concerned with everything from human rights and corporate capitalism to
housing, home-birthing and open source software. There were forums and
debates on the WTO, agriculture, state repression, nuclear energy, genetic
modification, colonialism, Palestine, Kurdistan, fair-trade, the liberalization
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of public services and numerous other topics. Despite the diverse range of
their interests, it is the commonality between separate activist associations
which tends to be stressed. They are generally considered to be engaged in
struggles against the domination of the meek by the powerful, all within
the context of neoliberal globalization. While Larzac activists are particularly concerned with the WTO, Palestine, state repression and genetic
modification, they oppose power and domination in all its forms. As part
of what they call the social movement (le mouvement social), a term which
is often used in the singular, their aim is to resist.
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of the social movement. For many, Bov included, entering into the halls
of power is not an effective way of changing society. It merely subordinates
you to an unjust social order, fixes you within a hierarchical institutional
framework and robs you of the potential to bring about change. The
question of effectiveness is key. What is important is the ability to oppose
the powerful and their perpetuation of injustice and to give the relatively
powerless a voice.
More recently, Bov himself seems to have been wondering whether or
not the presidency would not serve the interests of ordinary people and of
the oppressed. Newspapers reported periodically during 2006 that Bov
had been considering standing for president if he could gain the support
of the radical left, and in February 2007 he announced his candidacy (Bov,
2007).8 Some see this as a question of political expediency. They trust that
Bov, should he get into power, will not abandon the principles and the
taste for action that have seen the man himself who is sometimes said to
incarnate the movement described as a counter-power. But others are
rather more sceptical and some consider seeking a presidential mandate to
be profoundly mistaken, the error of someone concerned more with his
own aggrandisement than with the social good (see Lesay, 2006). As president, they worry, Bov can only alienate himself from the social movement,
the activist grassroots and ordinary people.
Despite such disagreements over the role of Frances best-known
activist, the logic of counter-power, to use Bovs phrase (quoted in Lesay,
2006: 3), is not a matter of participating in power but of organizing and of
building one big social movement out of diverse and independent social
movements. To effectively resist, the social movement must increase its
strength (rather than its power) relative to the forces of power to which
it is opposed as part of creating what people call a rapport de force. There
are two ways of creating a rapport de force, someone once declared at a
meeting prior to Larzac 2003: through arms, a path firmly rejected by most
alterglobalization activists (the local movement has been self-styled as nonviolent since the struggle against the military camp of the 1970s); and
through numbers. People must be attracted to the movement, convinced
to participate. Attracting the greatest possible number was always the aim
of the organizers of Larzac 2003. Numbers, I often heard it said, make it
impossible for the powerful to ignore the demands of the social movement.
Numbers confer a certain democratic legitimacy (Rose, 1999: 221). Large
numbers are seen to bolster the movements representativeness and are
used to construct it as a democratic force, one that represents ordinary
citizens and that therefore cannot be ignored by government. Activists
always claim to be acting for the common or public good and the public
is often rhetorically enlisted in the movement in the form of public
support. Support, demonstrated in opinion polls and statistics, is a sign
that the movement is strong, that it represents the democratic interest and
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Autonomy lived
I shall now look at the practices whereby activists cultivate in both themselves and others a certain individual autonomy in which they are supposedly freed from neoliberal ideology and the power of consumer society, and
made capable of participating in the struggle against domination. This
cultivation of autonomy is part of a technique of resistance. I shall focus on
what it means to be or to become an activist. To become an activist one
must first become aware (prendre conscience) and one must then endeavour
to act coherently, as people put it. Both of these are moral imperatives.
Both imply developing a sort of autonomy from power. Implicit, again, is
an opposition between power and resistance.
Activism is considered a choice, a choice made by aware and responsible individuals. Unlike the Bolivian social movements discussed by Sian
Lazar (2004b), where participation in demonstrations is obliged by an
authoritarian union hierarchy, Larzac activists believe that people cannot
be compelled to participate in the social movement, they must do so of
their own accord. However, someone whose mind is infected by the
neoliberal virus, to adopt a metaphor much liked by Attac presidents
(Cassen, 2003), is just not going to want to take to the streets. Delivering
them from ideology and making them conscious through education thus
becomes a major concern. This, of course, is nothing particularly new.
Feminists have long been concerned with consciousness raising and
Marxist intellectuals with making the workers conscious of their historical
position as part of the process of transforming a class-in-itself into a classfor-itself, thus creating a truly revolutionary force (Pratt, 2003: 14).
For Larzac-Millau activists, becoming aware entails developing a
consciousness of the existence of injustice, oppression and domination. It
means coming to an understanding that these are the products of power
and ridding oneself of various ideological assumptions, those of neoliberalism, for example, which have it that the free market makes not for
inequality but for public good (see Dumont, 1977: 61ff.). This process of
becoming aware is an ongoing one; it is considered a developmental
process through which one is formed as a person. One woman described
activism to me as something you mature into and people often speak of
an volution in their thinking whereby they become increasingly aware.
They conceive of the person as a being that constantly evolves. The struggle
of the 1970s is often seen by Larzac activists as a period of collective
evolution. It turned obedient and authority-fearing peasant farmers into
politically savvy and critical ones; ideological blindness gave way to an
enlightened awareness of power and domination (see Alland, 2001: xxxv).
The mark of awareness, then, is a certain autonomy of mind, an ability
to think critically, that is brought about by gradually excluding power in the
form of ideology. With the goal of increasing awareness in the general
public, activists engage in a range of pedagogical activities: forums, public
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refer to the basic facts of the domination of one people over another in
which Palestinians go hungry, are killed, have their lives disrupted.
Importantly, such facts are intended to interpellate, as Richard Clarke
puts it (2003: 121), to shock and to awaken people to injustice.
Becoming aware, for the activists I met, means understanding this
fundamental truth of injustice and oppression, and disabusing oneself of
any notion that Palestinians are mere terrorists, that Israel is merely defending itself against an enemy that aims at its annihilation. Such ideas are
considered to belong to the realm of ideology and power, justifications for
domination and brutality. However, the truth to which people must be
educated, activists tend to argue, is that the Israelis are aggressors and
colonizers, and Palestinians are victims. Faced with Israeli aggression,
Palestinians can only resist. The world is thus understood in terms of a
series of opposed categories: oppressor and oppressed, aggressor and
victim, power and counter-power, power and resistance. This is a language
that is used in many contexts and not just with reference to the Israel
Palestine conflict. To be aware is to place oneself on the side of counterpower, to liberate oneself from power.
In addition to cultivating awareness through forms of pedagogical
activism, becoming aware is also considered a moral task faced by the individual (cf. Berglund, 1998: 11; Humphrey, 1997). Becoming aware is a
moral imperative and a process through which activists cultivate in themselves a certain autonomy as part of an effort to resist. On the one hand,
this is a question of actively informing oneself, seeking out what is true,
distinguishing the truth from what one person called the shameless lies
that the mainstream press tends to deal in. The mass media, despite their
pedagogical usefulness, are much criticized for their biased representation of the facts and for misinforming the public. Faced with such a
situation it becomes imperative that activists inform themselves by recourse
to alternative information sources within the activist network websites,
journals and newspapers, political associations, or events such as Larzac
2003 and the European Social Forum.
On the other hand, however, activists feel compelled to seek out
injustice even in their own lives. They need to ask: how does injustice touch
me and what can I do about it? The question is a very practical one and the
key to becoming an aware individual. The transformation of society begins
with raising our own awareness (une conscientisation de nous-mme), one
woman said to me. We have to become aware of whats not right and that
inequalities exist and start by changing things in our own lives . . . Personally, I have a lot of things still to change. This woman, who came to the
Larzac in the 1970s and who was one of the most active activists I knew, was
much concerned with making an effort to consume differently by buying
fair-trade, organic or locally made produce, avoiding goods made by multinationals or in Asian sweatshops, buying for need and not in support of
that infernal economic machine of global capitalism.
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one gains control over oneself. The aim is to change the way one engages
with the world by bringing an awareness of self to all social situations in
order to live by ones non-violent beliefs and help to create a non-violent
world.
Seeking an awareness of self or a more autonomous existence, like
consuming differently and making other changes in ones daily life, is
indicative of a desire to live coherently, that is, to live in accordance with
your principles, to ensure an agreement between ideas and practice,
between the way you think about the world and the way you act in it.
Coherence (cohrence) is part of the definition of what an activist is or should
be. An activist, as Bov put it, is someone who tries to have a coherence
between their life, as lived everyday, and the ideas in which they believe and
wish to develop. The Larzac is often considered a place where people
manage, more than elsewhere, to live out their ideals. Bov told me that
there was no break between activism and daily life on the Larzac. Here,
he said, we are lucky to be able to have a coherence between the everyday
and our [activist] ideas. If the communities of the Arche and Mas Razal
provide evidence of this, so too do the attempts of many farmers since the
end of the military camp struggle to diversify their agricultural practices so
that they accord somewhat more closely with their ideals of a non-intensive,
non-productivist, non-profit-oriented agriculture. Some have cut ties with
Roquefort and instead produce their own cheeses; others sell direct to the
consumer rather than depending, at some point, on large-scale retail
outlets; many have gone organic.
Incoherences, however, are common and are much criticized by
activists themselves. On one of the monthly walks I used to go on with
Larzac activists, one woman, hot and thirsty, pulled out a can of Coca Cola.
What? I exclaimed. Where are your principles? She replied, a little
sheepishly, that it was true that she shouldnt really be drinking coke given
her anti-multinational opinions, but she needed the lift the caffeine gave
her and didnt drink coffee. She said she would try to get hold of some
fair-trade coke. Another woman, drawing on her experiences of Germany,
pointed out to me how common it was for activists in France to arrive at
protests and meetings in cars one person, one car although oil symbolized globalization. Others point to the incoherence of the intensive agricultural practices encouraged by the sheepfold given a general rejection
of productivist agriculture, or of shopping at supermarkets while affirming that the supermarket is a tool of imperialism. Some consider Bov,
the most visible face of the movement, to have become a media commodity and to have a market value, a somewhat dubious quality in a
person who affirms, on behalf of an entire movement, that the world is
not a commodity. They worry that his arguments convince less than his
image sells and that the whole strategy of courting the media is a somewhat
incoherent one. Larzac 2003, although seen by many as a great success,
was also criticized for other kinds of incoherence. I often heard examples
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of how it failed to live up to its slogan other worlds are possible. The whole
gathering was seen by some as large-scale and expensive, relying on sales of
beer and T-shirts to break even, and reproducing the relations of capitalism rather than enacting alternatives. During the clean-up, one of those
helping said to me that the volunteers (bnvoles) of whom there were
thousands asked to selflessly give of themselves were essentially little
more than workers whose labour was exploited to ensure a profit, or at
least to avoid a loss, given the 1.2 million outlay. They were necessary to
make money.
Given that activists are thoroughly embedded in globalized relations of
production, consumption and exchange, a certain incoherence is, perhaps,
inevitable. Achieving coherence is highly problematic. But it remains an
ideal and, indeed, a moral imperative because by acting coherently activists
distance themselves from the power of capitalism, consumer society and
neoliberalism, they banish it from their lives and thereby partially fulfil
their vocation as activists. To banish power is to create an autonomous space
in which to live your life, itself an act of resistance. This is something that
requires effort, an ongoing attention to the way you act in the world that is
part of the developmental process of becoming aware.
Through seeking to become aware and to live coherently, activists
produce themselves as autonomous individuals and ideologically cut themselves loose from the otherwise deterministic social forces that fashion
people as good consumers, obedient to the needs of capitalism. Awareness,
they believe, liberates them. They develop an understanding of the truth
that is independent of the conditioned blindness of capitalist ideology, an
autonomy of mind that is the basis for creating a united world. To live
coherently and autonomously is similarly to liberate oneself from power. It
is to engage in an everyday politics of resistance.
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dissolves away as a result. All you are left with is false consciousness or ideological domination or political posturing or some such thing. The problem
with this is that autonomy is a central part of the world in which activists
live. To suggest that they are not really autonomous dismisses what, for
them, is a very important notion; to affirm that they are accepts their vision
of things uncritically. Importantly, however, autonomy is not just an idea as
it is within the realm of social theory. As an idea it is a very important one,
but it is also acted out. Autonomy is done, it involves particular social practices, it is something that, in one form or another, activists create. One must
take the practice of autonomy seriously and explore just what autonomy
means, as opposed to treating it as a theoretical abstraction.
This article, then, has been an attempt to give autonomy a certain
ethnographic thickness (see Ortner, 1995). It seems to me that an all-ornothing, absolutist, abstract view of autonomy makes very little social
sense. A socially embedded and variable understanding of autonomy, in
contrast, makes focusing on the meaning and practice of autonomy
essential. It makes it important to explore the sense in which people are
autonomous and the social relations autonomy involves. There might
actually be areas of social existence that escape, more or less, the reach of
power, ideas that cant be reduced to the dominant ideology, spaces that
might be considered relatively autonomous or alternative, but whether
there are or not and precisely what this might mean is an ethnographic,
not a purely theoretical, question. Any autonomy Larzac activists might
have or exercise is never something absolute, always something relative,
always socially and historically situated, and always complex and full of
meaning. Their desire for autonomy is expressed in the attempt to do and
think things in slightly new and alternative ways that exclude the logic of
the market, reject the ideological assumptions of neoliberalism, refuse the
hegemony of multinationals and all forms of power and hierarchy.
As is clear from my ethnography, however, this is just a straightforward
matter. Central to the very meaning of autonomy, in this context, is
struggle. Autonomy, rather than being either a prerequisite of their resistance or an illusion, is an ideal for which activists must fight given the ideological and material forces demanding their acquiescence to the status quo.
It is something to increase, to cultivate, to win from the clutches of power.
The politics in which they engage, both in the public domain and in
everyday life, involves a struggle over autonomy over freedom, agency, the
power to choose, to act independently, to be free of ideology, domination
and dependency. The more of it activists have, the less they are subject to
power, the more able they are to resist, and the more they produce a
dichotomy between power (the state, the WTO, multinationals, neoliberal
ideology, hierarchy) and resistance (the social movement, activistindividuals, autonomous communities, equality) as an ethnographic and
empirical, rather than abstractly theoretical, fact.
Struggle is also at the core of Moores argument. Resistance, he
says, drawing on Gramsci, emerges not from an originary site but from
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Notes
1 My research was made possible with a doctoral scholarship from the New
Zealand Tertiary Education Commission. Early versions of this article were
presented at seminars of the Cambridge University Social Anthropology Society
and Sussex University Anthropology Department. Thanks to all who gave
comments. I would particularly like to thank Gisa Weszkalnys and Sian Lazar
for reading various drafts, and four anonymous reviewers for their very helpful
criticisms.
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2 The term antiglobalization movement is thus something of a misnomer,
although activists do still use the term antimondialisation with reference to their
politics.
3 For accounts of the events see Bov and Dufour (2000: 16ff.), Alland (2001:
169ff.), and the Spcial Anti Mac Do in the Larzac activist newspaper (GLL,
1999).
4 The book is published in English as The World is Not for Sale (Bov and Dufour,
2002).
5 Cf. Smith (2004) on the complex meaning of autonomy for Totonac organizations in Mexico. The result of their drive for autonomy and self-determination,
he argues, would be a hybrid construction (2004: 409) involving increased
political power, juridical independence and the revival of religion and subsistence agriculture, but also state aid and participation in global coffee markets.
6 Constructing a united world.
7 Attac counts many public intellectuals among its members. It is often described
as a movement for popular education oriented towards action (Attac, 2000:
26). On Attac see also Ancelovici (2002) and Pagis (2005).
8 Bov eventually received 1.32 percent of the vote in the 2007 presidential
elections.
9 On the anti-GM movement in Europe see Heller (2001), Levidow (2000),
Purdue (2000), Schurman (2004), Scott (2000), Stone (2002), Taussig (2004).
10 Three-quarters of Frances electricity is nuclear.
11 Lukes argues that the final Foucault rejected his own ultra-radical view of
power.
12 See, for example, Schneewind (1998: 13) on Kants conviction that individuals
are autonomous agents who impose morality on [them]selves; Mauss (1985),
Dumont (1986), Berman (1980) and Taylor (1989) on Western notions of the
individual; Rosanvallon (1992: 13ff.) on the new conception of individual
autonomy that universal suffrage required; Barry et al. (1996) on governmental techniques for producing individual, state, society, economy as autonomous
domains.
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Gwyn Williams was the Leach/RAI Fellow for 20056 in the Department of
Anthropology at the University of Sussex. His book, Struggles for an Alternative
Globalization: An Ethnography of Counterpower in Southern France, will be published by
Ashgate in 2008. [email: gwyn.williams@cantab.net]