Power, Resistance and the French Alterglobalization Movement

Cultivating AutonomyPower, Resistance and the FrenchAlterglobalization Movement

Gwyn Williams

Abstract This article explores the resistance of alterglobalization activists on theLarzac plateau in southern France to various forms of power. As part of a tech-nique of resistance activists cultivate themselves as autonomous politicalsubjects and organize a movement considered to be an autonomous counter-power. In addition to being a political goal, autonomy is problematically tangledup in many aspects of their lives and is of frequent concern in their efforts toresist. Autonomy also constitutes a theoretical problem in anthropologicaldiscussions of power and resistance. An autonomous space of resistance is oftenassumed by social movement theorists or denied by those who argue that powerand resistance are inseparable. I argue in this article that autonomy, understoodas something socially relative rather than absolute, is produced in the process ofresisting via particular practices through which power and resistance come tooppose one another.Keywords antiglobalization alterglobalization autonomy France hegemony Larzac power resistance social movements

The concepts of power and resistance have become ubiquitous in socialanthropology, even acquiring what Michael Brown has described as acertain theoretical hegemony (1996: 729). Since Foucault, they havebeen seen to permeate all social relations and anthropologists have beenincreasingly concerned with their manifestations not just in explicit politi-cal struggle but in everyday life. This article is concerned with the relation-ship between power and resistance as understood and lived by politicalactivists. I shall draw on fieldwork1 I carried out in 20023 on activists in southern France who were continually organizing what they calledresistance to forms of power. As part of the alterglobalization movement(le mouvement altermondialiste), they fight for a form of globalization that isalternative to the neoliberal variety they currently see being imposed bythe World Trade Organization (WTO) and by multinational corporations.2I will explore the way they attempt to resist by cultivating themselves asautonomous political subjects and organizing a movement considered tobe an autonomous counter-power. These forms of autonomy, I shallargue, are produced in the process of resisting through particular socialpractices which themselves help to create an opposition between powerand resistance.

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Autonomy has also been central to anthropological debates over powerand resistance. It constitutes something of a theoretical problem. Acommon assumption, as I shall discuss, seems to be that a certain autonomyfrom power is a prerequisite of resistance. Autonomy makes resistancepossible. Others have suggested, however, that resistance and power areinseparable and have challenged the link between autonomy and resist-ance. Autonomy, here, becomes either something of a romantic illusion,dissolving away altogether, or it becomes the product of power and part ofa technique of domination. Foucault is the key influence on those who takesuch a position. He argued that modern forms of power produceautonomous individuals who internalize discipline and govern themselves(1977 [1975]). More recently some writers have linked autonomy to therise of neoliberal globalization and governmentality (Rose, 1999). SianLazar writes that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Boliviaextend the power of government in their attempts (though not entirelysuccessful) to create . . . empowered individual, entrepreneurial, activecitizens who will take responsibility for their own . . . welfare, and who areprepared for the market rather than the state to provide for them (2004a:302). Barbara Cruikshank, in her discussion of self-help activists, arguesalong similar lines. The technologies of citizenship they adopt, whileaimed at making individuals politically active and capable of self-government, are actually modes of constituting and regulating citizens.Their goal may be to create some form of autonomy and empowerment self-help, self-sufficiency, or self-esteem but technologies of citizenshipare in fact strategies for governing the very subjects whose problems theyseek to redress (1999: 12; see also Trouillot, 2001).

For others autonomy is a central aspect of liberation rather than domi-nation. Alain Touraine (2001), in a book on politics and globalization,argues that moving beyond neoliberalism depends on the action ofautonomous social actors and social movements, while the struggle forautonomy, June Nash suggests, is what unites diverse social movements inthe neoliberal age (2005: 22). Hardt and Negri also link the possibility ofliberation from the forces of Empire to the potential of the multitude forautonomy. The multitude that multiple social subject whose difference[unlike that of the people] cannot be reduced to sameness (2005: 99) is capable, they write, of forming society autonomously; this, we will see,is central to its democratic possibilities (2005: xviixviii). The activists Ishall discuss similarly invoke autonomy in their attempts to resist neoliberalcapitalism. Like previous generations of activists, particularly anarchists andthose who took part in the mass protests of May 68, it is something theyvalue, to which they aspire and which they try to enact (see Graeber, 2004:2ff.; Pratt, 2003: 645; Ross, 2002; Touraine, 1968).

How is it, then, that autonomy can be seen as so central to processesof both domination and resistance? How best may we understand thenotion of autonomy and in what sense is it theoretically useful? In the

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course of this article I shall offer an ethnographic critique of autonomy,with the hope that the ethnographic understanding I develop might shedsome light on theoretical debates. Very briefly, my goal is to show thatautonomy must be understood in relative and not absolute terms, and as asocial and historical phenomenon in which struggle is vital.

The Larzac

For over 30 years the Larzac plateau in the south of France has been wellknown for its political activism. The Larzac is a sheep farming area thatbecame famous in the 1970s after the government decided to extend themilitary camp on the plateau, provoking a decade of protest on the part oflocal peasant farmers threatened with expropriation (see Alland, 2001;Martin, 1987; Vuarin, 2005). Over the course of the 1970s, the Larzac itselfbecame what people call a symbol of resistance. What made the Larzacstruggle remarkable is that the farmers often God-fearing, obedient andconservative formed an alliance with thousands of liberated outsiders hippies, students, Maoist revolutionaries, radicals from May 68 and ordinarycitizens who saw the struggle of the farmers for their land as part of a muchbroader fight against state power, hierarchy, inequality and capitalism. A fewoutsiders settled on the plateau, occupying farms the army had managed topurchase and grazing sheep like their peasant neighbours. They consideredtheir activities to be both agricultural and political, a demonstration to thewarmongers of the life-sustaining capacity of the land. Many thousands ofothers contributed funds, came to help the farmers in the summer, andparticipated in an ongoing series of demonstrations, occupations, illegalconstruction projects, marches, symbolic protests and mass gatherings, thelargest of which attracted 100,000 people to the plateau. The struggle was anon-violent one. Although certain outsiders had sometimes violent revol-utionary aims, the peasants consciously adopted non-violence as a politicalstrategy following the visit of a religious leader and Gandhian disciple calledLanza 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 whennewly elected Socialist President Franois Mitterrand cancelled the campextension in 1981. The struggle, however, generated a sort of culture ofprotest in the area which continues to this day. Following their victory, thepeasants and the neorural residents of the Larzac decided to return thesolidarity and support received from outsiders during the struggle. Theyturned their attention to political battles in the outside world, most notablythe Kanak independence movement in New Caledonia. Today, thestruggles of the Palestinians and the Kurds for self-determination are ofspecial interest to Larzac activists, as are the battles of people everywhereagainst genetically modified crops and neoliberal globalization.

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Williams: Cultivating Autonomy


Twenty years after the exemplary struggle of the 1970s, the Larzac wasthrust back into the national spotlight in the summer of 1999 when a groupof activists dismantled a McDonalds restaurant being built on theoutskirts of Millau, a town of 20,000 at the foot of the plateau, as part ofwhat they called a non-violent and symbolic protest.3 The action was ledby Jos Bov, Larzac activist and spokesperson of the Confdrationpaysanne, the second largest farmers union in France. It was triggered bythe imposition of US import tariffs on a hundred or so European products,among them Roquefort cheese, the mainstay of the local economy. Thetariffs were a retaliation for a European Union (EU) ruling condemnedby the WTO refusing the importation of hormone-treated meat from theUnited States. The tariffs angered local farmers who sell ewes milk to theRoquefort firms. But the dismantling was much more than a corporatistprotest against the United States by farmers concerned with their liveli-hoods. McDonalds came to symbolize everything that the activists involved,many of whom were not farmers, consider wrong with globalization: stan-dardization and the effacement of local diversity; commercialization andthe commodification of the world; the privileging of the private over thepublic good; the liberalization of the global economy being driven by theWTO. Against such neoliberal forces, activists assert that the world is nota 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 ofthe movement.

Extensive media coverage of the McDonalds affair made Bov into ahousehold name and one of the most celebrated political figures in France.It helped to cement the Confdration paysanne at the forefront of themovement and it reinforced the Larzacs reputation as a symbol of resist-ance. The McDonalds dismantling was seen by the activists I knew as thebeginning of a new era of protest, the event that gave the social movementa new lease of life and which encouraged activists across the country to sayno to the WTO and the neoliberal economic reforms it promotes. Formany, the WTO is the greatest single cause of the worlds injustice and itswrongs, and is the power they are concerned to resist. In 2003, Larzac-Millauactivists, with the assistance of activist groups in Paris and elsewhere, organ-ized an enormous gathering on the plateau against the WTO. The gather-ing, known as Larzac 2003, was held over three days in August and attractedan estimated 300,000 people to a series of concerts and political forums.Participation in Larzac 2003 was diverse. In addition to the highly visiblepresence of the Confdration paysanne and Attac, one of the major alter-globalization organizations in the country, the gathering involved the stallsand displays of 150 activist associations and unions from across France,concerned with everything from human rights and corporate capitalism tohousing, home-birthing and open source software. There were forums anddebates on the WTO, agriculture, state repression, nuclear energy, geneticmodification, colonialism, Palestine, Kurdistan, fair-trade, the liberalization

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of public services and numerous other topics. Despite the diverse range oftheir interests, it is the commonality between separate activist associationswhich tends to be stressed. They are generally considered to be engaged instruggles against the domination of the meek by the powerful, all withinthe context of neoliberal globalization. While Larzac activists are particu-larly concerned with the WTO, Palestine, state repression and geneticmodification, they oppose power and domination in all its forms. As partof what they call the social movement (le mouvement social), a term whichis often used in the singular, their aim is to resist.

The social movement

In a sense, the prerequisite of resistance is a certain autonomy, that of thesocial movement itself and that of individual activists. Perhaps it would bebetter to say, however, that resistance, in the particular context I consider,involves a struggle over autonomy over the power to choose, to act inde-pendently, to be free of ideology, domination and dependency. Autonomy,for activists, is something power, in its various forms, denies, and it is some-thing they aim to win, increase and cultivate. It is of constant concern intheir efforts to publicly resist and is also problematically tangled up in manyaspects of their everyday lives.5 Their autonomy, I shall argue, may be bestunderstood as the product of certain social practices through which powerand resistance come to oppose one another. Let me look first at the socialmovement.

Activists from the Larzac and Millau often stress the importance of thesocial movements autonomy, by which they mean its independence frompolitical parties and their power-seeking programmes. This stress onautonomy is nothing new in the broader context of French political move-ments. In particular, it was a feature of the anarcho-syndicalists of the early20th century and of similar movements elsewhere in Europe (Pratt, 2003:46ff.). Larzac activists, however, often trace the autonomy of the movementtoday back to the struggle against the military camp in the 1970s. Duringthe struggle, I was often told, all decision-making regarding goals, strategyand means remained in the hands of those 103 farmers whose livelihoodsand land were threatened by the extension of the military camp. Theyrefused to allow their struggle to be appropriated by parties or, indeed,by Maoists and other outsiders on the extra-parliamentary left (Martin,1987: 126) and assimilated to their self-interested agenda.

Today, activists aim to build a mouvement social autonome and ensure themovements autonomy by organizing in particular ways. While I was in thefield, an association called CUMS (Construire un monde solidaire)6 wasformed to plan Larzac 2003. People were adamant that CUMS be open toall individuals, unions, societies and associations, but closed to politicalparties. This closure was deemed necessary to maintain the movements

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autonomy. CUMS charter (2003) situates it firmly within the framework of the autonomous social movement . . . outside political parties. In this, itreflects a tendency in the alterglobalization movement more generally,independence from parties being an ideal clearly expressed, for example,in the charter of the World Social Forum (WSF) (Aguiton and Cardon,2005; see Appadurai, 2002: 28; Nash, 2005: 4). In practice, the distinctionbetween party and movement is not quite so easy to maintain. The WSFs inPorto Alegre received important institutional backing from the BrazilianWorkers Party; alterglobalization activists often champion the parties ofVenezuelan president Hugo Chvez or Bolivias Evo Morales; and left-wingparties do participate in social forums and events such as Larzac 2003. Theideal of an autonomous social movement, however, remains. Activists tendto be highly sceptical of parties. The French Socialists come in for thestrongest criticism for having entirely abandoned their principles, withtheir stall dismantled at Larzac 2003 and their party secretary attackedearlier in the year at a G8 counter-summit near Geneva. Those parties thatdo manage to gain a certain acceptance by those in the social movement generally small parties on the far left manage to present themselves assharing a distaste of neoliberalism and a desire for social justice.

The social movement is considered a movement of citizens, of ordinarypeople, not of the powerful or of those who seek power. The basic differ-ence between a party and a movement, for the activists I knew, consists inthe perceived fact that parties seek to get into power, while the socialmovement seeks a better world through forms of resistance and directaction. The movement is unconcerned to acquire power. It concerns itselfwith something more fundamental: the fight for justice, basic rights, thesocial good, freedoms and equality for all, and not the power of a few (theparty) over others. Ideally the movement also functions in a way that isdifferent from political parties, in what people call a horizontal, partici-patory or bottom up ( partir de la base) way. CUMS thus lacks hierarchicalstructures and formal offices in which power can be concentrated. Thereis no president or secretary and meetings provide forums at which anyonecan have their say. People are imagined to participate in the movement asautonomous individuals. In principle, any individual can participate in anyway they see fit, the main criterion simply being a desire to do so, althoughin practice there are certainly dominant figures and informal hierarchiesimpinging on peoples autonomy and providing a source of considerabletension.

In the strict and literal sense of the term as activists use it, anautonomous social movement would thus be one in which political partiesplay no significant role. More broadly, however, the term seems to imply anabsence of power, that represented by parties, by the state, by hierarchicalorganizational structures, by various techniques of domination, by ideology.It is power in all its forms that activists oppose and an autonomous socialmovement, for them, is one that is opposed to all forms of power. This

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opposition to power is ideally the movements defining feature, but onlybecomes a reality to the extent that the movement is autonomous and anti-hierarchical. Activists concern with autonomy from political parties isreally an expression of a wider concern to make the social movement in-dependent of the whole realm of power, however power is understood.

Another indication of this is the reluctance to admit a dissenting voiceinto the movement. Public debates (dbats) or forums, which activists aremuch concerned to organize, almost never involve the participation ofsomeone with an opposing view of the issue under discussion; never do theygive power a voice (cf. Berglund, 1998: 137ff.). During a meeting of AttacMillau in preparation for Larzac 2003, there was a debate on this very issue.Should someone who, due to professional affiliations, was suspected of notbeing firmly against neoliberalism be allowed to participate in a forumAttac was organizing on the commercialization of public health? Theperson in question had asked to participate. Those at the meeting worried,however, that he might hijack the debate for his own ends. He posed athreat to the social movement because it was feared that, if the man turnedout to be a neoliberal, power might enter where it ought not go, threaten-ing to undo the work of decontaminating minds that Jacques Nikonoff,national president of Attac, considered it to be Attacs role to accomplish.7

The concern to exclude power thus implies the categorization ofpeople into activists and dangerous others, members and non-members.While activists imagine the alterglobalization movement extending theworld over and often describe it as open to all, as a movement of activistsit can never include the powerful. Debate occurs within the movementbetween those of like mind, and at workshops, forums and protests thespeakers very often find themselves preaching to the converted. Activistsrecognize this and sometimes wryly describe such events as masses(messes). The social movement is selective and exclusive, in this sense, openonly to those people and ideas that contribute to its ability to resist. Itsclosure is a condition of its strength and a measure of its autonomy, anautonomy that is produced through the concern to exclude power.

The movement today is often described as a counter-power; thecontrol of power through protest and civil disobedience is its aim. Theplace the international antiglobalization movement must have . . . is as acounter-power and not at all as a power, one person told me. While theself-declared autonomy from political parties entails that activists do notaim to take control of the state, they do aim to control the power wieldedby those in government and to actively counter the indiscretions of thepowerful. Power and counter-power ought not to be confused. FollowingLarzac 2003, there were calls in certain quarters for Bov to stand for presi-dent. His popularity had been boosted by the gathering and his recentrelease from prison for his role in the destruction of GM grain. Hedisabused people of the idea, however, which was based on a conflation ofpower with counter-power and a complete misunderstanding of the role

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of the social movement. For many, Bov included, entering into the hallsof power is not an effective way of changing society. It merely subordinatesyou to an unjust social order, fixes you within a hierarchical institutionalframework and robs you of the potential to bring about change. Thequestion of effectiveness is key. What is important is the ability to opposethe powerful and their perpetuation of injustice and to give the relativelypowerless a voice.

More recently, Bov himself seems to have been wondering whether ornot the presidency would not serve the interests of ordinary people and ofthe oppressed. Newspapers reported periodically during 2006 that Bovhad been considering standing for president if he could gain the supportof 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 thatBov, should he get into power, will not abandon the principles and thetaste for action that have seen the man himself who is sometimes said toincarnate the movement described as a counter-power. But others arerather more sceptical and some consider seeking a presidential mandate tobe profoundly mistaken, the error of someone concerned more with hisown aggrandisement than with the social good (see Lesay, 2006). As presi-dent, 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-knownactivist, 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 ofbuilding one big social movement out of diverse and independent socialmovements. To effectively resist, the social movement must increase itsstrength (rather than its power) relative to the forces of power to whichit is opposed as part of creating what people call a rapport de force. Thereare two ways of creating a rapport de force, someone once declared at ameeting prior to Larzac 2003: through arms, a path firmly rejected by mostalterglobalization activists (the local movement has been self-styled as non-violent since the struggle against the military camp of the 1970s); andthrough numbers. People must be attracted to the movement, convincedto participate. Attracting the greatest possible number was always the aimof the organizers of Larzac 2003. Numbers, I often heard it said, make itimpossible for the powerful to ignore the demands of the social movement.Numbers confer a certain democratic legitimacy (Rose, 1999: 221). Largenumbers are seen to bolster the movements representativeness and areused to construct it as a democratic force, one that represents ordinarycitizens and that therefore cannot be ignored by government. Activistsalways claim to be acting for the common or public good and the publicis often rhetorically enlisted in the movement in the form of publicsupport. Support, demonstrated in opinion polls and statistics, is a signthat the movement is strong, that it represents the democratic interest and

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will of the people. Seventy percent of consumers are opposed to GM food,states a newsletter from one of the Larzacs activist associations in arguingthat the social movement and civil disobedience can therefore count onimportant support amongst the collectivity (Larzac Solidarits, 2003: 11).

The greater the numbers, the greater the movements strength, thegreater its autonomy and the greater the opposition between power andcounter-power appears to be. It is in the street, the public space of demon-strations (see Barry, 1999), where numbers and the counter-power of themovement are most visible and where resistance is best exercised. Atdemonstrations where there is a large congregation of people, themovement emerges as thing-like, a collective force of resistance capable ofhaving political effects (Weszkalnys, 2004: 117). The crowd of demon-strators attracts people to participate in it, it attracts the police to controlit, and the media who, through their coverage, demonstrate its force anddistribute its message to a broad audience (cf. Canetti, 2000: 15ff.; Hardtand Negri, 2005: 100).

But even at small protests the autonomy of the social movement ismade apparent and the opposition between power and counter-power isenacted. Protests very often have the power of the state or capital as theirtarget. Many are performed outside what are considered the symbols ofthe state such as prefectures or courthouses. Other protests target capital-ist power, that of the multinationals who produce GM seed or ofMcDonalds. At such protests, which may involve barely 100 people, as wellas at marches of hundreds of thousands, power is always considered presentin the guise of security forces and the police, the forces of order, as peopleput it. But power tends to be spatially confined and the opposition betweenpower and resistance to be spatially represented. Resistance createsautonomous domains of action from which power is excluded. The streetis always appropriated for marches, occupations take over space, GM cropdestructions take control of the fields. The forces of order are oftencomplicit in this separation of power and counter-power. They frequentlyencircle the demonstrators and the space they occupy, or line up againstthem, rather than mingling with the crowds as they tend to do at carnivalsand street festivals. At large marches, riot police are visible at the ends ofside streets, lined up across the road, while the protesters occupy the routeof the march and control activity within it. March organizers even form outof groups of protesters their own Security Service (Service dOrdre) to ensureorder and a trouble-free march. The police play no role and if they arepresent, they are invisible. At small demonstrations, police and protestersoften face off against one another. As soon as there is confrontation atprotests the use of tear gas or batons the opposition is made evident.We are in a logic of opposition someone told me after one such protestwhere activists had attempted to gain access to a GM research company andhad been foiled by security and police.

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Autonomy lived

I shall now look at the practices whereby activists cultivate in both them-selves and others a certain individual autonomy in which they are suppos-edly freed from neoliberal ideology and the power of consumer society, andmade capable of participating in the struggle against domination. Thiscultivation of autonomy is part of a technique of resistance. I shall focus onwhat it means to be or to become an activist. To become an activist onemust first become aware (prendre conscience) and one must then endeavourto act coherently, as people put it. Both of these are moral imperatives.Both imply developing a sort of autonomy from power. Implicit, again, isan opposition between power and resistance.

Activism is considered a choice, a choice made by aware and respon-sible individuals. Unlike the Bolivian social movements discussed by SianLazar (2004b), where participation in demonstrations is obliged by anauthoritarian union hierarchy, Larzac activists believe that people cannotbe compelled to participate in the social movement, they must do so oftheir own accord. However, someone whose mind is infected by theneoliberal virus, to adopt a metaphor much liked by Attac presidents(Cassen, 2003), is just not going to want to take to the streets. Deliveringthem from ideology and making them conscious through education thusbecomes a major concern. This, of course, is nothing particularly new.Feminists have long been concerned with consciousness raising andMarxist intellectuals with making the workers conscious of their historicalposition as part of the process of transforming a class-in-itself into a class-for-itself, thus creating a truly revolutionary force (Pratt, 2003: 14).

For Larzac-Millau activists, becoming aware entails developing aconsciousness of the existence of injustice, oppression and domination. Itmeans coming to an understanding that these are the products of powerand ridding oneself of various ideological assumptions, those of neo-liberalism, for example, which have it that the free market makes not forinequality but for public good (see Dumont, 1977: 61ff.). This process ofbecoming aware is an ongoing one; it is considered a developmentalprocess through which one is formed as a person. One woman describedactivism to me as something you mature into and people often speak ofan volution in their thinking whereby they become increasingly aware.They conceive of the person as a being that constantly evolves. The struggleof the 1970s is often seen by Larzac activists as a period of collectiveevolution. It turned obedient and authority-fearing peasant farmers intopolitically savvy and critical ones; ideological blindness gave way to anenlightened awareness of power and domination (see Alland, 2001: xxxv).

The mark of awareness, then, is a certain autonomy of mind, an abilityto think critically, that is brought about by gradually excluding power in theform of ideology. With the goal of increasing awareness in the generalpublic, activists engage in a range of pedagogical activities: forums, public

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debates, information evenings, article writing and so on. Many protestshave a pedagogical aim, indeed, education is often their principal aim.They are often targeted at the media, or at journalists who are likely to besympathetic, and described as actions mdiatiques. Actions such as theMcDonalds dismantling or the invasion of the Louvre on 14 July 2003 inprotest at state repression of the social movement (symbolized by Bovsimprisonment) are performed for the press and are self-consciouslyspectacular (cf. Castells, 1997: 106; Touraine, 2001: 57ff.). Spectacle (likelarge numbers) provides an important way of attracting journalists who, ifthey themselves can be educated, then play a key role in carrying the activistmessage to a wider public and stimulating an evolution of debate. GMcrop destructions or neutralizations are here exemplary.9 They aredesigned to provoke public debate and to force the issue of genetic modi-fication in agriculture onto the political agenda (cf. Pagis, 2005: 5). Thelack of debate that activists perceive is indicative of a lack of awareness ofthe ways in which GM companies seek total control of world agriculture(particularly through patenting) in their own private interest. It justifies, inpart, the necessity of uprooting GM field trials as a way of highlighting,with the assistance of media coverage, the true agenda of biotechnologyfirms.

While the media are considered an essential ally in the struggle againstforms of domination and the sympathies of journalists are cultivated,activists themselves engage in direct forms of pedagogical practice in orderto raise public awareness and convert people to their cause. Often theirconcern is to put the truth on display in the form of facts. At the Hour ofSilence for Palestine, a weekly activist gathering in the streets of Millauwhich normally consisted of around 20 people, there were often largehand-written displays of the numbers of Palestinians killed and the destruc-tion wrought by the Israeli army on homes and fields. The facts were statedbluntly. In January: 70 Palestinians killed by Israeli armed forces, on thenight of 1213 May, 33 houses destroyed, 58 families cast into the street, 15injured, this week . . . in the Gaza strip, 200 hectares of agricultural landrazed. There were often displays calling for a boycott of produce that wasmade in Israel and identifying brands of clothing, orange juice, avocados,lemons and other fruit likely to be of Israeli provenance in an attempt tocreate educated shoppers out of those who passed. One day, someonebrought along large photos graphically depicting what the captions calledsuffering and massacre. In addition, someone usually handed out oneor two A4 pages to passers-by, providing them with greater detail, argumentand a language of interpretation for what was going on in Palestine. Oneleaflet told, in terms that were common, of Palestinians hunger andhumiliation, of their resistance, of Israels crimes against humanity andits Palestinian victims, of its brutal and murderous colonization, of itsdaily violation of . . . human rights, of how it asphyxiates the Palestinianeconomy, of the apartheid in Palestine. Such language was considered to

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refer to the basic facts of the domination of one people over another inwhich Palestinians go hungry, are killed, have their lives disrupted.Importantly, such facts are intended to interpellate, as Richard Clarkeputs it (2003: 121), to shock and to awaken people to injustice.

Becoming aware, for the activists I met, means understanding thisfundamental truth of injustice and oppression, and disabusing oneself ofany notion that Palestinians are mere terrorists, that Israel is merely defend-ing itself against an enemy that aims at its annihilation. Such ideas areconsidered to belong to the realm of ideology and power, justifications fordomination and brutality. However, the truth to which people must beeducated, activists tend to argue, is that the Israelis are aggressors andcolonizers, and Palestinians are victims. Faced with Israeli aggression,Palestinians can only resist. The world is thus understood in terms of aseries of opposed categories: oppressor and oppressed, aggressor andvictim, power and counter-power, power and resistance. This is a languagethat is used in many contexts and not just with reference to the IsraelPalestine conflict. To be aware is to place oneself on the side of counter-power, to liberate oneself from power.

In addition to cultivating awareness through forms of pedagogicalactivism, becoming aware is also considered a moral task faced by the indi-vidual (cf. Berglund, 1998: 11; Humphrey, 1997). Becoming aware is amoral imperative and a process through which activists cultivate in them-selves 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 liesthat the mainstream press tends to deal in. The mass media, despite theirpedagogical usefulness, are much criticized for their biased represen-tation of the facts and for misinforming the public. Faced with such asituation it becomes imperative that activists inform themselves by recourseto alternative information sources within the activist network websites,journals and newspapers, political associations, or events such as Larzac2003 and the European Social Forum.

On the other hand, however, activists feel compelled to seek outinjustice even in their own lives. They need to ask: how does injustice touchme and what can I do about it? The question is a very practical one and thekey to becoming an aware individual. The transformation of society beginswith raising our own awareness (une conscientisation de nous-mme), onewoman said to me. We have to become aware of whats not right and thatinequalities exist and start by changing things in our own lives . . . Person-ally, I have a lot of things still to change. This woman, who came to theLarzac in the 1970s and who was one of the most active activists I knew, wasmuch concerned with making an effort to consume differently by buyingfair-trade, organic or locally made produce, avoiding goods made by multi-nationals or in Asian sweatshops, buying for need and not in support ofthat infernal economic machine of global capitalism.

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All this is part of seeking a certain autonomy from capitalism, consumersociety, the state and other realms where power is considered to operate,an autonomy that is lived out. Many on the Larzac attempt to do this in oneway or another. They aim, to varying degrees and in various ways, to liverelatively simply, in full respect of the environment and their fellow humanbeings, and to maintain a control over their own lives that they feel anuncritical integration into the world of wage work and consumption wouldmake impossible. A stand-out example is the farm of Mas Razal. In 2003,the farms handful of inhabitants, the first of whom arrived in 1996, had aproject to create what they imagined would be a more or less autonomouscommunity beyond the reach, as much as possible, of consumer society.Their aim was to abandon capitalism and to build a micro-society that washorizontal and egalitarian as opposed to the hierarchical society into whichmost are integrated and subordinate. The idea was to live ecologically, tobuild their own housing, to grow their own food, to rely on what was locallyavailable for the majority of their needs and not to depend on such thingsas nuclear energy or the market economy. Were against the system . . .for us the aim is to get out of it. By getting out, we stop feeding it, oneperson explained. When, thinking of the many mass protests I had been onwith Larzac activists, I asked why the aim was to get out of the system ratherthan actively changing it, the reply was unequivocal: getting out ischanging. It serves no purpose to march against nuclear power and thento plug into the national grid, he told me.10 Their aim was thus to live outin everyday life the ideals to which they aspired, to be radically anti-capitalist. Because they rejected capitalist society, they withdrew from itin an attempt to create a locally based society that was autonomous ofcapitalism. This, for them, was a political act, an act of resistance.

The Community of the Arche (ark), established on the plateau in the1970s to assist in the struggle against the military camp and based on prin-ciples of non-violence and simplicity, is similarly oriented toward trying tobe as autonomous as possible, as one of its members put it. By this hemeant escaping dependence on big business (Roquefort, for example, andsupermarkets) and avoiding capitalist excess in both production andconsumption. But he was also speaking of an individual and spiritualautonomy. Arche members stress the importance of grappling with the waydomination dwells within your own person and the way ones own behav-iour participates in reproducing forms of domination, conflict or in-equality. Everyone, they believe, has an aggressive side that it is imperativeto control if one is serious about creating a better world. One man told methat we [members of the Arche] are not non-violent . . . but people whotry to . . . manage our own violence. . . . Violence is inherent to all and itneeds to be managed. . . . First recognize it . . . and then get rid of it littleby little. In order to change the world, one must continually engage inwork on oneself (travail sur soi), as Arche members call it, something thatinvolves an exercise in self-development and the cultivation of autonomy as

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one gains control over oneself. The aim is to change the way one engageswith the world by bringing an awareness of self to all social situations inorder to live by ones non-violent beliefs and help to create a non-violentworld.

Seeking an awareness of self or a more autonomous existence, likeconsuming differently and making other changes in ones daily life, isindicative of a desire to live coherently, that is, to live in accordance withyour 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 shouldbe. An activist, as Bov put it, is someone who tries to have a coherencebetween their life, as lived everyday, and the ideas in which they believe andwish to develop. The Larzac is often considered a place where peoplemanage, more than elsewhere, to live out their ideals. Bov told me thatthere 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 everydayand our [activist] ideas. If the communities of the Arche and Mas Razalprovide evidence of this, so too do the attempts of many farmers since theend of the military camp struggle to diversify their agricultural practices sothat they accord somewhat more closely with their ideals of a non-intensive,non-productivist, non-profit-oriented agriculture. Some have cut ties withRoquefort and instead produce their own cheeses; others sell direct to theconsumer rather than depending, at some point, on large-scale retailoutlets; many have gone organic.

Incoherences, however, are common and are much criticized byactivists themselves. On one of the monthly walks I used to go on withLarzac activists, one woman, hot and thirsty, pulled out a can of Coca Cola.What? I exclaimed. Where are your principles? She replied, a littlesheepishly, that it was true that she shouldnt really be drinking coke givenher anti-multinational opinions, but she needed the lift the caffeine gaveher and didnt drink coffee. She said she would try to get hold of somefair-trade coke. Another woman, drawing on her experiences of Germany,pointed out to me how common it was for activists in France to arrive atprotests and meetings in cars one person, one car although oil symbol-ized globalization. Others point to the incoherence of the intensive agri-cultural practices encouraged by the sheepfold given a general rejectionof productivist agriculture, or of shopping at supermarkets while affirm-ing that the supermarket is a tool of imperialism. Some consider Bov,the most visible face of the movement, to have become a media com-modity and to have a market value, a somewhat dubious quality in aperson who affirms, on behalf of an entire movement, that the world isnot a commodity. They worry that his arguments convince less than hisimage sells and that the whole strategy of courting the media is a somewhatincoherent 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 wholegathering was seen by some as large-scale and expensive, relying on sales ofbeer and T-shirts to break even, and reproducing the relations of capital-ism rather than enacting alternatives. During the clean-up, one of thosehelping said to me that the volunteers (bnvoles) of whom there werethousands asked to selflessly give of themselves were essentially littlemore than workers whose labour was exploited to ensure a profit, or atleast to avoid a loss, given the 1.2 million outlay. They were necessary tomake money.

Given that activists are thoroughly embedded in globalized relations ofproduction, consumption and exchange, a certain incoherence is, perhaps,inevitable. Achieving coherence is highly problematic. But it remains anideal and, indeed, a moral imperative because by acting coherently activistsdistance themselves from the power of capitalism, consumer society andneoliberalism, they banish it from their lives and thereby partially fulfiltheir vocation as activists. To banish power is to create an autonomous spacein which to live your life, itself an act of resistance. This is something thatrequires effort, an ongoing attention to the way you act in the world that ispart of the developmental process of becoming aware.

Through seeking to become aware and to live coherently, activistsproduce themselves as autonomous individuals and ideologically cut them-selves loose from the otherwise deterministic social forces that fashionpeople as good consumers, obedient to the needs of capitalism. Awareness,they believe, liberates them. They develop an understanding of the truththat is independent of the conditioned blindness of capitalist ideology, anautonomy of mind that is the basis for creating a united world. To livecoherently and autonomously is similarly to liberate oneself from power. Itis to engage in an everyday politics of resistance.

Power, resistance and autonomy

What I have tried to show with the preceding ethnography is how the resist-ance of French alterglobalization activists involves a self-conscious culti-vation of certain sorts of autonomy: the autonomy of the social movement,which ideally emerges as a counter-power; and the autonomy of individuals,activists empowered by their critical awareness of the workings of power andwho attempt to live out their ideals in everyday life. The autonomy of bothactivists and the movement as a whole is understood to consist of theirrelative independence from power. It cant be taken for granted becausepower, in the form of ideology, always has a tendency to contaminatepeoples minds, as activists often put it, just as the power of multinationalsor the state has a tendency to dominate their lives. As well as beingdefended, autonomy is something that must be won and increased in theprocess of resisting. The struggle with power is thus a struggle over

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autonomy. Autonomy is what separates power from resistance, in a sense,thus dividing the world into two.

I am here making a claim about particular people, the practices inwhich they engage and their vision of the world. But what broader impli-cations does my ethnography have for anthropological theory? Is autonomyuseful as an analytical notion? A number of anthropologists have beenconcerned with this question. Their effort to eliminate the dichotomybetween power and resistance, as Robert Fletcher puts it (2001: 56), hasled them to question the very notion of autonomy. Previously, it is argued,power and resistance had been understood as things opposed historicalforces (capitalist and working classes), or public and private transcripts with resistance emerging from an originary space of autonomy beyond thereach of power (Moore, 1998: 352), from a space of autonomousconsciousness (Fletcher, 2001: 48), or from an authentic and wholesubject (Kondo, 1990: 224). But neither domination nor resistance areautonomous, in the words of Haynes and Prakash (1991: 3). Resistanceand power are inseparable, the argument goes, and there can be noautonomous or originary domain of resistance (see also Abu-Lughod,1990; Mitchell, 1990; OHanlon, 1991; Reed-Danahay, 1993).

This idea that power and resistance are of the same cloth and thatautonomy is a red herring has a particular theoretical genealogy. Many ofthe authors I cite above are inspired by Foucaults work in Discipline andPunish (1977 [1975]) on power as productive of human subjectivities andby a much cited passage from The History of Sexuality (1990 [1976]: 95):resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power (e.g.cited in Abu-Lughod, 1990: 42; Fletcher, 2001: 56; Moore, 1998: 353). Froma Foucauldian perspective, the actors who resist are produced by power.Power thus creates possibilities for resistance; it enters into us and becomesthe foundation on which resistance may be built (although power mayappear, through Timothy Mitchells effect of enframing [1990: 569], to beexternal to us). Autonomy, here, is nowhere to be found because powerdwells within us all; or, alternatively, autonomy is everywhere in the formof the autonomous individual, for example because it is an effect ofpower. In the latter case, autonomy readily becomes part of a technique ofdomination and the forms of neoliberal governmentality to which I alludein the introduction to this article.

Foucault, it must be said, is very interesting on power, but resistance issomething about which he has relatively little to say. The aim of the anthro-pologists of resistance who draw on his work, however, has been to free usfrom what Lila Abu-Lughod called the romance of resistance (1990), theidea that that those who resist are untouched by power or that power issomehow ineffective. This romance is reflected in the claims of scholars ofsocial movements about the way movements have alternative visions[s](Nash, 2001: 1522), speak a language that appears to be entirely theirown (Melucci, 1996: 1), practise cultural innovation (Escobar, 1992: 70),

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propose significant discourses of difference (Escobar, 2001: 158), orfoster . . . alternative modernities (Alvarez et al., 1998: 9). These writersplace emphasis on social movements difference and on their autonomyfrom power (cf. Fox, 1997; Starn, 1992).

But it is the highly influential James Scott, whose great virtue . . . wasto challenge the [concept] of hegemony (Fletcher, 2001: 46), who hascome in for particular criticism for entertaining the idea that power andresistance occupy separate and autonomous spaces (Fletcher, 2001; Gal,1995; Mitchell, 1990: 563; Moore, 1998: 351). Scott, Donald Moore argues,assumes some sort of autonomous, sovereign self and his idea of hiddentranscripts points to sites . . . power does not saturate or colonize (1998:3501, emphasis removed). Moore suggests that such realms of autonomy,in Scotts view, are what allow people to resist, to see past hegemonicframeworks, to penetrate and demystify the prevailing ideology based ontheir daily material experience, to cite Scott himself (1985: 317). ButScotts mistake is to think that such an autonomous space of resistanceexists. Rather than conceiving of a space of subalternity, insurgency, andresistance outside of power, domination, or hegemony, the challengebecomes to understand their mutual imbrication, Moore writes (1998:353), while Fletcher insists that resistance must be seen as a product ofpower (2001: 56).

For critics of a Foucauldian approach, however, abandoning the idea ofan autonomous space of resistance imposes an hegemony a notion whoseexcesses Scott was concerned to argue against that, in a sense, is utterlywatertight. The baby goes out with the bathwater. For Slavoj Zizek, Foucaultsabsolute continuity of resistance to power and his lack of a notion of antag-onism do away with any sort of political subject who might resist (1999: 251,2567). While Steven Lukes, in a recent book on power, suggests thatFoucaults ultra-radical concept of power as all-pervasive and productiveleaves little room for agency, freedom, rationality or autonomy (2005: 957,1067; see also Sangren, 1995).11 And without these things, how can therebe resistance worthy of the name? If resistance is to be seen as a product ofpower, as Fletcher would have it, what sort of resistance is it? If power iseverywhere and real autonomy nowhere, does the notion of resistance evenmake theoretical sense? Is the cultivation of autonomy and awareness on thepart of Larzac activists a case of their resistance or of their failure to escapea regime of domination and governmentality in which autonomy is central?Are the ways in which they live or the manner in which they organize themovement evidence of their autonomy or of their lack of it?

But I think such questions are not very productive ones. The wholedebate over autonomy has been one in which autonomy is too readilyunderstood in theoretical terms as something absolute, something youeither have or lack. Autonomy appears as an all-or-nothing concept. If youcan assert it, well and good. And if you can argue, on the basis of theory orobservation, that any claims to autonomy are unwarranted, then autonomy

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dissolves away as a result. All you are left with is false consciousness or ideo-logical domination or political posturing or some such thing. The problemwith this is that autonomy is a central part of the world in which activistslive. To suggest that they are not really autonomous dismisses what, forthem, is a very important notion; to affirm that they are accepts their visionof things uncritically. Importantly, however, autonomy is not just an idea asit 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 prac-tices, it is something that, in one form or another, activists create. One musttake the practice of autonomy seriously and explore just what autonomymeans, as opposed to treating it as a theoretical abstraction.

This article, then, has been an attempt to give autonomy a certainethnographic thickness (see Ortner, 1995). It seems to me that an all-or-nothing, absolutist, abstract view of autonomy makes very little socialsense. A socially embedded and variable understanding of autonomy, incontrast, makes focusing on the meaning and practice of autonomyessential. It makes it important to explore the sense in which people areautonomous and the social relations autonomy involves. There mightactually be areas of social existence that escape, more or less, the reach ofpower, ideas that cant be reduced to the dominant ideology, spaces thatmight be considered relatively autonomous or alternative, but whetherthere are or not and precisely what this might mean is an ethnographic,not a purely theoretical, question. Any autonomy Larzac activists mighthave or exercise is never something absolute, always something relative,always socially and historically situated, and always complex and full ofmeaning. Their desire for autonomy is expressed in the attempt to do andthink things in slightly new and alternative ways that exclude the logic ofthe market, reject the ideological assumptions of neoliberalism, refuse thehegemony of multinationals and all forms of power and hierarchy.

As is clear from my ethnography, however, this is just a straightforwardmatter. Central to the very meaning of autonomy, in this context, isstruggle. Autonomy, rather than being either a prerequisite of their resist-ance or an illusion, is an ideal for which activists must fight given the ideo-logical 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 ineveryday life, involves a struggle over autonomy over freedom, agency, thepower to choose, to act independently, to be free of ideology, dominationand dependency. The more of it activists have, the less they are subject topower, the more able they are to resist, and the more they produce adichotomy between power (the state, the WTO, multinationals, neoliberalideology, hierarchy) and resistance (the social movement, activist-individuals, autonomous communities, equality) as an ethnographic andempirical, 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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oppositional practices, which, unlike Scotts absolute and essential spacesof resistance, are always relational and dynamic (1998: 353). But Scott, inquestioning just how total and autonomy-denying hegemony really is, neednot fall back on the idea that hidden transcripts depend on an absolute andessential autonomy. Autonomy may well be relative or relational, whichseems somehow to have been Gramscis position. Although at times hepresents the hegemony of the historically progressive class as entailing analmost necessary intellectual subjugation of other social groups (1971: 60),Gramsci is also concerned with the contingency of struggle (see Laclau andMouffe, 1985). Like hegemony, autonomy, which is a term Gramsci uses, issomething for subaltern groups to acquire through struggle as they developtheir own conception of the world . . . which manifests itself in action, ifonly in flashes (Gramsci, 1971: 327, quoted in Lukes, 2005: 4950). Theirautonomy tends to be more limited and partial than integral (1971: 52;see Moore, 1998: 352). The idea of hegemony may thus imply that spacesof resistance are not entirely autonomous, but it does not imply that analternative vision of things is impossible, that there is no degree ofautonomy at all or that some form of autonomy cannot be won.

Activists can never be completely autonomous of the forms of power towhich they are subject and which, as Foucault aimed to show, enter intotheir very being. My aim, however, has been to argue for an autonomy thatis social, historical, variable and the subject of struggle. Foucault arguedthat modern forms of power produce persons as autonomous agents, indi-viduals who internalize discipline and govern themselves. But in the idea ofautonomy, one that has become ubiquitous in the modern era,12 iscontained the idea of resistance of not acting in accord with power andof not being touched by it. Autonomy does, in this sense, make resistancepossible. For resistance to then become effective, for it to emerge as a socialforce, autonomy must be increased and cultivated. If autonomy is an effectof modern forms of power, it is equally the effect of resistance (cf. Mitchell,1999). Autonomy is created in the process of resisting. The autonomy ofthe French social movement and of the activist individuals who participatein it, and the opposition between power and resistance, are produced andreproduced through organizing, protesting, educating, attempting to livecoherently and critically reflecting on ones own existence. These are prac-tices through which the hegemony of the dominant is challenged.

Notes

1 My research was made possible with a doctoral scholarship from the NewZealand Tertiary Education Commission. Early versions of this article werepresented at seminars of the Cambridge University Social Anthropology Societyand Sussex University Anthropology Department. Thanks to all who gavecomments. I would particularly like to thank Gisa Weszkalnys and Sian Lazarfor reading various drafts, and four anonymous reviewers for their very helpfulcriticisms.

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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 theirpolitics.

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 organiz-ations in Mexico. The result of their drive for autonomy and self-determination,he argues, would be a hybrid construction (2004: 409) involving increasedpolitical power, juridical independence and the revival of religion and sub-sistence 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 presidentialelections.

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 theindividual; Rosanvallon (1992: 13ff.) on the new conception of individualautonomy that universal suffrage required; Barry et al. (1996) on governmen-tal techniques for producing individual, state, society, economy as autonomousdomains.

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Gwyn Williams was the Leach/RAI Fellow for 20056 in the Department ofAnthropology at the University of Sussex. His book, Struggles for an AlternativeGlobalization: An Ethnography of Counterpower in Southern France, will be published byAshgate in 2008. [email: [email protected]]

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Power, Resistance and the French Alterglobalization Movement

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