Autarchy

Autarky is the characteristic of self-sufficiency, generally applied to societies, communities, states and their economic systems.

Autarky as an ideal or method has been embraced by a wide range of political ideologies and movements, especially on the left, ideologies such as African socialism, mutualism, war communism, council communism, communalism, swadeshi, syndicalism (especially anarcho-syndicalism) and left-wing populism, usually in an effort to build alternative economic structures or to control resources against structures that a particular movement considers hostile. Conservative, centrist, and nationalist movements have also embraced autarky in an attempt to preserve part of an existing social order or to develop a particular industry. Some movements such as right-wing populism and the extreme right have occasionally adopted self-sufficiency as a goal.

Proponents of autarky have advocated national self-sufficiency to reduce foreign economic, political, and cultural influences, as well as to promote international peace. Economists generally support free trade. There is a broad consensus among economists that protectionism has a negative effect on economic growth and economic well-being, while free trade and the reduction of trade barriers have a positive effect on economic growth

Autarky can be a policy of a state or some other type of entity when it seeks to be self-sufficient as a whole, but it can also be limited to a narrow field such as possession of a key raw material. Some countries have autarky policy regarding food and water for reasons of national security. Autarky can result from economic isolation or from external circumstances in which a state or other entity reverts to localized production when it lacks currency or excess production to trade with the outside world.

A self-sufficient economy that also cannot or cannot conduct foreign trade is known as a "closed economy".

Etymology

The word autarky comes from the Greek, αὐτάρκεια, which means "self-sufficiency" (derived from αὐτο-, "I" and ἀρκέω, "enough"). The term is sometimes confused with autocracy (Greek: αὐτoκρατία "rule by a single absolute ruler") or autarky (Greek: αὐταρχία - the idea of rejecting government and ruling oneself and no one else).

Philosophy

In Stoicism the concept of autarky represents independence from anything external, including independence from personal relationships, so that one is immune to the whims of fortune. The wise Stoic is self-sufficient, depending only on his own virtue.

In Epicureanism the concept of autarky represents having the fewest possible requirements to live a life of pleasure, free of pain (aponia).

History

Antiquity and Middle Ages

Early state societies that can be considered autarkic include nomadic pastoralism and the palatine economy, though over time they tend to become less self-sufficient and more interconnected. The Late Bronze Age, for example, saw previously self-sufficient palace economies become more dependent on trade, which may have been a contributing factor to the eventual collapse of the Late Bronze Age when various crises and blows to those states occurred. systems at the same time. After that collapse, the ideal of autarkeia formed part of the emerging Greek political culture, emphasizing economic self-sufficiency and local self-government.

Chinese populist philosophy of agriculturalism, prominent in the Spring and Autumn periods and warring states, supported equality and self-reliance as an antidote to rampant warfare and corruption.

During the fall of the Western Roman Empire, some rebellions and communities pursued autarky as a reaction both to turmoil and to counter imperial power. A prominent example is the Bacaude, who repeatedly rebelled against the empire and "formed autonomous communities" with its own internal economy and coinage.

Medieval communes combined an attempt at general economic self-sufficiency through the use of common land and resources with the use of mutual defense pacts, neighborhood assemblies, and organized militias to preserve local autonomy against the depredations of the local nobility. Many of these communes later became trading powers like the Hanseatic League. In some cases, communal village economies maintained their own debt system as part of a self-sufficient economy and to avoid becoming dependent on possibly hostile aristocratic or commercial interests. The trend towards "local self-sufficiency" it increased after the Black Death, initially as a reaction to the shock of the epidemic and later as a way for communes and city-states to maintain power against the nobility.

There is also considerable debate about how self-sufficient cultures resisted the spread of early capitalism. Golden age pirate communities have been called strongly autarkic societies where "marauders... lived in small self-contained democracies "and as a" anti-autarky "due to its reliance on raids.

Though rarer among imperial states, some autarkies occurred during specific time periods. The Ming dynasty, during its later, more isolationist period, maintained a closed economy that prohibited foreign trade and focused on the centralized distribution of goods produced on localized farms and workshops. A hierarchy of bureaucrats oversaw the distribution of these resources from central repositories, including a massive one located in the Forbidden City. That depot was, at the time, the largest logistics base in the world. The Inca Empire also maintained a society-wide system of autarky based on community taxation of specific goods and "supply by order".

19th and early 20th centuries

In some areas of the antebellum South, enslaved and free black populations carved out self-sufficient economies in an effort to avoid dependence on the larger economy controlled by the planter aristocracy. In eastern North Carolina, communities, often based on wetlands, used a combination of farming and fishing to carve out a "hidden economy" and ensure survival. The relative self-sufficiency of these maritime African-American populations provided the basis for a strongly abolitionist political culture, which made increasingly radical demands after the start of the American Civil War. Due to strained relations with some Union commanders and political factions during and after that war, these communities "focused their organizing efforts on developing their own institutions, their own sense of self-sufficiency, and their own political strength".

It can also be seen in the populist reaction of the People's Party (USA) to the exploitations of free trade in the late 19th century and in many early movements of utopian socialism. Mutual aid societies like the Grange and the sovereigns of industry attempted to establish self-sufficient economies (with varying degrees of success) in an effort to become less dependent on what they saw as an exploitative economic system and to generate more power to drive reform.

Early socialist movements used these autarkic efforts to build their base with institutions such as the Bourse du Travail, socialist soup kitchens, and food assistance. These played an important role in securing worker loyalty and turning those parties into increasingly powerful institutions (especially in Europe) throughout the late century XIX and early XX. Through these cooperatives, "Workers bought socialist bread and socialist shoes, drank socialist beer, organized socialist holidays and got a socialist education".

Local and regional agricultural autarkies in many areas of Africa and Southeast Asia were displaced by European colonial administrations at the turn of the century XIX and beginning of the XX, which sought to push the small-farming villages to larger plantations that, although less productive, they could more easily control. The self-sufficient communities and societies that ended colonialism were later cited as a useful example by African anarchists. /span>.

Communist movements adopted or rejected autarky as a goal at different times. In her study of anarchism in the late 19th century, Voltairine De Cleyre summarized the autarkic goals of early anarchist socialists and communists as "small, independent, self-sufficient and freely operating communes". Peter Kropotkin in particular advocated local and regional autarky integrating agriculture and industry, rather than the international division of labour. His work repeatedly featured communities "who did not need outside help or protection"; as a more resistant model.

Some socialist communities such as Charles Fourier fought for self-sufficiency. The early USSR in the Russian Civil War strove for a self-sufficient economy with War Communism, but later vigorously pursued international trade under the New Economic Policy. However, while the Soviet government during the later period encouraged international trade, it also allowed and even encouraged local autarkies in many peasant villages.

Sometimes, leftist groups clashed over autarkic projects. During the Spanish civil war, the anarcho-syndicalist CNT and the socialist UGT had created economic cooperatives in the Spanish Levante that they claimed were "managing the economic life of the region independently of the government." But communist factions responded by cracking down on these cooperatives in an attempt to return economic control to the central government.

There are right-wing totalitarian governments that have also pushed for autarky, developed domestic industry, and imposed high tariffs, but have crushed other autarky movements. In 1921, Italian fascists attacked existing left-wing autarkic projects at the behest of the big landowners, destroying an estimated 119 labor chambers, 107 cooperatives, and 83 peasant offices that year alone. Nazi Germany under Economy Minister Hjalmar Schacht, and more Later Walther Funk, they still pursued significant international trade, albeit under a different system, to escape the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, satisfy business elites, and prepare for war. The regime would continue to conduct trade, including with countries like the United States, including connections with major companies such as IBM and Coca-Cola.

After World War II

Economic self-sufficiency was pursued as a goal by some members of the non-aligned movement, such as India under Jawaharlal Nehru and Tanzania, under the ideology of Ujamaa and the Swadeshi Movement. That was partly an effort to escape the economic domination of both the United States and the Soviet Union while modernizing the countries' infrastructure.

Small-scale local governments were sometimes used by the civil rights movement, as in the case of the Montgomery bus boycott. The boycotters established their own self-sufficient system of cheap or free transit to allow black residents to get to work and avoid using the then-segregated public systems in a successful effort to exert political pressure.

Autonomous efforts for food sovereignty were also part of the civil rights movement. In the late 1960s, activist Fannie Lou Hamer was one of the founders of the Freedom Farms Cooperative, an effort to redistribute economic power and build self-sufficiency in black communities. "When you have 400 liters of vegetables and canned gumbo soup for the winter, nobody can pressure you or tell you what to say or do," Hamer summed up the foundation of the cooperative. The efforts were largely led by segregationist authorities and the far right with measures ranging from economic pressure to outright violence.

After World War II, autonomous efforts in Europe adopted local autarkic projects in an effort to create anti-authoritarian leftist spaces, especially by influencing the social center and squatter movement. These efforts remain a common feature of autonomist and anarchist movements on the continent today. The Micropolis social center in Greece, for example, has gyms, restaurants, bars, meeting spaces, and free distribution of food and resources.

Around 1970, the Black Panther Party turned away from orthodox communist internationalism toward "intercommunalism," a term coined by Huey P. Newton, "to retain the local when the rest of the radical thought seemed to move globally'. Intercommunalism attracted autarkic left-wing projects like free medical clinics and breakfast programs, expressly articulated as attempts to fill a void left by the failure of the federal government to provide such basic resources as food to black communities.

Autarky is a key part of Murray Bookchin's Communalist ideas, who wrote that in a more liberated future "every community would approximate local or regional autarky" and would refer to autarkeia as an essential part of the history of leftist efforts for local liberation. Bookchin's ideas, honed from the 1960s to the early 2000s, had an influence on multiple modern strains of anarchism and libertarian socialism, including the economy of Rojava.

The influential The 1983 anarchist book bolo'bolo , by Hans Widmer, advocated the use of autarky among his utopian anti-capitalist communes (known as bolos), stating that "the power of the State is based on the supply of food. Only on the basis of a certain degree of autarky can bolos enter an exchange network without being exploited'. Widmer theorized that through 'tactical autarky' such communes could avoid the return of oppressive structures and a monetary economy.

Autarkic efforts to counter the forced privatization of public resources and maintain local self-sufficiency also formed a key part of alter-globalization efforts. The Cochabamba water war saw Bolivians successfully oppose the privatization of their water system in order to keep the resource in public hands.

Contemporary

Today, national economic autarkies are relatively rare. A commonly cited example is North Korea, based on the governmental ideology of Juche (self-reliance), which is concerned with keeping its localized economy in the face of its isolation. However, even North Korea has extensive trade with Russia, China, Syria, Iran, Vietnam, India, and many countries in Europe and Africa. North Korea had to import food during a widespread famine in the 1990s.

A better modern example on a societal level is the autonomous region of Rojava, the autonomous region of northern Syria. Largely cut off from international trade, facing multiple enemies, and striving for a society based on communalism, Rojava's government and constitution emphasize economic self-sufficiency led by the town and city councils. Rojavan society and economy are influenced by Bookchin's ideas, including an emphasis on local and regional self-government. Under changes made in 2012, property and businesses belong to those who live in them or use them to achieve these goals, while infrastructure, land, and major resources are commons managed by local and regional councils. Bookchin, however, was concerned with the effects of isolationist autarkism regarding the closure of a community, and therefore always emphasized the need for a balance between localism and globalism.

An example of a contemporary effort at localized autarky, incorporating the history of the concept of black nationalism, Ujamaa, and the civil rights movement, took the concept of the Jackson Cooperation, a movement aimed at creating a working-class economy self-sufficient black woman in Jackson, Mississippi. The movement has aimed to secure land and build self-sufficient cooperatives and workplaces "to democratically transform the political economy of the city" and reject gentrification. Cooperation Jackson also saw a gain in electoral political power when his involvement was instrumental in the 2013 mayoral election of Chokwe Lumumba and the 2017 election of his son, Chokwe Antar Lumumba.

Support and Opposition

Local autarchy

• Anarquismo primitivista
• Anarchism and the environment
• Green Anarchism
• Mutualism (movement)
• Preparation
• Political Traditionalism
• Transition Community
• Utopian socialism

Social autarky

Support

• Anarcocommunism
• Anarcosindication
• Autonomous Movement
• Burmese path to socialism
• Colectivist anarchism
• Advisory Communism
• From Leonism
• Democratic Confederation
• Fascist Italy
• Juche
• Red Jemeres
• Mutualism (economic theory)
• Nationalism
• Corporativism
• Paleoconservadurism
• Populism
• Producerism
• Socialism in one country
• Solidarity economy
• State Capitalism
• Swadeshi Movement
• Trade union movement
• Technological Movement

Opposition

• Anarcocapitalism
• Classical liberalism
• Commercial revolution
• Fourth International
• Liberal internationalism
• libertarian conservatism
• Libertarismo
• Neoconservadurism
• Neoliberalism

Macroeconomic Theory

Support

• Alexander Hamilton
• Anti-globalization movement
• Murray Bookchin
• Furated Celso
• Central-periphery structure
• Friedrich List
• Hans Singer
• Import replacement industrialization
• Argument of the emerging industry
• Mercantile
• Statization
• Protectionism
• Raúl Prebisch
• Thesis of Prebisch-Singer

Opposition

• Andre Gorz
• Austrian School
• Economic liberalism
• Free Trade Agreement
• Free trade
• Globalization
• Milton Friedman
• Neoclassical economy
• Privatization

Microeconomic Theory

• Fundamental Theorems of the Welfare Economy