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+2 votes
Is it possible? Can an organization have autonomy even if anti-political or political nuclei participate within it?

For instance an assembly is held "autonomous" from union or party officials and all sorts of left groups. After excluding these, wouldn't anarchists still be interfering? Wouldn't other unaligned individuals mostly be disaffected liberals?

Everyone has "political" ideas, isn't it impossible to guard against such? Doesn't such logic fall into the same trap as anarcho-syndicalism? The only people being able to participate being anarchists and people who share the same practices but don't label themselves as such?
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1 Answer

+1 vote
It is clear that you are responding to some notion of autonomous organization ("everybody not having politics" or something?), but it is unclear where this notion came from.

I don't think the idea of being autonomous from parties and unions involves the idea of everybody having no political ideas, but rather making the decision that the form which one's struggle will take will not be left up to the control of a decision-making body which has demonstrated itself to hold the struggle back from directions in which some want to take it. If an assembly was held autonomously from the union and union leaders were in attendance (which is unlikely), those union leaders would be unable to control the decision-making in their usual fashion. Autonomous organization is thus less about excluding individuals or ideas than about organizing people in a different way.

An example: Say you work at an IWW Starbucks and the official union activity is not producing the desired results. During smoke breaks, you start talking to trusted coworkers about how to expropriate money directly from the corporation without getting caught, and you put these ideas into practice without going through the official union body. This is autonomous organization even if IWW bureaucrats are involved in the process.
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