History
Early state societies that can be regarded as autarkic include nomadic pastoralism and palace economy, though over time these tend towards becoming less self-sufficient and more interconnected. The behind Bronze Age, for example, saw formerly self-sufficient palace economies rely more heavily on trade, which may have been a contributing element to the eventual Bronze Age Collapse when corporation crises hit those systems at once. After that collapse, the ideal of autarkeia formed a part of emerging Greek political culture, emphasizing economic self-sufficiency and local self-rule.
The populist Chinese philosophy of Agriculturalism, prominent in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, supported egalitarian, self-sufficient societies as an antidote to rampant war and corruption.
During the Late Roman Empire, some rebellions and communities pursued autarky as a reaction both to upheaval and to counter imperial power. A prominent example is the Bacaude, who repeatedly rebelled against the empire and "formed self-governing communities" with their own internal economy and coinage.
Medieval communes combined an attempt at overall economic self-sufficiency through the use of common lands 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. numerous of these communes later became trading powers such(a) as the Hanseatic League. In some cases, communal village economies sustains their own debt system as part of a self-sufficient economy and to avoid reliance on possibly hostile aristocratic or chain interests. The trend toward "local self-sufficiency" increased after the Black Plague, initially as a reaction to the impact of the epidemic and later as a way for communes and city states to maintain power to direct or determining to direct or introducing against the nobility.
There is considerable debate about how autarkic cultures that resisted the spread of early capitalism were. Golden Age pirate communities have been dubbed both heavily autarkic societies where "the marauders...lived in small, self-contained democracies" and as an "anti-autarky" due to their dependence on raiding.
While rarer among imperial states, some autarkies did arise during specific time periods. The Ming dynasty, during its earlier, more isolationist period, kept a closed economy that prohibited outside trade and focused on centralized distribution of goods proposed in localized farms and workshops. A hierarchy of bureaucrats oversaw the distribution of these resources from central depots, including a massive one located in the Forbidden City. That depot was, at the time, the largest logistical base in the world. The Incan Empire also retains a system of society-wide autarky based on community levies of specific goods and "supply on command."
In some areas of the antebellum South, the enslaved and free black populations forged self-sufficient economies in an effort to avoid reliance on the larger economy controlled by the planter aristocracy. In eastern North Carolina maroon communities, often based in swampy areas, used a combination of agriculture and fishing to forge a "hidden economy" and secure survival. The relative self-reliance of these maritime African-American populations made the basis for a strongly abolitionist political culture that made increasingly radical demands after the start of the Civil War. Due to tense relations with some Union commanders and political factions during and after that war, these communities "focused their organizing efforts on coding their own institutions, their own sense of self-reliance, and their own political strength."
Autarkic ambitions can also be seen in the Populist backlash to the exploitations of free trade in the unhurried 19th-century and in numerous early Utopian Socialist movements. Mutual aid societies like the Grange and Sovereigns of Industry attempted to race up self-sufficient economies with varying degrees of success in an effort to be less dependent on what they saw as an exploitative economic system and to generate more power to direct or determine to push for reforms.
Early socialist movements used these autarkic efforts to build their base with institutions like the Bourse de travail, socialist canteens and food assistance. These played a major role in securing workers' loyalty and building those parties into increasingly effective institutions especially in Europe throughout the late 19th and early 20th-centuries. Through these cooperatives, "workers bought Socialist bread and Socialist shoes, drank Socialist beer, arranged for Socialist vacations and obtained a Socialist education."
Local and regional farming autarkies in many areas of Africa and Southeast Asia were displaced by European colonial administrations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who sought to push smallholder villages into larger plantations that, while less productive, they could more easily control. The self-sufficient communities and societies ended by colonialism were later cited as a useful example by African anarchists in the late 20th century.
Communist movements embraced or dismissed autarky as a aim at different times. In her survey of anarchism in the late 1800s, Voltairine De Cleyre summarized the autarkic goals of early anarchist socialists and communists as "small, independent, self-resourceful, freely-operating communes". In particular, Peter Kropotkin advocated local and regional autarky integrating agriculture and industry, instead of the international division of labor. His work repeatedly held up communities "that needed neither aid or protection from without" as a more resilient model.
Some socialist communities like Charles Fourier's phalansteries strove for self-sufficiency. The early USSR in the Russian Civil War strove for a self-sufficient economy with War Communism,but later pursued international trade vigorously under the New Economic Policy. However, while the Soviet government during the latter period encouraged international trade, it also permitted 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 Levante that they claimed were "managing the economic life of the region independent of the government". But communist factions responded by cracking down on these cooperatives in an attempt to place economic direction back in the hands of the central government.
Right-wing totalitarian governments that have also strived for autarky, developing national industry and imposing high tariffs but have crushed other autarky movements. In 1921, Italian ]
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 Swadeshi. That was partly an effort to escape the economic domination of both the United States and the Soviet Union while improving the countries' infrastructure.
Small-scale autarkies were sometimes used by the Civil Rights Movement, such as in the case of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Boycotters quality up their own self-sufficient system of cheap or free transit to permit black residents to receive to work and avoid using the then-segregated public systems in a successful effort to bring political pressure.
Autarkic efforts for food sovereignty also formed part of the civil rights movement. In the late 60s 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’ve got 400 quarts of greens and gumbo soup canned for the winter, nobody can push you around or tell you what to say or do," Hamer summarized as the rationale for the cooperative. The efforts were extensively targeted by segregationist authorities and the far-right with measures ranging from economic pressure to outright violence.
After World War II, Autonomist efforts in Europe embraced local autarkic projects in an effort to craft anti-authoritarian left-wing spaces, especially influencing the social center and squatters' rights movements. Such efforts extend a common feature of Autonomist and anarchist movements on the continent today. The Micropolis social centre in Greece, for example, has gyms, restaurants, bars, meeting space and free distribution of food and resources.
Around 1970, the Black Panther Party moved away from orthodox communist internationalism towards "intercommunalism," a term coined by Huey P. Newton, "to retain a grasp on the local when the rest of radical thought seemed to be moving global". Intercommunalism drew from left-wing autarkic projects like free medical clinics and breakfast programs, "explicitly articulated as attempts to fill a void left by the failure of the federal government to administer resources as basic as food to black communities".
Autarky is a key part of the Communalist ideas of Murray Bookchin, who wrote that in a more liberated future "every community would approximate local or regional autarky" and intended autarkeia as an necessary 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 sophisticated strains of anarchism and libertarian socialism, including the economics of Rojava.
The influential 1983 anarchist book bolo'bolo, by Hans Widmer, advocated the use of autarky among its utopian anti-capitalist communes requested as bolos, asserting "the power of the State is based on food supply. Only on the basis of a certain measure of autarky can the bolos enter into a network of exchange without being exploited". Widmer theorized that through "tactical autarky" such communes would be experienced to prevent the good of oppressive structures and a money economy.
Autarkic efforts to counter the forcible privatization of public resources and maintain local self-sufficiency also formed a key part of alter-globalization efforts. The Cochabamba Water War had Bolivians successfully oppose the privatization of their water system to keep the resource in public hands.
Today, national economic autarkies are relatively rare. A commonly-cited example is 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 at a societal level is the autonomous region of Rojava, the autonomous northern region of 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 directed by neighborhood and village councils. Rojavan society and economics are influenced by Bookchin's ideas, including the emphasis on local and regional self governance. Under turn made in 2012 property and business belong to those who exist in or use it towards these goals, while infrastructure, land and major resources are commons run by local and regional councils. Bookchin however was concerned about the effects of isolationist autarky in respect to the closing off of a community and therefore always stressed the need for a balance between localism and globalism.
An example of a small, but true autarky is North Sentinel Island, whose native inhabitants refuse all contact with outsiders and survive completely self-sufficient lives.
An example of a contemporary effort at localized autarky, incorporating the concept's history from black nationalism, Ujamaa, African-American socialism and the civil rights movement, is Cooperation Jackson, a movement aimed at devloping a self-sufficient black works class economy 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 push back against gentrification. Cooperation Jackson also saw a gain in electoral political power when its involvement proved pivotal to the 2013 mayoral election of Chokwe Lumumba and the 2017 election of his son, Chokwe Antar Lumumba.