Rejecting the Reification of Revolt
Jason McQuinn
Anarchy #54
Winter 2002-2003
Anarchist critiques of leftism have a history nearly as long as the term
"left" has had a political meaning. The early anarchist movement emerged
from many of the same struggles as the socialist movement (a major part of
the political left), from which it eventually differentiated itself. Both
were primarily a product of the social ferment which gave rise to the Age
of Revolutions - introduced by the English, American and French
Revolutions. This was the historical period in which early capitalism was
developing through the enclosure of commons to destroy community
self-sufficiency, the industrialization of production with a factory system
based on scientific techniques, and the aggressive expansion of the
commodity market economy throughout the world. But the anarchist idea has
always had deeper, more radical and more holistic implications than mere
socialist criticism of the exploitation of labor under capitalism. This is
because the anarchist idea springs from both the social ferment of the Age
of Revolutions and the critical imagination of individuals seeking the
abolition of every form of social alienation and domination.
The anarchist idea has an indelibly individualist foundation upon which its
social critiques stand, always and everywhere proclaiming that only free
individuals can create a free, unalienated society. Just as importantly,
this individualist foundation has included the idea that the exploitation
or oppression of any individual diminishes the freedom and integrity of
all. This is quite unlike the collectivist ideologies of the political
left, in which the individual is persistently devalued, denigrated or
denied in both theory and practice - though not always in the ideological
window dressing that is meant only to fool the naive. It is also what
prevents genuine anarchists from taking the path of authoritarians of the
left, right and center who casually employ mass exploitation, mass
oppression and frequently mass imprisonment or murder to capture, protect
and expand their holds on political and economic power.
Because anarchists understand that only people freely organizing themselves
can create free communities, they refuse to sacrifice individuals or
communities in pursuit of the kinds of power that would inevitably prevent
the emergence of a free society. But given the almost mutual origins of the
anarchist movement and the socialist left, as well as their historical
battles to seduce or capture the support of the international workers
movement by various means, it isn't surprising that over the course of the
19th and 20th centuries socialists have often adopted aspects of anarchist
theory or practice as their own, while even more anarchists have adopted
aspects of leftist theory and practice into various left-anarchist
syntheses. This is despite the fact that in the worldwide struggles for
individual and social freedom the political left has everywhere proven
itself either a fraud or a failure in practice. Wherever the socialist left
has been sucessful in organizing and taking power it has at best reformed
(and rehabilitated) capitalism or at worst instituted new tyrannies, many
with murderous policies - some of genocidal proportions.Thus, with the
stunning international disentegration of the political left following the
collapse of the Soviet Union, the time is now past due for all anarchists
to reevaluate every compromise that has been or continues to be made with
the fading remnants of leftism. Whatever usefulness there might have been
in the past for anarchists to make compromises with leftism is evaporating
with the progressive disappearance of the left from even token opposition
to the fundamental institutions of capitalism: wage labor, market
production, and the rule of value.
Leftists in the anarchist milieu
The rapid slide of the political left from the stage of history has
increasingly left the international anarchist milieu as the only
revolutionary anti-capitalist game in town. As the anarchist milieu as
mushroomed in the last decade, most of its growth has come from disaffected
youth attracted to its increasingly visible, lively and iconoclastic
activities and media. But a significant minority of that growth has also
come from former leftists who have - sometimes slowly and sometimes
suspiciously swiftly - decided that anarchists might have been right in
their critiques of political authority and the state all along.
Unfortutanetely, not all leftists just fade away - or change their spots -
overnight. Most of the former leftist entering the anarchist milieu
inevitably bring with them many of the conscious and unconscious leftist
attitudes, prejudices, habits and assumptions that structured their old
political milieu. Certainly, not all of these attitudes, habits and
assumptions are necessarily authoritarian or anti-anarchist, but just as
clearly many are.
Part of the problem is that many former leftists tend to misunderstand
anarchism only as a form of anti-statist leftism, ignoring or downplaying
its indelibly individualist foundation as irrelevant to social struggles.
Many simply don't understand the huge divide between a self-organizing
movement seeking to abolish every form of social alienation and a merely
political movement seeking to reorganize production in a more egalitarian
form, while others do understand the divide quite well, but seek to re-form
the anarchist milieu into a political movement anyway, for various reasons.
Some former leftists do this because they consider the abolition of social
alienation unlikely or impossible; some because they remain fundamentally
opposed to any individualist (or sexual, or cultural, etc.) component of
social theory and practice. Some cynically realize that they will never
achieve any position of power in a genuinely anarchist movement, and opt
for building more narrowly political organizations with more room for
manipulation. Still others, unused to autonomous thinking and practice,
simply feel anxious and uncomfortable with many aspects of the anarchist
tradition and wish to push those aspects of leftism within the anarchist
milieu that help them feel less threatened and more secure - so that they
can continue to play their former roles of cadre or militant, just without
an explicitly authoritarian ideology to guide them.
In order to understand current controversies within the anarchist milieu,
anarchists need to remain constantly aware - and carefully critical - of
all this. Ad hominem attacks within the anarchist milieu are nothing new,
and most often a waste of time, because they substitute for rational
criticism of people's actual positions. (Too often rational criticism of
positions is simply ignored by those unable to argue for their own
positions, whose only recourse is to wild or irrelevant accusations or
attempted smears.) But there remains an important place for ad hominem
criticism addressed to people's chosen identities, especially when these
identities are so strong that they include sedimented, often unconscious,
layers of habits, prejudices and dependencies. These habits, prejudices and
dependencies - leftist or otherwise - all constitute highly appropriate
targest for anarchist criticism.
Recuperation and the Left-Wing of Capital
Historically, the vast majority of leftist theory and practice has
functioned as a loyal opposition to capitalism. Leftists have been (often
vociferously) critical of particular aspects of capitalism, but always
ready to reconcile themselves with the broader international capitalist
system whenever they've been able to extract a bit of power, partial
reforms - or sometimes, just the vague promise of partial reforms. For this
reason leftists have often been quite justifiably criticized (by both
ultra-leftists and by anarchists) as the left wing of capital.
It's not just a problem that those leftists who claim to be anti-capitalist
don't really mean it, although some have consciously used such lies to gain
positions of power for themselves in opposition movements. The major
problem is that leftists have incomplete, self-contradictory theories about
capitalism and social change. As a result their practice always tends
towards the recuperation (or co-optation and reintegration) of social
rebellion. Always with a focus on organization, leftists use a variety of
tactics in their attempts to reify and mediate social struggles -
representation and substitution, imposition of collectivist ideologies,
collectivist moralism, and ultimately repressive violence in one form or
another. Typically, leftists have employed all of these tactics in the most
unrepentantly heavy-handed and explicitly authoritarian of ways. But these
tactics (except for the last) can also be - and have often been - employed
in more subtle, less overtly authoritarian ways as well, the most important
examples for our purposes being the historical and present practices of
many (but not all) left anarchists.
Reification is often most generally described as "thingification". It's the
reduction of a complex, living process to a frozen, dead or mechanical
collection of objects or actions. Political mediation (a form of practical
reification) is the attempt to intervene in conflicts as a third-party
arbiter or representative. Ultimately these are the definitive
characteristics of all leftist theory and practice. Lefitsm always involves
the reification and mediation of social revolt, while consistent anarchists
reject this reification of revolt. The formulation of post-left anarchy is
an attempt to help make this rejection of the reification of revolt more
consistent, widespread and self-aware than it already is.
Anarchy as a Theory & Critique of Organization
One of the most fundamental principles of anarchism is that social
organization must serve free individuals and free groups, not vice versa.
Anarchy cannot exist when individuals or social groups are dominated -
whether that domination is facilitated and enforced by outside forces or by
their own organization.
For anarchists the central strategy of would-be revolutionaries has been
the non-mediating (anti-authoritarian, often informal or minimalist)
self-organization of radicals (based on affinity and/or specific
theoretical/practical activities) in order to encourage and participate in
the self-organization of popular rebellion and insurrection against capital
and state in all their forms. Even among most left anarchist there has
always been at least some level of understanding that mediating
organizations are at best highly unstable and unavoidably open to
recuperation, requiring constant vigilance and struggle to avoid their
complete recuperation.
But for all leftists (including left anarchists), on the other hand, the
central strategy is always exprressly focussed on creating mediating
organizations between capital & state on the one side and the mass of
disaffected, relatively powerless people on the other. Usually these
organizations have been focussed on mediating between capitalists and
workers or between the state and the working class. But many other
mediations involving opposition to particular institutions or involving
interventions among particular groups (social minorities, subgroups of the
working class, etc.) have been common.
These mediating organizations have included political parties, syndicalist
unions, mass political organizations, front groups, single-issue campaign
groups, etc. Their goals are always to crystallize and congeal certain
aspects of the more general social revolt into set forms of ideology and
congruent forms of activity. The construction of formal, mediating
organizations always and necessarily involves at least some levels of:
* Reductionism (Only particular aspects of the social struggle are included
in these organizations. Other aspects are ignored, invalidated or
repressed, leading to further and further compartmentalization of the
struggle, which in turn facilitates manipulation by elites and their
eventual transformation into purely reformist lobbying societies with all
generalized, radical critique emptied out.)
* Specialization or Professionalism (Those most involved in the day-to-day
operation of the organization are selected - or self-selected - to perform
increasingly specialized roles within the organization, often leading to an
official division between leaders and led, with gradations of power and
influence introduced in the form of intermediary roles in the evolving
organizational hierarchy.)
* Substitionism (The formal organization increasingly becomes the focus of
strategy and tactics rather than the people-in-revolt. In theory and
practice, the organization tends to be progressively substituted for the
people, the organization's leadership - especially if it has become formal
- tends to substitute itself for the organization as a whole, and
eventually a maximal leader often emerges who ends up embodying and
controlling the organization.)
* Ideology (The organization becomes the primary subject of theory, with
individuals assigned roles to play, rather than people constructing their
own self-theories. All but the most self-consciously anarchistic formal
organizations tend to adopt some form of collectivist ideology, in which
the social group at some level is conceded to have more political reality
than the free individual. Wherever sovereignty lies, there lies political
authority; if sovereignty is not dissolved into each and every person it
always requires the subjugation of individuals to a group in some form.)
All anarchist theories of self-organization, on the contrary, call for (in
various ways and with different emphases):
* Individual and Group Autonomy with Free Initiative (The autonomous
individual is the fundamental basis of all genuinely anarchistic theories
of organization, for without the autonomous individual, any other level of
autonomy is impossible. Freedom of initiative is likewise fundamental for
both individuals and groups. With no higher powers comes the ability and
necessity for all decisions to be made at their point of immediate impact.
As a side note, post-structuralists or postmodernists who deny the
existence of the autonomous anarchist individual most often mistake the
valid critique of the metaphysical subject to imply that even the process
of lived subjectivity is a complete fiction - a self-deluded perspective
which would make social theory impossible and unnecessary.)
* Free Association (Association is never free if it is forced. This means
that people are free to associate with anyone in any combination they wish,
and to dissociate or refuse association as well.)
* Refusal of Political Authority, and thus of Ideology (The word "anarchy"
literally means no rule or no ruler. No rule and no ruler both mean there
is no political authority above people themselves, who can and should make
all of their own decisions however they see fit. Most forms of ideology
function to legitimate the authority of one or another elite or institution
to make decisions for people, or else they serve to delegitimate people's
own decision-making for themselves.)
* Small, Simple, Informal, Transparent and Temporary Organization (Most
anarchists agree that small face-to-face groups allow the most complete
participation with the least amount of unnecessary specialization. The most
simply structured and least complex organizations leave the least
opportunity for the development of hierarchy and bureaucracy. Informal
organization is the most protean and most able to continually adapt itself
to new conditions. Open and transparent organization is the most easily
understood and controlled by its members. The longer organizations exist,
the more susceptible they usually become to the development of rigidity,
specialization and eventually hierarchy. Organizations have life spans, and
it is rare that any anarchist organization will be important enough that it
should exist over generations.)
* Decentralized, Federal Organization with Direct Decision-Making and
Respect for Minorities (When they are necessary, larger, more complex and
formal organizations can only remain self-manageable by their participants
if they are decentralized and federal. When face-to-face groups - with the
possbility for full participation and convivial discussion and
decision-making - become impossible due to size, the best course is to
decentralize the organization with many smaller groups in a federal
structure. Or when smaller groups need to organize with peer groups to
better address larger-scale problems, free federation is preferred - with
absolute self-determination at every level beginning with the base. As long
as groups remain of manageable size, assemblies of all concerned must be
able to directly make decisions according to whatever methods they find
agreeable. However, minorities can never be forced into agreement with
majorities on the basis of any fictitious conception of group sovereignty.
Anarchy is not direct democracy, though anarchists may certainly choose to
use democratic methods of decision-making when and where they wish. The
only real respect for minority opinions involves accepting that minorities
have the same powers as majorities, requiring negotiation and the greatest
level of mutual agreement for stable, effective group decision-making.)
In the end, the biggest difference is that anarchists advocate
self-organization while leftists want to organize you. For leftists, the
emphasis is always on recruiting to their organizations, so that you can
adopt the role of a cadre serving their goals. They don't want to see you
adopt your own self-determined theory and activities because then you
wouldn't be allowing them to manipulate you. Anarchists want you to
determine your own theory and activity and self-organize your activity with
like-minded others. leftists want to create ideological, strategic and
tactical unity through "self-discipline" (your self-repression) when
possible, or organizational discipline (threat of sanctions) when
necessary. Either way, you are expected to give up your autonomy to follow
their heteronomous path that has already been marked out for you.
Anarchy as a Theory & Critique of Ideology
The anarchist critique of ideology dates from the work of Max Stirner,
though he did not use the term himself to describe his critique. Ideology
is the means by which alienation, domination and exploitation are all
rationalized and justified through the deformation of human thought and
communication. All ideology in essence involves the substitution of alien
(or incomplete) concepts or images for human subjectivity. Ideologies are
systems of false consciousness in which people no longer see themselves
directly as subjects in their relation to their world. Instead they
conceive of themselves in some manner as subordinate to one type or another
of abstract entity or entities which are mistaken as the real subjects or
actors in their world.
Whenever any system of ideas and duties is structured with an abstraction
at its center - assigning people roles or duties for its own sake - such a
system is always an ideology. All the various forms of ideology are
structured around different abstractions, yet they all always serve the
interests of hierarchical and alienating social structures, since they are
hierarchy and alienation in the realm of thought and communication. Even if
an idelolgy rhetorically opposes hierarchy or alienation in its content,
its form still remains consistent with what is ostensibly being opposed,
and this form will always tend to undermine the apparent content of the
ideology. Whether the abstraction is God, the State, the Party, the
Organization, Technology, the Family, Humanity, Peace, Ecology, Nature,
work, Love, or even Freedom; if it is conceived and presented as if it is
an active subject with a being of its own which makes demands of us, then
it is the center of an ideology. Capitalism, Individualism, Communism,
Socialism, and Pacifism are each ideological in important respects as they
are usually conceived. Religion and Morality are always ideological by
their very definitions. Even resistance, revolution and anarchy ofen take
on ideological dimensions when we are not careful to maintain a critical
awareness of how we are thinking and what the actual purposes of our
thoughts are. Ideology is nearly ubiquitous. From advertisements and
commercials, to academic treatises and scientific studies, almost every
aspect of contemporary thinking and communication is ideological, and its
real meaning for human subjects is lost under layers of mystification and
confusion.
Leftism, as the reification and mediation of social rebellion, is always
ideological because it always demands that people conceive of themselves
first of all in terms of their roles within and relationships to leftist
organizations and oppressed groups, which are in turn considered more real
than the individuals who combine to create them. For leftists history is
never made by individuals, but rather by organizations, social groups, and
- above all, for Marxists - social classes. Each major leftist organization
usually molds its own ideological legitimation whose major points all
members are expected to learn and defend, if not proselytize. To seriously
criticize or question this ideology is always to risk expulsion from the
organization.
Post-left anarchists reject all ideologies in favor of the individual and
communal construction of self-theory. Individual self-theory is theory in
which the integral individual-in-context (in all her or his relationships,
with all her or his history, desires, and projects, etc.) is always the
subjective center of perception, understanding and action. Communal
self-theory is similarly based on the group as subject, but always with an
underlying awareness of the individuals (and their own self-theories) which
make up the group or organization. Non-ideological, anarchist organizations
(or informal groups) are always explicitly based upon the autonomy of the
individuals who construct them, quite unlike leftist organizations which
require the surrender of personal autonomy as a prerequisite for membership.
Neither God, nor Master, nor Moral Order: Anarchy as Critique of Morality
and Moralism
Tha anarchist critique of morality also dates from Stirner's master work,
The Ego and Its Own (1844). Morality is a system of reified values -
abstract values which are taken out of any context, set in stone, and
converted into unquestionable beliefs to be applied regardless of a
person's acutal desires, thoughts or goals, and regardless of the situation
in which a person finds himself or herself. Moralism is the practice of not
only reducing living values to reified morals, but of considering onself
better than others because one has subjected oneself to morality
(self-righteousness), and of proselytizing for the adoption of morality as
a tool of social change.
Often, when people's eyes are opened by scandals or disillusionment and
they start to dig down under the surface of the ideologies and received
ideas they have taken for granted all their lives, the apparent coherence
and power of the new answer they find (whether in religion, leftism, or
even anarchism) can lead them to believe that they have now found the Truth
(with a capital "T"). Once this begins to happen, people too often turn
onto the road of moralism, with its attendant problems of elitism and
ideology. Once people succumb to the illusion that they have found the one
Truth that would fix everything - if only enough other people also
understood, the temptation is then to view this one Truth as the implied
Problem around which everything must be theorized, which leads them to
build an absolute value system in defense of their magic Solution to the
Problem this Truth points out to them.
The various forms of leftism encourage different types of morality and
moralism, but most generally within leftism the Problem is that people are
exploited by capitalists (or dominated by them or alienated from society or
from the productive process, etc.) The Truth is that the People need to
take control of the Economy (and/or Society) into their own hands. The
biggest Obstacle to this is the Ownership and Control of the Means of
Production by the Capitalist Class, backed up by its monopoly over the use
of legalized violence through its control of the political State. To
overcome this, people must be approached with evangelical fervor to
convince them to reject all aspects, ideas and values of Capitalism and
adopt the culture, ideas and values of an idealized notion of the Working
Class in order to take over the Means of Production by breaking the power
of the Capitalist Class and constituting the power of the Working Class (or
its representative institutions, if not their Central Committees or its
Supreme Leader) over all of Society...This often leads to some form of
Workerism (usually including the adoption of the dominant image of the
culture of the working class, in other words, working-class lifestyles), a
belief in (usually Scientific) Organizational Salvation, belief in the
Science of (the inevitable victory of the Proletariat in) Class Struggle,
etc. And therefore tactics consistent with building the One True
Organization of the Working Class to contest for Economic and Political
Power. An entire value system is built around a particular, highly
oversimplified conception of the world, and moral categories of good and
evil are substituted for critical evaluation in terms of idividual and
communal subjectivity. The descent into moralism is never an automatic
process. It is a tendency which naturall manifests itself whenever people
start down the path of reified social critique. Morality always involves
derailing the development of a consistent critical theory of self and
society. It short-circuits the development of strategy and tactics
appropriate for this critical theory, and encourages an emphasis on
personal and collective salvation through living up to the ideals of this
morality, by idealizing a culture or lifestyle as virtuous and sublime,
while demonizing everything else as being either the temptations or
perversions of evil. One inevitable emphasis then becomes the petty,
continuous attempt to enforce the boundaries of virtue and evil by policing
the lives of anyone who claims to be a member of the in-group sect, while
self-righteously denouncing out-groups. In the workerist milieu, for
example, this means attacking anyone who doesn't sing paeans to the virtues
of working class organization (and especially to the virtues of the One
True form of Organization), or to the virtues or lifestyles (whether it be
beer drinking instead of drinking wine, rejecting hip subcultures, or
driving a Ford or Chevy instead of BMWs or Volvos). The goal, of course, is
to maintain the lines of inclusion and exclusion between the in-group and
the out-group (the out-group being variously portrayed in highly
industrialized countries as the Middle and Upper Classes, or the Petty
Bourgeois and Bourgeois, or the Managers and Capitalists big and small).
Living up to morality means sacrificing certain desires and temptations
(regardless of the actual situation you might find yourself in) in favor of
the rewards of virtue. Don't ever eat meat. Don't ever drive SUVs. Don't
ever work 9-5. Don't ever scab. Don't ever vote. Don't ever talk to a cop.
Don't ever take money from the government. Don't ever pay taxes. Don't ever
etc., etc. Not a very attractive way to go about living your life for
anyone interested in critically thinking about the world and evaluating
what to do for oneself.
Rejecting Morality involves constructing a critical theory of one's self
and society (always self-critical, provisional and never totalistic) in
which a clear goal of ending one's social alienation is never confused with
reified partial goals. It involves emphasizing what people have to gain
from radical critique and solidarity rather than what people must sacrifice
or give up in order to live virtuous lives of politically correct morality.
Post-Left Anarchy: Neither Left, nor Right, but Autonomous
Post-left anarchy is not something new and different. It's neither a
political program nor an ideology. It's not meant in any way to constitute
some sort of faction or sect within the more general anarchist milieu. It's
in no way an opening to the political right; the right and left have always
had much more in common with each other than either has in common with
anarchism. And it's certainly not intended as a new commodity in the
already crowded marketplace of pseudo-radical ideas. It is simply intended
as a restatement of the most fundamental and important anarchist positions
within the context of a disintegrating international political left.
If we want to avoid being taken down with the wreckage of leftism as it
crumbles, we need to fully consciously and explicitly dissociate ourselves
from its manifold failures - and especially from the invalid
presuppositions of leftism which led to these failures. This doesn't mean
that it's impossible for anarchists to also consider themselves leftists -
there has been a long, most often honorable, history of anarchist and left
syntheses. But it does mean that in our contemporary situation it is not
possible for anyone - even left anarchists - to avoid confronting the fact
that the failures of leftism in practice require a complete critique of
leftism and an explicit break with every aspect of leftism implicated in
its failures. Left anarchists can no longer avoid subjecting their own
leftism to intensive critique. From this point on it is simply not
sufficient (not that it really ever has been) to project all the failures
of leftism onto the most explicitly obnoxious varieties and episodes of
leftist practice, like Leninism, Trotskyism and Stalinism. The critiques of
leftist statism and leftist party organization have always been only the
tip of a critique that must now explicitly encompass the entire iceberg of
leftism, including those aspects often long incorporated into the
traditions of anarchist practice. Any refusal to broaden and deepen the
criticism of leftism constitutes a refusal to engage in the
self-examination necessary for genuine self-understanding. And stubborn
avoidance of self-understanding can never be justified for anyone seeking
radical social change.
We now have the unprecedented historical opportunity, along with a
plenitude of critical menas, to recreate an international anarchist
movement that can stand on its own and bow to no other movements. All that
remains is for all of us to take this opportunity to critically reformulate
our anarchist theories and reinvent our anarchist practices in light of our
most fundamental desires and goals.
Reject the reification of revolt. Leftism is dead! Long live anarchy!
Link: http://www.anarchymag.org
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=03/01/19/2984877
