Ceasefire Magazine » anarchism

In Theory Autonomism: The future of activism?

Andrew Robinson — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 05:05:12 +0000

By Andrew Robinson

Activism today often seems to exist as a separate layer, resisting incorporation in the wider society, and creating a counterculture with its own spaces, social relations and rituals distinct from other social groups. This is largely because activists seek autonomy as a prerequisite for other kinds of social relations. Autonomy has replaced orientation to the masses as the central orientation of activism, and in doing so, has enabled horizontal forms of relations to replace (at least tendentially) the vertical party-model.

Activists are oriented to living differently and to changing the world, not to acting as the leaders of a particular class, and have moved away from interest-based concerns to questions of ethical commitment, non-conformism, anti-authoritarianism and the rejection of a wide array of repressive and stultifying aspects of the present system, from the work-system and the police to the abuse of animals and the devastation of the biosphere.

How did this transformation come about? Contemporary activism comes from a range of sources: anarchism, deep ecology, Situationism, Feminism, Pacifism – but one of the major influences has been European Autonomism, and I suspect this is one of the major reasons for the changing orientation towards horizontalism and autonomy.

Autonomism emerged in Europe in the 1970s, primarily in Italy and Germany (and, theoretically, mainly in Italy), and has since loosely defined the kinds of movements involved in the 2008 uprising in Greece, the ungdomshuset revolt in Denmark, as well as the wave of summit protests, etc.

To be sure, many of the people involved in these movements do not identify themselves as autonomist, but the strategic perspectives involved in the theory have quietly spread through resonance and indirect influence. In any case, the matter may not be so much about influence as the effect of a particular zeitgeist, which autonomism, Situationism and other 1960s/70s-era movements expressed, a zeitgeist which marked the special characteristics of the rebellion of this period and the kind of things it rejected. The zeitgeist is an effect, I think, of a particular phenomenon: the seduction of consumer society ceases to operate as a utopian horizon once it is realised past a certain point, and ceases to seem as utopian as it did in its absence.

Autonomism provides, however, a useful theoretical looking-glass through which to examine the perspectives arising from this historical moment. While different national movements had different influences – the ecological aspect was very strong in Britain, the Greek movement was heavily inflected by resistance to the military dictatorship of the 1970s and subsequent betrayals of the resistance – the clearest theoretical articulation arose in the Italian context, with Italy serving, in autonomist terms, as the ‘laboratory’ for new forms of struggle which later spread across Europe.

Well-known figures in autonomism include Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti, Paolo Virno, Sergio Bologna, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Romano Alquati, Mariarosa dalla Costa, and a number of others. These authors articulated a new variety of Marxist theory which expresses the vitality and power of a historical moment which is not yet over.

Today, autonomism and anarchism have become almost interchangeable, but their historical origins are rather different. Autonomists in Italy emerged as a left splinter from the Communist Party, initially coming together as micro-parties before adopting more horizontal approaches. This happened via the mediation of operaismo or ‘workerism’, an approach focused on workplace struggles. The language of autonomism and post-autonomism to this day has remained inflected with a rhetoric of communism and class struggle which strongly indicates its origins in Marxism. It was rooted in close analyses and empirically-based accounts of the changing situation of workplace and social struggles, and was formulated by a group of activist-intellectuals who were direct participants in the events they described.

For autonomists, the driving-force of historical change is not capital or the state, but rather, the self-activity (or ‘autovalorisation’ – creation of one’s own values) of the working-class, defined broadly to include all of the people who are exploited directly or indirectly by capitalism (such as housewives, who perform ‘reproductive labour’, refugees and migrants, whose subordination is part of the creation of low-wage economies, and unemployed people, who despite not being in a ‘job’ as such, are still active in ‘social production’ or the creation of social relations).

This struggle is the starting-point for understanding capitalism, and it creates a different perspective, similar to the ‘reversal of perspective’ in Situationism, which sees issues from an autonomous standpoint rather than the system’s standpoint. For autonomists, the transitions between phases of capitalism – for instance, between welfare-state Fordism and neoliberalism – are not primarily capitalist strategies, but rather, responses to (or even after-effects of) working-class revolts which make earlier forms of capitalism unsustainable.

Capitalism seeks to capture and exploit the creative force of labour, but cannot exist without it; on the other hand, labour can be ‘autonomous’, existing without capital (and without the state, which in autonomism, is viewed as a part of capitalism). Historical changes occur as new forms of resistance force capitalism to adapt in response. There is thus a constant tension between ‘class composition’ or ‘recomposition’, the process of recreating spaces of autonomy and non-capitalist social relations, and ‘decomposition’, the process through which capital closes down such spaces and breaks down such relations.

Autonomist analysis suggests that resistance is everywhere. Ordinary people – and especially, people seeking to reclaim bits of their time from capitalism, or refusing to be disciplined into the role of obedient subjects – are already engaged in forms of agency which escape the system’s logic. Practices such as slacking-off, calling in sickies, sabotaging equipment to get time off work, using wildcat strikes to maintain power against bosses, and so on, were deemed to involve a challenge to the subordination of creative activity to capital.

Autonomism also pioneered wider social strategies, such as ‘autoreduction’, the political appropriation of goods and services through mass refusal to pay, for instance, political shoplifting and faredodging. These everyday acts of revolt are viewed in autonomism as the ‘real movement of communism’ as utopia – communism is not a goal to be achieved in the future, but is already present in everyday refusals. This produces an almost Manichean dichotomy between the forces producing autonomy and the forces seeking to suppress it.

A second force, an ‘outside’, is always present, immanent in everyday resistance, and periodically becoming visible as autonomous spaces and zones, and as alternative kinds of social relations. (It is sometimes linked to the Marxist point that use-value, the motive for consumption, is tendentially outside of exchange-value; in neoliberalism, this division is undermined, exchange-value comes to define use-value by defining high-status commodities, and the result is a crisis of representation, as the system refers tautologically to itself, without a recognised outside).

The force of the outside begins to create a new society when it acts autonomously from the commands it receives from capital and the state. It emerges as a new society in forms such as new social networks, occupied factories, social centres (see below), and everyday forces of resistance. At any point, it is at a certain level of composition, but it contains the potential to form an entire other society outside the terms of the present global system, and repressive forces are constantly working to prevent it from further composing beyond its current composition, and to decompose it.

Informing the autonomist analysis of such struggles is the idea of the ‘refusal of work’. To ‘refuse’ work is not necessarily to be unemployed; it is to refuse to be disciplined into the set of traits and characteristic ‘behaviours’ deemed to make a person ‘employable’. A person may ‘refuse work’ to one degree or another by for instance, being unable to keep to a rigid timetable, being resistant to obeying orders, or refusing to conform to dominant speech or dress-codes. It’s not so much a moral rejection of work as an insistence on the primacy of one’s own desires and particularities over whatever arbitrary standards the powers-that-be happen to impose.

Autonomism is thus similar to the dissident scenes which emerged in the old authoritarian-socialist eastern bloc. It insists on the right to be different, the right to insist autonomously on one’s own perspective and way of life, against the homogenising pressures of neoliberal conformity. To ‘refuse work’ is also not to refuse to engage in any kind of activity, but rather, involves reclaiming one’s creative power from its entrapment in the dominant system. By refusing work, one becomes capable of value-creating, autonomous creative activity.

What, then, is the role of activists, who are seeking to overcome capitalism? The creation and defence of spaces of autonomy is taken as crucial, with activists acting as a defensive line between spaces of autonomy and state strategies which seek to destroy them. This involves the formation of forms of counter-power which can be mobilised against state repression. This idea of counter-power is perhaps best developed in the squatters’ movement: if police attack a squat, activists will blockade the squat to make it expensive to evict, hold disruptive protests elsewhere in the city, and break open new squats, making the attempt at repression both costly and self-defeating.

The creation and defence of autonomous spaces is also taken as crucial. The radical squatters’ movement has drawn heavily on autonomism, partly because squatting is a clear case of autoreduction (in this case, of rents), and partly because squatting is a means to carve out autonomous spaces. One innovation which can be traced to autonomism is the ‘social centre’, a site, usually squatted, which acts as a node for radical social networks, providing a meeting space and a range of services.

In Nottingham, Sumac and JB Spray are arguably social centres; Sumac in particular acts as a focal point for a wide range of ecological and other activist meetings and events, providing services such as a library, bar, catering service, computer access, meeting space and specific events such as a childrens’ evening and music and film events.

In Britain, spaces of autonomy have been negatively affected by decades of neoliberal decomposition, but quite recently, Britain had a thousands-strong eco-activist scene and an even larger free party scene with an annual circuit of temporary autonomous spaces. At further degrees of development, one can expect autonomy to be expanded to entire areas. In some cases, such as the Christiania commune, the Exarcheia district of Athens, and formerly Kreuzberg in Berlin, entire districts become largely autonomous, with police able to enter only through a military-style invasion under a hail of bricks, and a vibrant counter-society flourishing in the margins of the old.

The next stage from this might be to link up all the autonomous areas, creating a secondary map which surrounds and besieges the gridded map of capitalist flows, pushing the latter back into increasingly small areas of the globe. To do this, of course, the question must be addressed of building links between autonomous spaces in different areas, including with indigenous groups and autonomous movements in the global South.

For a number of reasons, ‘classical’ autonomism is difficult to find today. One reason is that it was a special product of ‘laboratory Italy’, a site of intense social struggles which were eventually repressed as a neoliberal, and highly authoritarian, regime took shape.

The autonomist movement in Italy was weakened by a wave of repression, in which activists were accused of guilt-by-association with the Red Brigades, and leading figures such as were jailed (though descendants of autonomia, such as Ya Basta!/Disobedientes, remain active in Italy to this day).

Another reason is that autonomism is a process-oriented, change-oriented theory which reacts quickly to what are perceived to be changes in class composition, reformulating itself in new terms. From the mid-1980s, autonomist authors such as Negri and Virno have moved away from the militantly antagonistic politics of classical autonomism into various strands of ‘post-autonomist’ theory.

In these more recent approaches, neoliberalism is viewed as paradoxically creating the conditions for liberation, with the working-class recomposing as a ‘multitude’ directly involved in production across the whole of society.

This rather reformist move left the field of militant autonomy to authors from anarchist backgrounds, such as Alfredo Bonanno and the Invisible Committee. These authors have made extensive borrowings from autonomist theory. Hakim Bey’s theory of temporary autonomous zones also extends the idea of autonomy, focusing on the reclamation of spaces neglected by the dominant gaze. Hence, the focal point of autonomy has moved sideways from autonomism into anarchism. This has led to the emergence of current groupings which are sometimes referred to as ‘neo-anarchist’ or ‘anarcho-autonome’, drawing strongly on both traditions.

Autonomism is vital in thinking through questions of autonomous agency, and especially in terms of the importance of creating an ‘outside’ counterposed to the dominant way of life. Some limits should, however, be noted. There is something of a contradiction over the issue of creative or productive power and the relationship to work in autonomism, which can be summarised as a contradiction between ‘power to the workers’ and the ‘refusal of work’. On the one hand, people are taken to have creative potential because their labour is the underpinning of capital; on the other, their creative activity today is exhibited primarily as refusal to take part in such labour.

The tension between the refusal and the valorisation of work remains unresolved in autonomist theory. The latter aspect can lead to a worrying progressivism or developmentalism, which is disempowering in relation to forms of resistance which defend unincorporated spaces rather than ‘passing through’ capitalism, and which creates the danger that problematic aspects of the present organisation of work will be reproduced in a future ‘liberated’ society, albeit without the parasitic layer of bosses on the top.

On a related point, I often find this style of theorising worryingly collectivist. There is a certain tendency in autonomism to suggest that the class, rather than particular people or groups, are becoming autonomous. This raises the question of what it is that integrates people as a class, or a single community.

Many autonomists would probably maintain that people have a kind of essence, or ‘species-being’, which links us all together and provides a basis for a non-dominatory society to nonetheless show high levels of commonality. I suspect this is wrong, and that current integration is an artificial effect of the very mechanisms of command which autonomism would do away with. In other words, without capitalism, there would not be a ‘class’ as a unitary entity either.

This raises the question of how people who are autonomous, or small groups of similar-minded people which are autonomous from other such small groups, can interrelate constructively. This is a problem which arises concretely in activist settings, and which is partially addressed by horizontal processes which seek to avoid the subordination of any participant to the group or to others.

As David Graeber puts it, the emphasis of anarchist organising is not on convincing everyone to agree, or imposing one group’s views on others, but rather, on finding ways that people who are fundamentally different, who will likely never agree, can nevertheless coexist and work together on particular projects. I think this is more helpful than thinking in terms of a unitary class, community or multitude as the focus or goal of agency.

Autonomism tends not to take seriously enough the extent to which people are drawn into identities and attachments through which they come to support the status quo. By emphasising how people are always in struggle, autonomism downplays the extent to which ordinary people often have reactionary beliefs which can be turned against struggle. Indeed, it doesn’t really deal with psychology at all (it does, however, borrow an Althusserian theory of ideology which engages to some extent with these kinds of issues).

The kind of issues which would be crucial to, say, Reich, Marcuse, Castoriadis, Guattari, or Foucault are noticeable by their absence; their place is often filled by economics or ontology, which do a bad job of engaging with motives and complex defence-formations. This is not the only theoretical gap. In my view, the class structure of contemporary society is more complex than autonomism tends to allow. In particular, strategies of inclusion which create intermediary layers, of reactive network formation (such as patronage networks) which incorporate people through relative advantage or hostility to worse-off others, and conflicts between capital and the state tend to become invisible in this account.

Even the agency of capital can be elided, as capitalist changes are reduced to the effects of workers’ struggle. This approach is useful in defining an adversary, but strategically limiting in failing to see the complexity of forces at work.

On a similar note, I would question whether an emphasis on the totality of people engaged in productive activity is useful in the contemporary context. Segmentations between included and excluded/marginalised groups of workers/producers are sharpening drastically, and it seems to me that the included have on the whole been drawn disastrously into the Third Way recomposition. There is thus a need to theorise the agency of the excluded and marginalised, separately from the category of ‘all of those who produce’. Indeed, I would argue that, in contrast to Fordism, neoliberalism actually reduces the extent to which excluded/marginalised groups are nevertheless ‘productive’.

For instance, the formal economy is shrinking in large parts of the world. Radical theory may have to reorient from the included-but-exploited, or ‘adversely incorporated’ – who are disempowered by the very conditions of their inclusion – to the practice of those who either refuse and de-link from (at least some aspects of) the dominant system, or who are forcibly delinked by the system. This reformulation would also take us beyond the autonomist contradiction regarding work, perhaps by reformulating creative activity against the work-system, in favour of subsistence, gift economies and other forms of non-commodified creative activity.

Autonomy has a future, despite the current wave of decomposition, as it provides the necessary antidote to alienation and commodification in social life, re-empowering subjects beyond the restrictive frame of the dominant system. Autonomy necessarily tends to produce itself as an outside in the present, else it would be reduced to the status of a fantasy supplemental to the dominant system. To seek to empower and maximise autonomy, it is necessary to always look for outsides, however partial, and seek to bring them together into a complete outside, another way of being, another world.

The current weakness of autonomy is strategic. Capitalism innovates in the field of repression, and autonomy must innovate in the field of defeating repression. The next great protest wave will come about when new means are found which render non-viable the current, neoliberal/Third Way composition of global capitalism.

This is a movement from which the last has not yet been heard.

Andrew Robinson is a political theorist and activist based in the UK. His book Power, Resistance and Conflict in the Contemporary World: Social Movements, Networks and Hierarchies (co-authored with Athina Karatzogianni) was published in Sep 2009 by Routledge. His ‘In Theory’ column appears every other Friday.

Further reading:
Aufheben journal
The Wombles – anarchist group influenced by autonomism
Aut-op-sy discussion forum on autonomism
Harry Cleaver’s autonomism archive
Autonomism library
The Commoner journal
Ephemera journal
Midnight Notes Collective

Diary of a Domestic Extremist: Why I hate activism

hich — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 01:00:54 +0000

By Mikhail Goldman

I hope that readers of this article will be aware of what I mean by activism. It is the work of that particular sect, “the activists”, who have taken it upon themselves to rid the world of evil. Whilst their peers pursue careers, raise families or lose themselves in hedonism, the activists minimise their commitments to the conventional world, putting their hearts and souls into the furtherance of whatever ideals they hold dear. Inevitably, to some extent, through “dropping out” of the mainstream, the activist seeks solace in doing good deeds. She considers this to be a life more enriched and rewarding than the materialism of those who surround her.

OK – I exaggerate. Not every activist is a modern day nun or monk. That said, the parallels made between activism and religiosity are deliberate and are intended to demonstrate the limitations of the former. Indeed, the adoption of activism as a role or a lifestyle is a significant obstacle to progress towards genuine and far-reaching social and political change. The inflexibility that results from the adoption of an activist role hinders the ability of the activist to adapt to change and remain effective. It also encourages the emergence of “experts” of social change and the formation of hierarchies that impede spontaneous action. Meanwhile, the tendency to associate activism with a particular lifestyle can lead to the estrangement of activists from the general population and the dilution of radical politics.

One of the most influential critiques of activism as a role was the anonymous article Give up Activism, which appeared in the aftermath of the June 18th 1999 anti-globalisation protests in London (J18). Drawing heavily on the work of situationist writer Raoul Vaneigem, the piece emphasised the limitations of activism and even suggested that it was a counter-revolutionary ideology.

Taking on the role of activist, the authors suggested, was to become a jealous guardian of the secrets of revolution. The activist relies on a niche provided by capitalist social relations in order to have relevance and it is thus in his interest to maintain that situation. Whilst I would question whether this tendency is, in itself, sufficient to nullify the activist’s desire to overcome oppressive social relations, it is clear that the activist role sets up a situation in which there is competition between an individual’s status as an “expert” of revolution and the revolutionary change itself. This is particularly true when the former is so much easier to achieve and maintain than the latter.

There is certainly a tendency for ‘activist’ to turn into shorthand for ‘expert in bringing about radical social change’. Even in movements and groups that claim to be against hierarchical social relations there is an unstated assumption that it is the ‘superactivists’ that are best positioned to lead the revolution. This assumption results in the pursuit of getting as many people into activism as possible, with the aim of achieving a critical mass that can then lead the charge against capital/climate change/whatever.

However, this assumes that the activists are a vanguard and thus, somehow, superior to the masses. This theory is certainly not borne out by the evidence of actual insurrections, in which the ‘specialists’ of revolution usually play a rather peripheral role. Even if it were probable that activists could lead such a revolt, the formation of an informal leadership class would ensure the reproduction of hierarchical social values. To form a leadership group within a so-called revolutionary movement is to sow the seeds of counter-revolution.

Another phenomenon that seems to be associated with the adoption of the activist role is an inflexibility around strategy and tactics. Because activism inevitably means perpetuating action, there is often little opportunity for reflection and adaptation within the milieu. An ideology of constant attack is part and parcel of the role and is favoured, even when patience might be more effective.

In addition, the fetishisation of particular tactics results in their mass reproduction, often without regard for the limited period during which they are novel, when no defence against them had yet been formulated. For example, the past decades have seen activists around the western world lock themselves to various things with zeal, because it is what activists do – not, necessarily, because they have determined that it is the most appropriate action to take. By clinging to a heritage limited by culture and geography, the activist reproduces the same routine over and over, without apparent regard to its effects.

It is this culture of activism that is, perhaps, neglected by Give up Activism. The adoption of activism as a lifestyle rather than a medium for bringing about social change serves to alienate those who do not identify with its idiosyncratic culture. The unspoken rules of what hairstyles, clothing, diet and lifestyle choices are and aren’t acceptable in the activist ghetto are major barriers to those who are interested in the same revolutionary aims but don’t share the lifestyle.

The activist subculture is derived from subsections of punk, hippy and other predominantly white subcultures which inevitably makes it harder for non-white people to fit into them. Without being part of the social scene around activism, with its drinking rituals (vegan organic beer only, of course) and crusty clothing choices, the outsider can only get so involved in the movement.

This results in a limbo situation for such people who cannot fit in. Most end up giving up on a scene that they feel they can never be fully part of.

Aside from the obvious cultural bias in activist circles towards whiteness, the disproportionate dominance of student politics (as well as those who have come through the university system) means that those from working class backgrounds often feel a similar alienation from activism. The intellectuals of the movement love to communicate in lengthy theses on this or that particular issue, often lacking direct connections to those on the front line.

Unsurprisingly, there is often a lack of understanding of the harsh realities poor people experience, which can lead to a lifestyle of poverty being fetishised (see, for example, criticisms of CrimethInc). Certain prevalent activist lifestyle choices e.g. clothing, diet, not flying, etc. are easier to adopt for the middle class activist who, after a childhood of luxury, sees these choices as a rejection of materialism. This denial of material wealth is a less comfortable choice to make for the person who has grown up associating such denials with a lack of opportunity.

Last but not least, the culture of activism is often a macho culture. The emphasis on having the best ideas or doing the most daring actions can encourage a competitive atmosphere where those with the loudest voices (usually men) get heard and others (often women) stay silent. Just as in the case in society at large, the speakers are often male and those who are expected to support them are often female. This reproduction of gender roles in activist culture is further evidence that it is not, at present, a revolutionary culture.

The lack of diversity and acceptance, in the activist subculture, of people who are different, is obviously a problem. However, the one area where there does appear to be genuine diversity is also a problem: activism has long been associated with anarchist politics due to the traditional association of direct action with those ideas. However, with the emergence of liberal direct-action movements, particularly around climate change, the political ideals of activism have become muddied and less focussed.

Whilst you might once have associated the activist with the revolutionary politics of anarchism or socialism, now the activist might be just as likely to engage in symbolic acts with the aim of pressuring some authority or other to change its policy. This divergence of political positions around a common lifestyle seems to be the opposite of what is required to bring about wide reaching social change.

Activism, then, is a deeply problematic identity which throws a number of obstacles in the path to radical social change. This inevitably leads to the question of what can be done by those who are committed to that radical change and, out of the lack of alternatives, end up defining ourselves as activists?

One of the most important things is to get over ourselves. Just because we are consciously committed to trying to revolt doesn’t make us the most capable of doing it. We are going to need a lot of friends and allies before we are able to do anything. When spaces open up for the kind of change we wish to see we won’t be the ones leading it because there won’t be any leaders. We can spread useful ideas and skills amongst people who are sympathetic but in the end spontaneity will be vital.

Because we need a massive range of people from all backgrounds to adopt radical ideas before meaningful change becomes possible we need to constantly be aware of the limited diversity of the circles we move in. It is only when these are genuinely open to and supportive of a wide range of active participants that we will grow in any meaningful sense. That means rejecting the white, middle-class, male claim on radicalism that is prevalent at the moment.

It means accepting people who have different lifestyles and different ideas about eating meat, shopping in supermarkets and using fossil fuels to those prevalent in the subculture. There is a need to be open to and welcoming of everyone who is sick of the system of domination.

Whilst there’s a lot to be said for and against that colourful character of an anarchist, Ian Bone, his Bash the Rich book makes excellent reading. In one chapter, he recounts how he and his Class War comrades participated in the Brixton riot of 1981. They saw the riot as an opportunity to engage in the struggle against their class enemies. Rather than trying to set themselves up as some elite group with authority over what was going in, they saw the riot as a moment in the struggle that, with their street fighting experiences, they could contribute to, along with other unknown militants.

As far as I’m concerned activists should be just that – unknown militants who lend their efforts and their solidarity to struggles wherever they find the opportunity.

Mikhail Goldman, (a.k.a. The Domestic Extremist) currently focusses his trouble-making and incitement in the Midlands area. His favourite activities are bringing down the system and enjoying a good cup of tea.

His column appears every Wednesday.

In Theory Anarchism, war and the state

Andrew Robinson — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 14:53:40 +0000

By Andrew Robinson

This article summarises how a number of anarchist and anarchistic authors view the relationship between the state and war. Some of the authors discussed below are self-identified anarchists, while others are libertarian or autonomist Marxists who adopt anarchistic ideas. Stereotypically, anarchists are associated with violence, corresponding to the view of states as guarantors of peace. The first stereotype follows from the second: while anarchists disagree on the use of force, they generally view states as highly warlike, and oppose state violence both internationally and against internal ‘enemies’. The Hobbesian view of the state as protector is based partly on an assessment of state behaviour comparable to IR Realism, and partly PM awareness of histories of state-formation and of stateless peoples and movements. In contrast to statists, anarchists generally view society or social relations as separate and distinct from the state (or the state as a special kind of social relation distinct from others).

Michael Bakunin, one of the earliest, and most celebrated proponents of Anarchism

In response to a common misconception, it is not true that anarchists oppose the state because they are naïve about human nature. Anarchist views about human nature are widely variant. Objections to the state can be convincing based on many different views, such as distrusting people to hold too much power without abusing it. Statists might be said to have a dual conception of human nature: the good people are trusted with excessive power so as to disempower the bad people. Statism is thus associated with hierarchical differentiations of people. Further, the objection is not simply to states as institutions but to state-like ways of relating and acting: in some accounts, the state is a social relation. In anarchist theory, states are viewed as expressions of hierarchical, oppressive social logics. They are forces of decomposition, which tend to attack or break down alternative, horizontal social relations. They are also based on ‘reactive’ emotional forces of suspicion, hatred and aggression which they channel to produce warlike relations among people. They also turn on one another, accumulating wealth by pillaging other states or societies. Against such state violence, anarchist strategies often seek to find or form focal-points for social power which can counterbalance or draw energies away from state power. These focal-points necessarily involve living and acting in non-militarist, non-authoritarian ways.

In Statism and Anarchy, Bakunin portrays the modern state as primarily military, and closely connected to the ruling class. As a military force, the state is necessarily aggressive, competing with other states for power. It produces moral and intellectual decay through its corrupting power. The extent of this decay depends on the extent to which the state’s way of thinking filters down through society, a process which is strongest in the most militaristic states. The ‘people’, primarily meaning the excluded and powerless, are for Bakunin a potential counterpoint to the state, and can destroy it in insurrection.

Kropotkin similarly argues that the state, or ‘political principle’ (vertical association or hierarchy), is counterposed to society, or the ‘social principle’ (horizontal association or affinity). In The State: Its Historic Role, he argues that the state is ‘synonymous with war’. The state brings peace, if at all, only as lifeless dominance in a ‘colourless, lifeless whole’. Social networks bring effervescent life, whereas states bring death through structural violence and pillage. Since the state cannot tolerate other sources of power, it wages constant war against social networks as they arise. There is thus a constant zero-sum struggle between the state as a force of control and impoverishment and social networks as spaces for freedom and creativity. Local communities have capabilities for self-defence and/or peacebuilding. Although wars can be fought outside or against states, they have a different significance, enlivening people in the defence of liberty rather than disempowering them through its destruction.

Stirner’s argument is rather different. In The Ego and its Own, he starts from a critique of social roles and categories, termed ‘spooks’ in his work, to derive a critique of submission to overarching categories of all kinds. Stirner is what would today be called an ‘anti-essentialist’, an opponent of fixed labels and of the privileging of some aspects of a person over others. States are rejected as bearers of particular categories which are wrongly accorded a greater status than other categories. Further, sacrifices for the state are always matters of the state’s self-interest. By claiming a monopoly on violence, the state pursues self-interested violence at the expense of its subjects.

Tolstoy’s Christian Anarcho-Pacifism draws similar distinctions, but characterises the anti-state pole rather differently. For Tolstoy, the state’s ‘law of violence’ stands against a ‘law of love’, with each expressing a particular emotional climate and set of passions. States embody ‘low passions’ such as hatred (often channelled against outsiders using nationalism), against which love provides a basis for peace and happiness. Love is expressed in acts such as conscientious objection, withdrawing the social activity on which state violence is based.

Anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were central in anti-conscription activism in First World War America and were jailed as prisoners of conscience. Their anti-militarist critiques placed a strong emphasis on socialist criticisms of the capitalistic basis of war. Elites use irrational prejudices to manipulate people into fighting on their behalf. Rudolf Rocker wrote an influential anarchist critique of nationalism around the same time, portraying the state as distorting legitimate particularisms into hateful chauvinisms. Also in this period, Randolph Bourne popularised the phrase ‘war is the health of the state’. In an unfinished work titled The State, he argued that the state demands ‘mystic[al] devotion’, which war is a means to realise. In war, the permanent state machine displaces party competition and comes to monopolise public life. Its main aim is not victory, but the ‘spiritual compulsion’ bound up with the ideal of the state, with the triumph of a ‘herd’ mentality over creativity and difference. The outpouring of irrational, reactive forces is managed by nationalistic elites for their own benefit.

With fascism overrunning Europe, the leftist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich pioneered a sexual-liberationist critique of militaristic states in his Mass Psychology of Fascism. Reich views repressive social systems as enabled by repressive biological and emotional structures through which people prevent themselves from feeling emotions. Fascism emerges from a complete identification with state power and the leader, a pattern derived from identification with the father in patriarchal, authoritarian families. Such families train people to channel attachments vertically rather than horizontally. More recently, Klaus Theweleit used this approach to interpret the masculine violence of proto-fascist groups as an attempt to seek existential security in categories of purity and displays of superiority over demonised others. On a similar line of thought, authors from the Frankfurt School have argued that industrialised war and genocide throw doubt on the benevolence of modernity. Adorno links war to the desire to dominate nature. Fromm argues that humanity’s survival is put at risk by a peculiarly human type of malevolent aggression arising from alienation. Marcuse critiques the discourse of war as a kind of doublespeak, and interprets modern war as a self-frustrating product of the frustration-aggression complex. Frustration arising from capitalist life is channelled and rendered socially functional through military aggression, but cannot be alleviated by such aggression because human means of war have been replaced with technological means. War thus tends towards repetition and escalation.

Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ distinguishes between three types of violence or effective action. States are founded in law-making violence which posits their own command as the law, are maintained by law-preserving violence which maintains a status-quo through small acts of enforcement, and can be shattered by law-destroying violence (such as a general strike). For Benjamin, the state is based on reactive attachments, here interpreted as power over life for the sake of power, and is fearful, becoming more authoritarian over time as it becomes afraid of the emergence of counter-powers. Law-making violence is instrumental, whereas law-destroying violence is expressive, directing itself against the capability to use law-making or preserving violence.

The theory of the state as a source of social decomposition by means of social war is extended by Antonio Negri in his 1970s-era works. Negri views state violence as a means to preserve capitalist domination as a kind of irrational social command over labour. The new form of the state, the ‘crisis-state’, is geared to a permanent state of exception which simultaneously causes and wards off extreme risks of destruction such as nuclear war. It also forms an internal warfare state directed at forces of life, autonomous social movements, with which it is in an irreducible antagonism. In this phase, Negri views such movements as tending to become an armed society counterposed to the state. This view of radical antagonism fades in Negri’s more recent work, but still in Hardt and Negri’s Empire and Multitude, the state is deemed to be waging an unwinnable, unlimited global war indistinguishable from policing. Also from an autonomist standpoint, the Midnight Notes Collective have argued that recent wars are means for preserving Northern monopolies on advanced technologies by playing on risks of weapons proliferation, or are resource wars focused on the enclosure and exploitation of resources. The idea of the ‘state of exception’ has been expanded by Giorgio Agamben.

Looking at autonomy more broadly, alternatives to the state also emerge in studies of stateless indigenous social groups. There is substantial debate on whether such groups are warlike, with scholars arguing that certain groups are extremely peaceful or engage only in ritualised forms of combat. Clastres’ theory of indigenous warfare stands out in showing the difference between indigenous and statist types of war. In his theory, indigenous war is a way of asserting the difference and autonomy of each village or band, placing an obstacle in the way of state-formation by ensuring that power remains diffuse. Statist war, in contrast, causes ethnocide, which is inscribed in the nature of the state as the dissolution of the many into the one. Autonomous social movements such as La Ruta Pacifica also offer autonomous responses to war. In this group’s discourse, social weaving is theorised as a way of counterposing energies of hope to those which sustain the permanent state of war in Colombia. Their activities focus on morale-boosting, emotional repair, collective mourning and working through fear. They believe that violence decomposes social relations, so that power can be exercised by recomposing relations.

Noam Chomsky has been a vigorous champion of Anarcho-syndicalist ideals

Noam Chomsky is perhaps the best-known anarchist critic of imperialist wars. Chomsky’s work focuses on exposing the lies and distortions of political and media accounts of wars, focusing on the empirical rebuttal of false claims. Chomsky focused on economic self-interest as the main motive for warmongering, portraying the military-industrial complex as a financial racket. As well as direct resource grabs, the American war-machine is directed at making the current world-system seem inescapable by eliminating ‘the threat of a good example’, of a country which succeeds without playing America’s game. To allow such warmongering, illusions are systematically manufactured through distorted media coverage. Such ideologies can also be self-perpetuating, particularly among the foreign policy ‘backroom boys’, causing wars through their own dynamic even where there is little economic or geostrategic benefit.

The insurrectionist anarchist Alfredo Bonanno provides another contemporary theory of anarchism and war. In Bonanno’s theory, affirmation of life goes hand-in-hand with assaults on structures of power and alienation. Insurrection is viewed as the point of explosion of accumulated discontent. Struggle must not, however, reproduce militarist approaches which are ‘the dominion of death’. Bonanno also interprets ethno-religious civil wars in terms of the mistaken mapping of the desire for revolt onto misleading ethno-religious categories. Nationalist wars can be manufactured to defuse the ‘powder-keg’ of revolt, or can complicate rebellions against the powerful.

In poststructuralism, war is critiqued as part of a mechanism of logistical control through which diffuse hierarchical apparatuses reshape society. Deleuze and Guattari view states as counterposed to autonomous war-machines of the kind discussed by Clastres. The state also captures such war-machines, turning them into forces of reactive desire for its own projects of ‘antiproduction’ or decomposition. War-machines captured by states become agencies of “war for war’s sake”, tending towards total destruction. Virilio treats the military class as an important social force with its own logic or ‘essence’ which it seeks to impose on society. The method of the military class is not simply to defeat enemies but to control and rearrange space so as to disempower enemies in advance or corrode their affirmative energies. This is achieved, for instance, by creating ecologically inhospitable spaces subject to control, in place of dense ecosystems. The military is thus counterposed to popular defence, which has a different logic based on dense ecosystemic spaces giving strategic advantages over attackers. Today, popular defence has recomposed as insurrection, in cases such as Vietnam and Palestine, and has as its goal the destruction of military control over space. Baudrillard argues that states cause not ‘war’ (which implies an adversarial and symbolic element) but ‘non-war’, a kind of destructive violence in which the enemy is not recognised as an agent but instead, systematically disempowered by technological means. ‘Non-war’ is pursued as a means to systemic dominance, but is compromised by its incapacity for dialogue.

One can summarise these various views through a few leitmotifs they have in common. Firstly, anarchist views of war see the state as a force for repressive control, in the interests of the state itself or of a ruling class or elite. Such states find themselves in constant war with other kinds of social forces, and sometimes with other states too. They thus use war as a kind of crisis-management, to control societies and maintain an overall system of control. States are based on, or else produce for their own ends, reactive emotional dispositions of aggression, fear and ‘herd’ morality which find their apex in war. States, especially warfare-states, tend to disempower and sap energies from other social forces and to decompose social relations. Against such powers, people can activate counter-powers, either as forces in a relation of non-militarist war with the state, or as networks which withdraw the everyday power on which the state depends.

* This article is based on “The State as a Cause of War: Anarchist and Autonomist Critiques of War”, forthcoming in Hall Gardner (ed.), The Ashgate Research Companion to War: Origins and Prevention, Aldershot: Ashgate.

Andrew Robinson is a political theorist and activist based in the UK. His book Power, Resistance and Conflict in the Contemporary World: Social Movements, Networks and Hierarchies (co-authored with Athina Karatzogianni) was published in Sep 2009 by Routledge.

Q&A: Anarchism

Admin — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 23:02:32 +0000

Anarchism is an oft-misunderstood political ideology – it’s not mainstream, it doesn’t seem to have a set of defined principles and to many, the word means ‘chaos’. Here, Usayd Younis answers some common questions.

Why do anarchists object to the establishment?

The establishment is the current system in place. It usually refers to the organised bodies of the state (e.g. the police), and concentrations of private power (e.g. corporations).

“It only makes sense to seek out structures of authority,” says Noam Chomsky “and to challenge them. Unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled.”

This implies is that anarchists are not dogmatically anti-establishment – but that the onus is on the establishment to justify its authority. If the establishment cannot justify the reasons for its authority, then it should be dismantled. Thus, in the Chomskyan example, some instances of the use of authority and coercion – like pulling a child back from a road with heavy traffic – are justifiable. Most are not.

Anarchists generally believe that people are quite capable of fully participating in meaningful decisions which affect them, and the society. They pit themselves against the traditional conservative view (dating back to Plato) which argues that some kind of an elite is necessary to preserve the good of the society as a whole. To an anarchist, everyone who is involved in society must have an equal say in the way it is run.

In the U.K., as in other ‘polyarchial democracies’, the voter is presented with a selection of representatives to make decisions on their behalf. To an anarchist, this is the wrong way round. Anarchists would push for consensus decision-making, where no power is disproportionately vested in certain people.

Why do anarchists believe that the state is unnecessary?

One of the central themes running throughout anarchism is anti-statism. The state is a sovereign body that exercises supreme authority over all individuals and associations living within a defined geographical area. Either forcibly or by non violent means, the removal of the state plays a crucial role in defining anarchism against other ideologies that it can be related with, notably socialism and liberalism.

Sebastien Faure, in Encycopedie Anarchiste, defined anarchism as ‘the negation of the principle of Authority’. He saw ‘Authority’ as an offence against the principles of freedom and equality. By rejecting the state, anarchists endorse instead the principles of absolute freedom and unrestrained political equality. Authority with the right of one person or institution to influence the behaviour of others enslaves, oppresses and limits human life. It damages and corrupts both those who are subject to authority and those who are in authority.

The state is automatically a possessor of high authority. It is only by this concentration of authority that states could carry out the crimes of slavery, mass genocide and illegal occupation that are widely witnessed in both recent history and in the present day.

To be in authority is to acquire an appetite for prestige, control and eventually domination – giving rise to a ‘psychology of power’ of which Paul Goodman (1911-72) said, ‘many are ruthless and most live in fear’. This is especially true when political authority is backed by the machinery of the modern state.

Other ideologies, though they dislike its ill-effects, recognise the state as a necessary evil. Anarchists, in contrast, see it as a negative and destructive force embodied in institutions of law and government.

The ‘social contract’ is largely a myth, say anarchists. You become subject to a state by being born there, not out of free choice. And the massive coercion used to get you to obey the rules of the state does not constitute a fair contract, agreed to without duress. The state is a coercive body whose laws must be obeyed because they are backed by the threat of punishment. You can dress this up in the term ‘social contract’, but its essence doesn’t change. Since the advent of the state system (caused largely by the needs of European capital and constant fighting in Europe), point out anarchists, we have seen extreme ideologies of fascism and Stalinist communism run vast swathes of the world. We have seen every imaginable atrocity, genocide, and catastrophic war. We have come close to destroying every living thing on the planet – indeed, this possibility is still far from unlikely. Isn’t it time we lost trust in the state?