Translated by Nikos Gatzikis

____________

Marxist theorist Mark Fisher (1968–2017) posed a critical question: “Are cultural resources running out in the same way as natural resources are?” (Fisher, 2009). Through an analysis of cultural production over the past fifty years, he argued that the popular culture of Western societies has ‘frozen’ in the 20^thcentury, with the present characterized by timeless repetitions, revivals, and a striking lack of innovation.

According to Fisher, the 20^th century was defined by the parallel development of technological and cultural forms: the emergence of new technologies allowed for formal changes in pop culture, giving it a distinct chronological “signature”(Fisher, 2009). As examples, we can consider how the synthesizer became emblematic of the music of the ’70s and the ’80s or how the ‘rough’ assembly of samplers characterized ’90s rave music.

However, from 2000 onward, this trend disappears, and technological progress becomes disconnected from cultural production: technology continues to advance in leaps, but popular culture remains stagnant, clinging to its old forms. In fact, as Fisher notes, new technologies often serve not to produce new cultural forms, but to more faithfully reproduce old ones.[1] In this way, today, technological innovations “have tended to be parasitic on old [cultural] media” (Fisher, 2009).

If Fisher diagnosed a cultural landscape trapped in an endless loop of the past,Generative AI is not just another instance of this inertia – it is its logical conclusion. I argue that applications for text, image, and sound production—such as ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Soundraw, which utilize data from human activity to generate content—exemplify the tendency Fisher identified.

To make this parallel clearer, we must first examine Fisher’s arguments more closely.

In the texts included in Ghosts Of My Life (Fisher, 2014a),as well as in his blog k-punk, Fisher argues that the Western culture of the 20^thcentury was essentially modernist, rejecting the past and striving to achieve some formal innovation. Moreover, in contrast to the elitist and largely inaccessible modernism of the first half of the 20^thcentury, the period from 1960 to 2000, which shaped Fisher’s aesthetic perception, was marked by the emergence of a “popular modernism” with mass appeal (Fisher, 2014b). The examples Fisher usesare mainly drawn from British music: 1960s psychedelic rock, 1970s punk, 1980s post-punk, and 1990s rave.

In contrast to this era of unprecedented innovation, the popular culture of the 21^st century has abandoned modernism. Cultural forms no longer rebel against the past, but embrace it and repeat it. Thus, the“nostalgia mode” of postmodern capitalism (a term by Fredric Jameson) exhibits a “formal attachment to the techniques and formulas of the past, a consequence of a retreat from the modernist challenge of innovating cultural forms” (Fisher, 2014a, p. 11).

The examples that can be used to support this idea are endless. Fisher points to the disappearance of the ‘retro’ genre in music, a category that has stopped making sense, since, today, everything is somewhat retro and essentially timeless. Thus, Adele and Amy Winehouse—whose “recordings are saturated with a vague but persistent feeling of the past” (Fisher, 2014a, p. 14)—were not considered retro, but entirely contemporary.

Fisher also refers to the inability to identify the distinctive “sound” of the 2000s or 2010s, as well as the sterile appropriation of rave by bands like the Black Eyed Peas (Fisher, 2014a, p. 180) or mod by groups like Blur and Oasis. Rather than genuine tributes, he argues, these repetitions were “confidence tricks which borrowed yesterday’s inventions and half-heartedly passed them off as today’s swagger” (Fisher, 2014b). In the 2020s, one need only look at Hollywood, which increasingly resembles an Ouroboros, endlessly regurgitating its own past through sequel after sequel, spin-offs no one asked for, and countless remakes.

But how can we explain the disappearance of popular modernism in the 21st century? Why has pop culture stopped drawing on the creativity of technological advances? According to Fisher, the main reason is the transition of Western societies from the social democracy of the post-war period (welfare state, relative safety) to the neoliberal era ushered in by Thatcher and Reagan (expansion of the market sphere, dominance of managerial logic). This shift coincided with the transition from Fordist capitalism (stable employment in a specific space with limited hours) to today’s post-Fordist capitalism (precarious work with flexible hours, work that you take home, pervasive anxiety).

This transition brought significant changes to the production and consumption of art, and Fisher argues that these changes are responsible for the stagnation of contemporary pop culture. Regarding production, neoliberal capitalism “has gradually but systematically deprived artists of the resources necessary to produce the new” (Fisher, 2014a, p. 15). With the erosion of the welfare state, free tertiary education, and both private and public spaces (low rents, squats), the “indirect source of funding” that enabled experimentation in 20^thcentury pop culture has disappeared. Today, most artists are pressured “toproduce something that [is] immediately [profitable]”and thus turn to “cultural products that resembl[e] what [is] already successful” (Fisher, 2014a, p. 15).

At the same time, in terms of consumption, the audience of pop culture ends up desiring the reproduction of familiar forms, demanding ‘more of the same.’ The neoliberal condition of general uncertainty compels usto seek security in “established” cultural expressions, while the “besieging of attention” imposed by the technologies of communicative capitalism makes us “demand quick fixes,” such as the “easy promise of a minimal variation on an already familiar satisfaction” (Fisher, 2014a, p. 15). In this way, Fisher argues, neoliberalism is the primary mechanism behind the freezing of pop culture.[2]

I feel that Generative AI represents the culmination of the creative enervationthat Fisher diagnosed. Artificial intelligence is anachronistic by nature, inherently bound to the cultural production of the past. Its function is to metabolize the data of human activity (literature, painting, music) in orderto produce combinations of words, pixels, and sounds that satisfactorily respond to a given prompt.

Indeed, AI is very capable. ChatGPT can write a good paragraph “in the style of Woolf,” Midjourney can generate a good image “in the style of Monet,” So-VITS-SVC can even make songs with Tupac’s voice. But they cannot revolt. They cannot rupture. They cannot escape the weight of the pastand bring something new. Paraphrasing Fisher, we might say that “the law of [AI] is that everything comes back” (Fisher, 2014b), whether it be writing styles, artistic techniques, or even the dead themselves.

Thus, if AI artists are selling images online, if Kanye is releasing AI music videos, if Hollywood is considering using chatbots to write scripts and if inspired dissertations are already being drafted by ChatGPT, the result is utterly void. The only thingAI can do is ingest what has already happened and regurgitate it as formula, as undead forms that refuse to disappear. In this sense, Generative AI is the perfect realization of capital’s necromanticdream: culture that consumes itself endlessly, resurrecting the past while preventing the emergence of the new.

It follows that debates about AI’s “intelligence” or “consciousness” are absurd. The fact that we recognize our own reflectionin AI says more about us than it does about it. The ability of AI-generated self-help books or young adult fiction to selldoes not mean that AI writes ‘like a human’ – it means that, for decades, many humans have been writing, reading, and thinking like machines.

Thus, when we speak of AI’s (present or future, actual or virtual) “consciousness,” this tells us nothing about the algorithm’s“intelligence”, but insteadreveals how much we have mechanized our thinking, how much we have distancedourselves from our own bodies, our own experiences, andour own creative capacities, to the point that we now see our image reflected in binary code.

The moment we disconnect consciousness from the emergence of the new is the moment we surrender to the sterile timelessness of capitalist non-sense.

_____________

Haris Kalaitzidis

References

Fisher, M. (2014a). Ghosts of my life: Writings on depression, hauntology and lost futures. Zer0 Books.

Fisher, M. (2014b, January 5). Going overground. k-punk. https://k-punk.org/going-overground/

Fisher, M. (2009, April 15). Running on empty: The lack of innovation in pop music suggests that we are experiencing an energy crisis in culture. New Statesman. https://www.newstatesman.com/long-reads/2009/04/culture-technology-energy-rave

[1] Fisher cites the example of HD televisions, where “we see the same old things, but brighter and glossier” (Fisher, 2009). In the 21^st century, we might consider how Hollywood uses CGI to make aging actors appear younger (e.g., Robert De Niro) or to resurrect them entirely (e.g., Carrie Fisher).

[2]If Fisher’s analysis has a limitation, this ishis tendency to overwhelmingly focus on neoliberalism without situating it within the broader tendencies of capitalism and the oscillation between the contractual and the authoritarian poles of the state. As a result, and even though Fisher insists that he is not proposing some nostalgic return to social democracy, his work—or, at least, many interpretations of it—struggles to shake the sense that things ‘were better back then’, and that the main problem in today’s world is neoliberalism. I suspect this was one of the reasons that led him to take up one unviablepolitical position after another: engaging with accelerationism and left cybernetics in his youth, becoming enamoured with Syriza, Podemos, and Corbyn later on, and attacking the “neo-anarchist” tendency of horizontalism and rejection of parliamentary politics.

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Becoming-Other, Becoming-Many: Poststructuralism and the Problem of Justice- George Sotiropoulos– political philosopher and member of Void Network participates in the conference POSTSTRUCTURALISM: PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE Wed. 6/3/2019 MADRID

This paper argues that poststructuralist thought can help articulate a critical and materialist notion of justice against the normativist and idealist conceptions dominant today. The assumption that justice is a critical concept goes all the way back to Plato, whose interrogation of the notion in the Republic yields a critical analysis of the political forms existing in Greece at the time. On the other hand, in the very same work, Plato has been taken to canonize an idealist conceptualization of justice, as a normative Ideal that prescribes how things Ought to be. This conception remains prevalent today in mainstream theories of justice, which unfold within a more or less liberal frame of reference. Despite the plurality of perspectives and the willingness to critically engage with key premises of liberal thought, justice continues for the most part to be conceived as a judgment that reason passes on material reality. Recognizing the exclusionary implications of this type of normative political theory, a diverse yet identifiable current of thought has emerged that attempts to recover a more critical conception of justice, which does not adopt however the reductionist attitude of traditional Marxist or more broadly materialist critiques. In this context, the legacy of poststructuralism has been ambivalent. On the one hand, the late work of Derrida has arguably been an inaugurating moment of contemporary critical and non-reductionist theories of justice. On the other hand, it is not hard to find instances in the work of other iconic poststructuralist thinkers that suggest a principled dismissal of the notion’s analytical and political merits. Intentionally or inadvertently, poststructuralism’s radical critique of political normativism has been said (and accused) to lead to a subsumption of justice to power. Even Derrida’s attempts to sustain the irreducibility of the former to the latter, ends up in an aporetic position, which refrains from articulating an alternative, positive conception of justice. It is the latter possibility that my paper explores. Starting with a brief discussion of Derrida and Foucault and then focusing on Deleuze and Guattari, it will be argued that poststructuralist thought provides a fertile basis for a concept of justice that foregrounds the latter’s critical potency without however forfeiting its normative and ethical traits. At the same time, this conception will be shown to be consistent to a materialist theory of social reality, yet respectful of the ideational dimension of justice as well as of its excessiveness vis-à-vis historical actuality.

Conference Program

more info: https://poststructuralismconference.wordpress.com/conference-abstracts/

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Q: So what is specific to capitalism in all this?

GD: Are delirium and interest, or rather desire and reason, distributed in a completely new, particularly “abnormal” way in capitalism? I believe so. Capital, or money, is at such a level of insanity that psychiatry has but one clinical equivalent: the terminal stage. It is too complicated to describe here, but one detail should be mentioned. In other societies, there is exploitation, there are also scandals and secrets, but that is part of the “code”, there are even explicitly secret codes. With capitalism, it is very different: nothing is secret, at least in principle and according to the code (this is why capitalism is “democratic” and can “publicize” itself, even in a juridical sense). And yet nothing is admissible. Legality itself is inadmissible. By contrast to other societies, it is a regime born of the public *and* the admissible. A very special delirium inherent to the regime of money. Take what are called scandals today: newspapers talk a lot about them, some people pretend to defend themselves, others go on the attack, yet it would be hard to find anything illegal in terms of the capitalist regime. The prime minister’s tax returns, real estate deals, pressure groups, and more generally the economical and financial mechanisms of capital — in sum, everything is legal, except for little blunders, what is more, everything is public, yet nothing is admissible. If the left was “reasonable,” it would content itself with vulgarizing economic and financial mechanisms. There’s no need to publicize what is private, just make sure that what is already public is being admitted publicly. One would find oneself in a state of dementia without equivalent in the hospitals.

Instead, one talks of “ideology”. But ideology has no importance whatsoever: what matters is not ideology, not even the “economic-ideological” distinction or opposition, but the *organisation of power*. Because organization of power– that is, the manner in which desire is already in the economic, in which libido invests the economic — haunts the economic and nourishes political forms of repression.

Q: So is ideology a trompe l’oeil?

GD: Not at all. To say “ideology is a trompe l’oeil, ” that’s still the traditional thesis. One puts the infrastructure on one side– the economic, the serious– and on the other, the superstructure, of which ideology is a part, thus rejecting the phenomena of desire in ideology. It’s a perfect way to ignore how desire works within the infrastructure, how it invests in it, how it takes part in it, how, in this respect, it organizes power and the repressive system. We do not say: ideology is a trompe l’oeil (or a concept that refers to certain illusions) We say: there is no ideology, it is an illusion. That’s why it suits orthodox Marxism and the Communist Party so well. Marxism has put so much emphasis on the theme of ideology to better conceal what was happening in the USSR: a new organization of repressive power. There is no ideology, there are only organizations of power once it is admitted that the organization of power is the unity of desire and the economic infrastructure. Take two examples. Education: in May 1968 the leftists lost a lot of time insisting that professors engage in public self-criticism as agents of bourgeois ideology. It’s stupid, and simply fuels the masochistic impulses of academics. The struggle against the competitive examination was abandoned for the benefit of the controversy, or the great anti-ideological public confession. In the meantime, the more conservative professors had no difficulty reorganizing their power. The problem of education is not an ideological problem, but a problem of the organization of power: it is the specificity of educational power that makes it appear to be an ideology, but it’s pure illusion. Power in the primary schools, that means something, it affects all children. Second example: Christianity. The church is perfectly pleased to be treated as an ideology. This can be argued; it feeds ecumenism. But Christianity has never been an ideology; it’s a very specific organization of power that has assumed diverse forms since the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages, and which was able to invent the idea of international power. It’s far more important than ideology.

FELIX GUATTARI: It’s the same thing in traditional political structures. One finds the old trick being played everywhere again and again: a big ideological debate in the general assembly and questions of organization reserved for special commissions. These questions appear secondary, determined by political options. While on the contrary, the real problems are those of organization, never specified or rationalized, but projected afterwards in ideological terms. There the real divisions show up: a treatment of desire and power, of investments, of group Oedipus, of group “superegos”, of perverse phenomena, etc. And then political oppositions are built up: the individual takes such a position against another one, because in the scheme of organization of power, he has already chosen and hates his adversary.

Q: Your analysis is convincing in the case of the Soviet Union and of capitalism. But in the particulars? If all ideological oppositions mask, by definition, the conflicts of desire, how would you analyze, for example, the divergences of three Trotskyite groupuscules? Of what conflict of desire can this be the result? Despite the political quarrels, each group seems to fulfill the same function vis-a-vis its militants: a reassuring hierarchy, the reconstitution of a small social milieu, a final explanation of the world… I don’t see the difference.

FG: Because any resemblance to existing groups is merely fortuitous, one can well imagine one of these groups defining itself first by its fidelity to hardened positions of the communist left after the creation of the Third International. It’s a whole axiomatic, down to the phonological level — the way of articulating certain words, the gesture that accompanies them — and then the structures of organization, the conception of what sort of relationships to maintain with the allies, the centrists, the adversaries… This may correspond to a certain figure of Oedipalization, a reassuring, intangible universe like that of the obsessive who loses his sense of security if one shifts the position of a single, familiar object. It’s a question of reaching, through this kind of identification with recurrent figures and images, a certain type of efficiency that characterized Stalinism–except for its ideology, precisely. In other respects, one keeps the general framework of the method, but adapts oneself to it very carefully: “The enemy is the same, comrades, but the conditions have changed.” Then one has a more open groupuscule. It’s a compromise: one has crossed out the first image, whilst maintaining it, and injected other notions. One multiplies meetings and training sessions, but also the external interventions. For the desiring will, there is — as Zaire says– a certain way of bugging students and militants, among others.

In the final analysis, all these groupuscules say basically the same thing. But they are radically opposed in their *style*: the definition of the leader, of propaganda, a conception of discipline, loyalty, modesty, and the asceticism of the militant. How does one account for these polarities without rummaging in the economy of desire of the social machine? >From anarchists to Maoists the spread is very wide, politically as much as analytically. Without even considering the mass of people, outside the limited range of the groupuscules, who do not quite know how to distinguish between the leftist elan, the appeal of union action, revolt, hesitation of indifference.

One must explain the role of these machines. these goupuscules and their work of stacking and sifting–in crashing desire. It’s a dilemma: to be broken by the social system of to be integrated in the pre-established structure of these little churches. In a way, May 1968 was an astonishing revelation. The desiring power became so accelerated that it broke up the groupuscules. These later pulled themselves together; they participated in the reordering business with the other repressive forces, the CGT [Communist worker’s union], the PC, the CRS [riot police]. I don’t say this to be provocative. Of course, the militants courageously fought the police. But if one leaves the sphere of struggle to consider the function of desire, one must recognize that certain groupuscules approached the youth in a spirit of repression: to contain liberated desire in order to re-channel it.

Q: What is liberated desire? I certainly see how this can be translated at the level of an individual or small group: an artistic creation, or breaking windows, burning things, or even simply an orgy or letting things go to hell through laziness or vegetating. But then what? What could a collectively liberated desire be at the level of a social group? And what does this signify in relation to t”the totality of society”, if you do not reject this term as Michel Foucault does.

FG: We have taken desire in one of its most critical, most acute stages: that of the schizophrenic–and the schizo that can produce something within or beyond the scope of the confined schizo, battered down with drugs and social repression. It appears to us that certain schizophrenics directly express a free deciphering of desire. But now does one conceive a collective form of the economy of desire? Certainly not at the local level. I would have a lot of difficulty imagining a small, liberated community maintaining itself against the flows of a repressive society, like the addition of individuals emancipated one by one. If, on the contrary, desire constitutes the very texture of society in its entirety, including in its mechanisms of reproduction, a movement of liberation can “crystallize” in the whole of society. In May 1968, from the first sparks to local clashes, the shake-up was brutally transmitted to the whole of society, in some groups that had nothing remotely to do with the revolutionary movement–doctors, lawyers, grocers. Yet it was vested interests that carried the day, but only after a month of burning. We are moving toward explosions of this type, yet more profound.

Q: Might there have already been a vigorous and durable liberation of desire in hostpry, apart from brief periods. a celebration, carnage, war, or revolutionary upheavals? Or do you really believe in an end of history. after millennia of alienation, social evolution will suddenly turn around in a final revolution that will liberate desire forever?

FG: Neither the one nor the other. Neither a final end to history, nor provisional excess. All civilizations, all periods have known ends of history–this is not necessarily convincing and not necessarily liberating. As for excess, or moments of celebration, this is no more reassuring. There are militant revolutionaries who feel a sense of responsibility and say: Yes excess “at the first stage of revolution,” serious thing s… Or desire is not liberated in simple moments of celebration. See the discussion between Victor and Foucault in the issue of *Les Temps Moderns* on the Maoists. Victor consents to excess, but at the “first stage”. As for the rest, as for the real thing, Victor calls for a new apparatus of state, new norms, a popular justice with a tribunal, a legal process external to the masses, a third party capable of resolving contradictions among the masses. One always finds the old schema: the detachment of a pseudo capable of bringing about syntheses, of forming a party as an embryo of state apparatus, of drawing out a well brought up, well educated working class; and the rest is a residue, a lumpen-proletariat one should always mistrust (the same old condemnation of desire). But these distinctions themselves are another way of trapping desire for the advantage of a bureaucratic caste. Foucault reacts by denouncing the third party, saying that if there is popular justice, it does not issue from a tribunal. He shows very well that the distinction “avant-garde-lumpen-proletariat” is first of all a distinction introduced by the bourgeoisie to the masses, and therefore serves to crush the phenomena of desire, to *marginalize* desire. The whole question is that of state apparatus. It would be strange to rely on a party or state apparatus for the liberation of desire. To want better justice is like wanting better judges, better cops, better bosses, a cleaner France, etc. And then we are told: how would you unify isolated struggles without a party? How do you make the machine work without a state apparatus? It is evident that a revolution requires a war machine, out this is not a state apparatus, it is also certain that it requires an instance of analysis, an analysis of the desires of the masses, yet this is not an apparatus external to the synthesis. Liberated desire means that desire escapes the impasse of private fantasy: it is not a question of adapting it, socializing it, disciplining it, but of plugging it in in such a way that its process not be interrupted in the social body, and that its expression be collective. What counts is not the authoritarian unification, but rather a sort of infinite spreading: desire in the schools, the factories, the neighborhoods, the nursery schools, the prisons, etc. It is not a question of directing, of totalising, but of plugging into the same plan of oscillation. As long as one alternates between the impotent spontaneity of anarchy and the bureaucratic and hierarchic coding of a party organization, there is no liberation of desire.

Q: In the beginning, was capitalism able to assume the social desires?

GD: Of course, capitalism was and remains a formidable desiring machine. The monary flux, the means of production, of manpower, of new markets, all that is the flow of desire. It’s enough to consider the sum of contingencies at the origin of capitalism to see to what degree it has been a crossroads of desires, and that its infrastructure, even its economy, was inseparable from the phenomena of desire. And fascism too–one must say that it has “assumed the social desires”, including the desires of repression and death. People got hard-ons for Hitler, for the beautiful fascist machine. But if your question means: was capitalism revolutionary in its beginnings, has the industrial revolution ever coincided with a social revolution? No, I don’t thing so. Capitalism has been tied from its birth to a savage repressiveness; it had it’s organization of power and its state apparatus from the start. Did capitalism imply a dissolution of the previous social codes and powers? Certainly. But it had already established its wheels of power, including its power of state, in the fissures of previous regimes. It is always like that: things are not so progressive; even before a social formation is established, its instruments of exploitation and repression are already there, still turning in the vacuum, but ready to work at full capacity. The first capitalists are like waiting birds of prey. They wait for their meeting with the worker, the one who drops through the cracks of the preceding system. It is even, in every sense, what one calls primitive accumulation.

Q: On the contrary, I think that the rising bourgeoisie imagined and prepared its revolution throughout the Enlightenment. From its point of view, it was a revolutionary class “to the bitter end”, since it had shaken up the *ancien regime* and swept into power. Whatever parallel movements took place among the peasantry and in the suburbs, the bourgeois revolution is a revolution made by the bourgeoisie terms are hardly distinguishable–and to judge it in the name of 19th or 20th century socialist utopias introduces, by anachronism, a category that did not exist.

GD: Here again, what you say fits a certain Marxist schema. At one point in history, the bourgeoisie was revolutionary, it was even necessary–necessary to pass through a stage of capitalism, through a bourgeois revolutionary stage. It’S a Stalinist point of view, but you can’t take that seriously. When a social formation exhausts itself, draining out of every gap, all sorts of things decode themselves, all sorts of uncontrolled flows start pouring out, like the peasant migrations in feudal Europe, the phenomena of “deterritorialisation.” The bourgoisie imposes a new code, both economic and political, so that one can believe it was a revolution. Not at all. Daniel Guerin has said some profound things about the revolution of 1789. The bourgoisie never had illusions about who its real enemy was. Its real enemy was not the previous system, but what escaped the previous systems’s control, and what the bourgoisie strove to master in its turn. It too owed its power to the ruin of the old system, but this power could only be exerciced insofar as it opposed everything else that was in rebellion against the old system. The bourgoiseie has never been revolutionary. It simply made sure others pulled of the revolution for it. It manipulated, channeled, and repressed an enormous surge of popular desire. The people were finally beaten down at Valmy.

Q: They were certainly beaten down at Verdun.

FG: Exactly. And that’s what interests us. Where do these eruptions, these uprisings, these enthusiasms come from that cannot be explained by a social rationality and that are diverted, captured by the power at the moment they are born? One cannot account for a revolutionary situation by a simple analysis of the interests of the time. In 1903 the Russian Social Democratic Party debated the alliances and organization of the proletariat, and the role of the avant-garde. While pretending to prepare for the revolution, it was suddenly shaken up by the events of 1095 and had to jump on board a moving train. There was a crystallization of desire on board a wide social scale created by a yet incomprehensible situation. Same thing in 1917. And there too, the politicians climbed on board a moving train, finally getting control of it. Yet no revolutionary tendency was able or willing to assume the need for a soviet-style organization that could permit the masses to take real charge of their interests and their desire. Instead, one put machines in circulation, so-called political organizations, that functioned on the model elaborated by Dimitrov at the Seventh International Congress–alternating between popular fronts and sectarian retractions–and that always led to the same repressive results. We saw it in 1936, in 1945, in 1968. By their very axiomatic, these mass machines refuse to liberate revolutionary energy. It is, in an underhanded way, a politics comparable to that of the President of the Republic or of the clergy, but with red flag in hand. And we think that this corresponds to a certain position vis-a-vis desire, a profound way of envisioning the ego, the individual, the family. This raises a simple dilemma: either one finds a new type of structure that finally moves toward the fusion of collective desire and revolutionary organization: or one continues on the present path and, going from repression to repression, heads for a new fascism that makes Hitler and Mussolini look like a joke.

Q: But then what is the nature of this profound, fundamental desire which one sees as beeing constitutive of man and social man, but which is constantly betrayed? Why does it always invest itself in antinomic machines of the dominant machine, and yet remain so similar to it? Could this mean that desire is condemned to a pure explosion without consequence or to perpetual betrayal? I have to insist: can there ever be, one fine day in history, a collective and during expression of liberated desire, and how?

GD: If one knew, one wouldn’t talk about it, one would do it. Anyway, Felx just said it: revolutionary organization must be that of the war machine and not of state apparatus, of an analyzer of desire and not an external systhesis. In every social system, there have always been lines of escape, and then also a rigidification to block off escape, or certainly (which is not the same thing) embryonic apparatuses that integrate them, that deflect or arrest them in a new system in preparation. The crusades should be analysed from this point of view. But in every respect, capitalism has a very particular character: its lines of escape are not just difficulties that arise, they are the conditions of its own operation. it is constituted by a generalized decoding of all flux, fluctuations of wealth, fluctuations of language, fluctuations of art, etc. It did not create any code, it has set up a sort of accountability, an axiomatic of decoded fluxes as the basis of its economy. It ligatures the points of escape and leaps itself having to seal new leaks at every limit. It doesn’t resolve any of its fundamental problems, it can’t even forsee the monetary increase in a country over a single year. It never stops crossing its own limits which keep reapperaing farther away. It puts itself in alarming situations with respect to its won production, its social life, its demographics, its borders with the Third World, its internal regions, etc. Its gaps are everwhere, forever giving rise to the displaced limits of capitalism. And doubtless, the revolutionary way out (the active escape of which Jackson spoke when he said: ” I don’t stop running, but while running, I look for weapons”) is not at all the same thing as other kinds of esacpe, the schizo-escape, the drug-escape. But it is certainly the problem of the marginalized: to plug all these lines of escape into a revolutionary plateau. In capitalism, then, these lines of escape take on a new character, a new type of revolutionary potential. You see, there is hope.

Q: You spoke just now of the crusades. For you, this is one of the first manifestations of collective shizohrenia in the West.

FG: This was, in fact, an extraordinary schizophrenic movement. Basically, in an already schismatic and troubled world, thousands and thousands of people got fed up with the life they led, makeshift preachers rose up, people deserted entire villages. It’s only later that the shocked papacy tried to give direction to the movement by leading it off to the Holy Land. A double advantage: to be rid of errant bands and to reinforce Christian outposts in the Near East thretened by the Turks. This didn’t always work: the Venetian Crusade wound up in Constantinople, the Childrens Crusade veered off toward the South of France and very quickly lost all sympathy: there were entire villages taken and burned by these “crosses” children, who the regular armies finally had to round up. They were killed or sold into slavery.

Q: Can one find parallels with contemporary movements: communities and by-roads to escape the factory and the office? NAd would there be any pope to co-opt them? A Jesus Revolution?

FG: A recuperation by Christianity is not inconceivable. It is, up to a certain point, a reality in the United States, but much less so in Europe or in France. But there is already a latent return to it in the form of a Naturist tendency, the idea that one can retire from production and reconstruct a little society at a remove, as if one were not branded and hemmed in by the capitalist system.

Q: What role can still be attributed to the church in a country like ours? The church was at the center of power in Western civilization until the 18th Century, the bond and structure of the social machine until the emergence of the nation-state. Today, deproved by the technocracy of this essential function, it seems to have gone adrift, without a point of anchorage, and to have split up. One can only wonder if the church, pressured by the currents of Catholic progressivism, might not become less confessional than certain political organizations.

FG: And ecumenism? In’t it a way of falling back on one’s feet? THe church has never been stronger. There us bi reasiob ti oppose church and technocracy, there is a technocracy of the church. Historically, Christianity and positivism have always been good partners. The development of positive sciences has a Christian motor. One cannot say that the psychiatrist has replaced the priest. Nor can one say the cop has replaced the priest. There is always a use for everyone in repression. What has aged about Christianity is its ideology, not its organization of power.

Q: Let’s get to this other aspect of your book: the critique of psychiatry. Can one say that France is already covered by the psychiatry of *Sectuer*–and how far does this influence spread?

FG: The structure of psychiatric hospitals essentially depends on the state and the psychiatrists are mere functionaries. For a long time the state was content to practice a politics of coercion and didn’t do anything for almost a century. One had to wait fot the Liberation for any signs of anxiety to appear: the first psychiatric revolution, the opening of the hospitals, the free services, instituional psychotherapy. All that has led to the great utopian politics of “Sectorization,” which consisted in limiting the number of internments and of sending teams of psychiatrists out into the population like missionaries in the bush. Due to lack of credit and will, the reform got bogged down: a few model services for official visits, and here or there a hospital in the most underdeveloped regions. We are now moving toward a major crisis, comparable in size to the university crisis, a disaster at all levels: facilities, training of personnel, therapy, etc.

The instituional charting of childhood is, on the contrary, undertaken with better results. In this case, the initiative has escaped the state framework and its financing to return to all sorts of associations–childhood protection or parental associations…. The establishments have proliferated, subsidized by Social Security. The child is immediately taken charge of by a network of psychologists, tagged at the age of three, and followed for life. One can expect to see solutions of this type for adult psychiatry. In the face of the present impasse, the state will try to de-nationalize institutions in favor of other institutions ruled by the law of 1901 and most certainly manipulated by political powers and reactionary family groups. We are moving toward a psychiatric surveillance of France, if the present scrises fail to liberate its revolutionary potentialities. Everywhere, the most conservative ideology is in bloom, a flat transposition of the concepts of Oedipalism. In the childrens’s wards, one calls the director “uncle,” the nurse, “mother.” I have even heard distinctions like the following: group games obey a maternal principle, the workshops, a paternal one. The psychiatry of *Secteur* semms progressive because it opens the hospital. But if this means imposing a grid over the neighborhood, we will soon regret the loss of the closed asylums of yesterday. It’s like psychoanalysis, it functions openly, so it is all the worse, much more dangerous as a repressive force.

GD: Here’s a case. A woman arrives at a consultation. She explains that she takes tranquilizers. She asks for a glass of water. Then she speaks: “You understand I have a certain amount of culture. I have studied, i love to read, and there you have it. Now I spend all my time crying. I can’t bear the subway. And the minute I read something, I start to cry. I watch television; I see images of Vietnam: I can’t stand it …” The doctor doesn’t say much. The woman continues: “I was in the Resistance… a bit. I was a go-between.” The doctor asks her to explain. “Well, yes, don’t you understand, doctor? I went to a cafe and I asked, for example, is there something for Rene?” I would be given a letter to pass on.” The doctor hears “Rene”; he wakes up: “Why do you say “Rene”? It’s the first time he asks a question. Up to that point, she was speaking about the metro, Hiroshima, Vietnam, of the effect all that had on her body, the need to cry about it. But the doctor only asks: “Wait, wait, ‘Rene’ … what dies ‘Rene’ mean to you?” Rene–someone who is reborn [re-n’e]? The Renaissance, this fits into a universal schema, the archetype: “You want to be reborn.” The doctor gets his bearings: at last he’s on track. And he gets her to talk about her mother and her father.

It’s an essential aspect of our book, and it’s very concrete. The psychiatrists and psychoanalysts have never paid any attentiaon to delirium. It’S enough just to listen to someone who is delirious: it’s the Russians that worry him, the Chinese; my mouth is dry; somebody buggered me in the metro; there are germs and spermatozoa swimming everywhere; it’s Franco’s fault, the Jews, the Maoists: all a delirium of the social field. Why shouldn’t this concern the sexuality of the subject–the relations it has with the Chinese, the whites, the blacks? Whith civilization, the crusades, the metro? Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts hear nothing of this, on the defensive as much as they are indefensible. They crush the contents of the unsoncious under prefab statements: “You speak to me of the Chinese, but what about your father? No, he isn’t Chinese? THen , do you have a Chinese lover?” It’s atz the same level of repressive work as the judge in the Angela Davis case who affirmed: “Her behavior can only be explained by her beeing in love.” ANd what if, on the contrary, Angela Davis’s libido was a social, revolutionary libido? What if she were in love because she was a revolutionary?

That is what we want to say to psychiatrists and psychoanalysts: yopu don’t know what delirium is; you haven’t understood anything. If our bnook has a meaning, it is that we have reached a stage where many people feel the psychoanalytif machine no longer works, where a whole generation is getting fed up with all-purpose schemas–oedipus and castration, imaginary and symbolic–which systematically efface the social, political, and cultural contents of any psychic disturbance.

Q: You associate schizophrenia with capitalism; it is the very foundation of your book. Are there cases of schizophrenia in other societies?

FG: Schizophrenia is indissocialble from the capitalist system, itself conceived as primary leakage (fuite): and exclusive malady. In other societies, escape and marginalization take on other aspects. The asocial individual of so-called primitive societies is not locked up. The prison and the asylum are resent notions. One chases him, he is exiled at the edge of the village and dies of it, unless he is integrated to a neighboring village. Besides, each system has its paricular sickness: the hysteric of so-called primitive societies, the manic-depressive paranoiacs of the great empires… The capitalist economy preoceeds by decoding and de-territorialization: it has its exterme cases, i.e., schzophrenics who decode and de-territorialize themselves to the limit; but also it has its extreme consequences–revolutionaries.

by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
source: http://deleuzelectures.blogspot.co.uk/2007/02/capitalism-very-special-delirium.html?m=1

The post “Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium” by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari appeared first on Void Network.

“First and foremost what we abhor on the whole is not just the image of some ultimate substance, some indivisible density; it is also and above all (at least for me) bad form.” Roland Barthes, Digressions

1. INITIATION

Little subversions make for big conformities.

2. PROVISIONAL DEFINITION

The man of the Old Regime is the figure of bourgeois subjectivity at the moment of its liquidation and hollowing out by cybernetic domination, which historically was issued from that bourgeoisie itself.  Defunct, bourgeois subjectivity survives itself indefinitely in the myth of the free, autonomous, strong individual, self-assured and sure of his world, a world that contains in its fenced-in yard a set of values and established experiences that our “individual” wholly inhabits, as well as the consumption of a certain number of cultural commodities that serve him as a system of references.  From being the object of social critique during the whole of the 19th century, and a good part of the 20th, the man of the Old Regime has now become the subject of such critique, in a reconstitution process internal to commodity domination which now requires the maintenance of the man of the Old Regime as a false alternative to the American way of life.  What we’re talking about here is a form of life, and not an attributable class of individuals: hence we are inferring him from our singular inclinations, no less than from the empirical summary of character traits, cultural practices, sediments of habit, and institutional skeletons that justify him.  The man of the Old Regime functions as a womb for socially produced, possible habituses; for us this isn’t about critiquing a “way of life,” but about putting ourselves on a plane of consistency that would allow reality to be read in terms of an ensemble of ethical and political confrontations between forms-of-life.  We are not going to dissect nor judge them, but merely take a material measurement of their lines of flight and the playing area they offer.  The man of the Old Regime is a special kind of Bloom whose guarded escape from the world is his sole and unique line of flight.

3. METHOD.

The walk-on role relationship that Bloom has with his own life, has no reason for it; that means that we can’t undo the tangle of “psychological” and social forces that constitute the essence of Old Regime humanity.  It would be as illusory as it would be useless to claim to be able to say what the Old Regime man “is,” so we’ll just content ourselves with describing what happens to him everyday.  A sociological analysis and criticism of the ideology there, one founded in a comprehension of the real interests and strategies pursued by individuals and in a will to dissipate the social effects of the interference with and travesty of these interests, in spite of the occasional clarifications it might offer, is just part of a struggle to outline this domain of habitus-incorporation, one that can’t be justified, not even subtly, as something taken up out of social self-interest.  The man of the Old Regime can only be handled with a formal description that would update both the defense mechanisms of his individual art of living while also updating our evaluation of the political institutions prerequisite for his persistence, namely the monopoly on public violence by what’s called the “state” authorities, and by their corollary, bourgeois publicity, which interrupts all the real consequences of thought.  The Old Regime posture can only ever exist as a particular internal modality of the New Cybernetic Regime, as a liberalness granted by the latter, and must be understood, in bureaucratic sociological terms, as a strategy for the distinction and affirmation of a non-bloomized habitus in an era when Bloom is a transcendental aspect of all critical theory on social being.  More than just a particular vision or theory of the world, the “discourse” of the Old Regime is an epistemological apparatus that decrypts reality by means of a system of classic and general categories (man, the passions, interest, history, action, negativity, difference, Spectacle, etc.), which always permits a warding off and neutralizing of all events by bringing them down to the safety of “been there done that.”  Moreover, it permits those Blooms that play more or less masterfully the Old-Regime-man role to silence their own singular implication in what’s happening to them; by thus splitting hairs about everything that happens, the man of the Old Regime pardons himself from ever thinking about his own real situation.  The passion for critique that animates him thus often expresses itself in a simple reflex of distancing: he doesn’t need to fabricate new concepts in order to think about any given event; he needs to do so in order to actively deny any and all events, by fitting them in with some already-known essence.

4. AN APPARATUS INCARNATE.

The man of the Old Regime is a responsive type; he’s perhaps the first in history to live in a state of total resentment, since he can’t resign himself to completing the inevitable labor of finally interring the habitus culturally associated with the bourgeois ethic on pain of indicting himself.  A real experience of the contemporary situation is forbidden to him, because – and in this sense he’s profoundly autistic – he speaks, or rather, he discourses about the present advances of the involutional process of capitalist subsumption and on the morals that sketch themselves out therein from above — from a bird’s eye view, carefully secured by safety tape of both the police and linguistic kinds.  In no circumstances can he let himself fully go into experience and be contaminated by such contemptible realities; rather he lays a blanket rejection on anything unheard-of, whatever is not validated by the classical forms of existence.  This is a question of his survival, pure and simple.  In effect, in the more or less long term, this attenuated form-of-life is doomed to disappearance, undermined by the evaporation of its conditions of existence and the unavoidable shrinkage of peaceful space for its expression.  Politically, this decline manifests itself in the terror this strange, frightened citizen lives in, nostalgically longing for the good old days of submission to the limited sovereignty of a Nation-State, a submission which he could plainly and fully fathom on sight, and from which he could always escape and take refuge in his inner conscience, a liberated zone, the homeland of the Self where self-ignorance could easily pass itself off as moral conscience.  Dispossessed of his little stock of anecdotes and violently removed from his natural milieu by the growing onrush of the Empire’s acephalous, non-contractual, inordinate sovereignty, the man of the Old Regime has been swindled by History, and, world-weary, has sent in his invoice; thus in France a few years ago we saw an Old Regime politico-intellectual party and movement crop up which attempted to bail out the water from a few good old myths like Republic, School, or Authority, in the shadow of which they hoped to be able to go on living.  But their coin has no more currency, and Sirius’ perspective doesn’t bring home the bacon anymore.  The man of the Old Regime, thus, is reduced by all this to bringing his theoretical neutralization and interference apparatus into existence biographically, an apparatus of “change-for-its-own-sake-ism” [bougisme], modernity, the dominant ideology of party-down youth-ism, progress, mobility, flexibility and clean slates; in brief, the ever-so pleasant globalization so dear to the “liberal-libertarians,” versus a certain number of properly valorized postures and concepts like critique, reflection, authority, slowness, conservatism, “tory anarchism,” the Republic so dear to the “Bolshevik-bonapartists,” respect for the past, traditionalism, literature, discursive masterfulness, etc.  But the part he pretends to play so passionately has in fact already been played out.  The assertions, positions, theses, and analyses that comprise the feigned confrontations he has in his world are always already known to all, and in no way serve to clarify reality but act as symbols of recognition, gauges of belonging, rhetorical guide-rails.  These are gimmicks; it’s the stuff of carnival fortune-tellers.  The static here comes from an eternal playing out, over and over again, of the old false opposition between conservatism/progressivism, terms that are never more than two variants of the same anthropological thesis – a thesis of pacification that postulates man as a living-social-being-in-society.  And the point of it all is to naturalize an apparatus that comprises one of the major controlled burns to hide the fact of human reality as civil war.

Who could still believe this world to be worthy of love? What good does it do to love what itself is devoted to hatred?  Even God can’t do it, and resigns himself to allowing Hell to go on existing.

Bernanos

5. GIMMICK

One of the favorite gimmicks of the man of the Old Regime is the declamatory affirmation of his militant exteriority to “this” world, his irreducibility relative to the so-called “mass” culture, the dominant bloc of alienation, perceived as the impassable horizon of all human positions; this reflex at bottom only expresses the fetishism of a chimerical foreignness to the world that seeks itself out for example in the practice of perpetual, pathetic, misanthropic – or even schismatic hygienic measures.  Owing to the heavy historical tendency to centralist pacification which has marked the French State for such a long while, and has produced the citizenist psychology we know so well – the psychology of subjects believing they can find freedom in the proper operation of a State that takes charge of all the “political” aspects of their lives – the Old Regime posture is reminiscent, in a preferential way, of a certain tradition very much our own, one that can be traced back to the “anti-monarchist” libertines, and has continued all the way down to the right-wing/royalist [Maurrasian – from Charles Maurras] and dietary situationism of today, by way of reactionary catholics, heideggerians of all obediences, anarcho-capitalists, “Hussars,” and other Sollerso-Celinians. [Phillippe Sollers/Louis-Ferdinand Celine].  In the last resort, old regime man will always try to make good on his back-up right, his right to an inward emigration.  Today all these fractions are part of a vast movement remaking the battle-fronts, all seeking to ally themselves with liberal-humanism so as to escape the historical confrontation between the Empire and whatever escapes it.

continue reading 
of the book:

CHAPTER 6-15
http://oldregime.jottit.com/6-15
CHAPTER 16-20
http://oldregime.jottit.com/16-20 
CHAPTER 21-30
http://oldregime.jottit.com/21-30 

source:
http://oldregime.jottit.com/1-5 

The post Tiqqun:”The Little Game of the Man of the Old Regime” appeared first on Void Network.

Unlike Mansoor, I do not think it is in their oversights that Weigel and Ahern deserve a rejoinder. From an anarchist perspective, at least for those of us who read Tiqqun with tremendous interest (without entirely aligning ourselves with some more or less imagined Tiqqunist position), what is striking about them is just how symptomatic their response is—how much it tells without setting out to be much more than a dismissal, a nice excuse not to read, or not to think about what you didn’t really read. (The dismissal is, it’s true, followed by a weak exhortation. But the exhortation feels tacked on and is unlikely to be the reason their piece made the rounds.)

Weigel and Ahern’s reading of Tiqqun reveals to us their political presuppositions and shortcomings; it also pushes us to make our investment in certain positions consonant with Tiqqun’s more explicit. Anarchist conversations can be different if anarchists are willing to read everything more symptomatically—Weigel and Ahern and Tiqqun, yes, but also our own bodies, our own lives. What follows, then, is not an attempt to defend Tiqqun, much less to show the right way to read them, and more of an outline of what I would like to discuss—a sketch of a conversation some of us are learning to have.

To begin, a summary of what is at stake in Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl (PM). First, it was included in the first issue of the Tiqqun journal (1999) and then published separately by Mille et une Nuits (2001). Second, there is a clear conceptual linkage between the Theory of Bloom (published in the same issue, and also republished separately) and these Preliminary Materials. Bloom and Young-Girl are figures that appear in both texts (as well as here and there in Tiqqun’s other writings). To enter into this topic I’ll cite an appraisal of Tiqqun for antagonist projects from the recent collection Impasses:

In Theory of Bloom and Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl the critical work proceeds through figures. Bloom and Young-Girl are figures. They are not concepts … they are not demographic designators. They figure social phenomena that emerge in the twentieth century. These social phenomena have to do with forms of experience and subjectivity. When we talk about these in the U.S. way, we usually use the impoverished lexicon of identity politics.

Bloom and Young-Girl are part of what Tiqqun attempted in this journal—to borrow the quaint title of another piece in that issue, a “phenomenology of everyday life.” The aim is to see what is learned if we can describe some aspects of what manifests (what is made to appear) in societies like ours as Bloom, or as Young-Girl. That is what they mean when they write that Young-Girl is a “vision machine” constructed with the aim of “making the [social] battlefield manifest.” The theory of Bloom is developed in a mostly philosophical mode; the materials for the theory of the Young-Girl are gathered as fragments and presented as preliminaries, as if work remains to be done—or must be left incomplete out of some unnamed necessity. I will return to this below. Third, Young-Girl “is obviously not a gendered concept.” I repeat this because it merits repeating; it merits repeating because it has not been understood. Young-Girl, as a figure, allows us to map out and detect ways in which apparatuses of power produce, grasp and model the libidinal sphere in every sense, including those desires which so naturally or culturally seem to cleave into the two-and-then-some of sexual difference or the immediate manyness of genders. Put differently, though the figure is not intended to render a gender visible, it does model something about how gender has come to operate, insofar as gender is a crucial aspect of certain forms-of-life well integrated into societies like ours. Our good liberals and bad radicals enjoy saying that once a sexual or gender identity has been claimed or reclaimed by someone, it is, at least to some extent, free of power relations, of domination.

We counter that the model (explicit for the liberals, implicit for some radicals) for the value of this recognition is and always has been recognition by the state and the granting of legal and moral rights, of new forms of personhood; that, when it is not the legal model, it is the model of creative consumption, in which I believe I am discovering and expressing my true self as I navigate commodity-space; and concurrently that to expand the field of the normal (i.e. more rights, commodities tailored to what I think are my needs) will never amount to the kind of disruptive liberation we anarchists are after. I will return to this matter as well. Fourth, Bloom and Young-Girl are in a complicated relation of partial resonance with a third text published in Tiqqun 2, Sonogram of a Potential. This piece argues for an “ecstatic feminism” along lines I find congruent with my reading of the Bloom/Young-Girl dyad. I will make passing reference to Sonogram, though I do not mean to absorb it entirely into the theoretical space of the first two. Sonogram deserves its own discussion.

Weigel and Ahern make several symptomatic mistakes, or force several misreadings, concerning the least ambiguous aspects of Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl. The first is that, after an initial reference, they refer to the book as Theory of the Young-Girl. But the book is not The, or A, Theory of the Young-Girl. To treat a text that presents itself as preliminaries, outlines, notes, “trash theory”, as a finished product, is to ignore the first and clearest sign its author or authors could give as to how to approach it. This is telling considering the amount of space they devote to inveighing against a supposed irony in PM. It does not seem to me that PM communicates in any single tone, and, if it does, it would be something less ambivalent, such as “hate [of] the Spectacle.” Second mistake: they repeatedly state (and base part of their criticism on the claim) that Tiqqun wrote anonymously. But obviously, Tiqqun did not write anonymously; they wrote in and as Tiqqun. (Inability to distinguish between true anonymity and the use of pseudonyms, heteronyms, shared names such as Tiqqun, and multiple-use names (e.g. Luther Blissett) suggests, again, willful ignorance of the most obvious clues to interpretation.) Weigel and Ahern not only assimilate pseudonymous to anonymous writing, but more strikingly claim that here such practices “abet sexism” (note legalistic language). Mansoor responds appropriately on this point, arguing that pseudonymity and non-attribution of sources are in fact “an attack on the politics of textual propriety, the law of the copyright and of the father.” To which an anarchist might add that it is no surprise that our academics insist on identification of authors and citation of sources, and that we like to write, read, and discuss writing that refuses that insistence.

Weigel and Ahern get one thing quite right: Young-Girl is a figure. But they immediately botch their response by assimilating the figural to the real, as if Young-Girl were an idea, a concept, of actually existing young girls. They are like those who read Anti-Oedipus and get confused or offended when they “realize” that Deleuze and Guattari think psychotics should be shuffled into the place of the revolutionary subject. Or like those who read Nietzsche on the overman and think it is an argument for a genetic homo superior. (To someone who responds to PM by asking “Wait a minute, how has all the concreteness of the world taken refuge in my ass?”, one might well answer: “Wait a minute, why are you so comfortably identifying with a figure of hyperconsumption?”) What does it mean, then, that Weigel and Ahern fail to mind the dash and so miss what is figural about the figure? It means that they are able to read obtusely, “ontically”, as Nina Power puts it, whenever they need to make the claim that there is sexism or misogyny afoot in PM. The figure loses all of its diagnostic and critical power when it is grasped so crudely. It is not a theory of young girls we are talking about here, so why read it all as though it is about girls or women? It is a satire, in some sense, but not a satire of or about women or girls. It is a satire, or really a détournement with dark satirical effects, about gender and power, about how power works through gender (not just as sexism), about how we cling to gender and so to the power that works through gender. Ariana Reines wrote a fascinating set of notes on her work on PM. Her opinion:

I’d like to point out for the Anglophone reader that although the introduction asserts that the “Young-Girl is evidently not a gendered concept,” and that the term is applicable to young people, gays, and immigrants, French is a gendered language; and that, moreover, the genderedness of French is not the only way to account for the fact that this book, as it accumulates, does become—in some sections more than others—a book about women. With everything biological and constructed the term women signifies. A book about us. It contains passages rife with heterosexist ressentiment and, occasionally, whiffs of (what seemed to me to be) female intellectual rage against the more vapid and conformist members of our sex.

Reines puts her finger on the risk that PM runs, the risk, precisely, of a response like Weigel and Ahern’s: the accusation of garden-variety sexism, or, worse, extreme misogyny. No, it is not a side effect of the French language; it had to run this risk to make its point. No, the possible “female intellectual” did not have to out and name herself to keep the text safe from such accusations; it would have botched precisely what makes it work. (“Tiqqun claims it has lady members…” write Weigel and Ahern. Identify yourselves for proper textual/political evaluation.)

A remark about what makes it work: the reason, I would suggest, that the book is called Preliminary Materials is that so much of it is a collection of détourned texts. (Reines: “You should know that when a passage in the text sounds like a women’s magazine, that’s because it comes from a women’s magazine”). Now, the practice of détournement was conceived by the Situationists out of desperation, as they were seeking to abolish (among other things) art as a separated sphere of life. Their analysis was that any new creation (painting, film) would either prefigure, or simply work as raw material for, future commodification—if it did not already and inescapably bear the commodity form. As a response they attempted creations composed of repurposed images or fragments, whose contrast and conflict would not just represent but enact the negativity they felt towards the world. “This combination of parody and seriousness reflects the contradictions of an era in which we find ourselves confronted with both the urgent necessity and the near impossibility of initiating and carrying out a totally innovative collective action” (Situationist International #3, 1959). That is why Weigel and Ahern are wrong to simply describe this part (most) of PM as “Situationist-ish collage.” A collage suggests a fanciful assemblage of images that go well together, like a grade school assignment to make a poster showing what you want to be when you grow up, which assumes the images of your prospective adulthood are already there, waiting for you to shop among them and creatively recombine them. Détournement, however, is primarily negative—it concerns what cannot be said, shown, or felt except by glaring, sometimes violent contrast of text and image. It shows or says that what you want to show or say can’t be shown or said—its negativity arises from the feeling that life is impossible, that you have no way of being who or what you want to be.

So if and to whatever extent this book seems to be about girls or women, those girls or women are to be understood, I would say, along the lines of such a negativity. A future theory of the Young-Girl must pass through the negative reference to woman, girl, femininity, femaleness, all of that, because it follows the articulations and investments of power apparatuses in societies like ours. “The ‘youth’ and ‘femininity’ of the Young-Girl, in fact her youthitude and femininitude, are that through which the control of appearances extends to the discipline of bodies” (PM). Reines’ other main point: sustained work with the text produced in her a disturbing somatization. “I mean it gave me migraines, made me puke; I couldn’t sleep at night, regressed into totally out-of-character sexual behavior.” I imagine this is because it produces its effects precisely by rubbing the most disgusting aspects of our culture of consumption and recuperation in your face—not just citations of sexism or misogyny but terrible evidence of your participation in them, the way that you are capable of embodying the Young-Girl. (Reines’ nausea as a symptom of the unnamed necessity that leaves the materials in a preliminary form.) That is the darkness of its satirical effects, the negativity at work in its détournement.

That said, one could go too far in thinking that the reference to girls or women is all there is to the figure. Does this not also become a book about young people? Yes, because the apparatuses also invest the “youth” of the young, the citizens and consumers of the future, and the unlucky faces of every perverse desire of the now. Why do Weigel and Ahern not discuss the Young- component of Young-Girl? The short answer is that they have a target in mind: the Man-Child (note that, since man-child is hyphenated in ordinary use, this expression elides whether or not it is a figure, the Man-Child, or just man-children here and there who are under discussion—precisely their confusion about the figure of the Young-Girl). To make their point, they must treat PM as an off-balance, sexist critique that requires its balancing answer. Mansour detects the imaginary of equality at work here, and aptly intervenes:

[They] rely on a brand of feminism that takes symmetry for “fairness,” “equity” for “equality,” as though those were not already part of the metrics on which our contemporary social relations are founded. … We are supposed to find our place, as good citizens, in the immense system of equivalence posing as equality. […]
What we need is not a program, especially one of equality when equality in the face of the uneven history, of women under patriarchy and capitalism, has served to subjugate us ever more under false promises of wealth and legal juridical recognition.

Here we could also listen to Sonogram:

There is no equality possible between men and women, nor between men and men or women and women. The smooth surface of abstract arithmetic that forms the basis for the illusion of democracy constantly cracks under the obvious weight of irreducible ethical differences, under the arbitrary nature of elective affinities, under the suspicion that the circulation of power is a question of qualities that become incarnate, that power passes through bodies.

All of which is to say that, while Weigel and Ahern state that Tiqqun’s theory “is at the tail end of a radical tradition that has largely exhausted its usefulness,” we might notice that Tiqqun, in PM and especially Sonogram, set out from an exhaustion or impasse within feminism. The latter text strongly modifies the term with the adjective ecstatic in view of that impasse, while the former bluntly states: “The triumph of the Young-Girl originates in the failure of feminism.” According to Tiqqun, the more liberal forms of feminism were easily absorbed into social institutions whose basic coercive function was not altered, whereas the more autonomist and radical forms faced the same sociocultural counteroffensive as the entirety of the revolutionary Left (in this sense it is instructive to read Tiqqun’s two histories of the Italian 70s, This is Not a Program and Sonogram, side by side). I’ll briefly add that the attention-grabbing complement to Weigel and Ahern’s (as Mansoor rightly puts it) brand of feminism, the conceit of the Man-Child, is, as a joke, a dud; as criticism, it is limited to the narrow range of dudes in humanities graduate programs (who may well be neurotic and annoying, but aren’t especially the locus of power in a society like ours). What is worst about this preconceived target, and the sloppy reading of PM that Weigel and Ahern seem to need to pass through to get there, is that “his” irony allows them to misconstrue the practice of détournement in PM, which would otherwise have been an obstacle to their literal, ontic reading. And it is in this reading and its easily “actionable” object (the desideratum of “fairness” feminism, which always knows how to act once it finds the inequality to be equalized) that the mild popularity of Weigel and Ahern’s piece lies. Who cares what some obscure group had to say about capitalism and identity? It is complicated and difficult reading. It is easier to denounce man-children—who, let me be perfectly clear, I have no intention of defending.
But some of us anarchists would rather understand what the obscure group had to say about capitalism and processes of identification, even and especially if it troubles such moral and political commonplaces as fairness and equality; even and especially if it risks the thought of the failure of feminism so as to learn a different kind of lesson from its history. Back to the figural, then. The anonymous commentator in Impasses underlines that Bloom and Young-Girl have a mutual source. “For the Young-Girl as for all other Blooms, the craving for entertainment is rooted in anguish” (PM). But Blooms sometimes resist, and part of that resistance may be to write their own theory (said theory is still “of Bloom” in the other sense of the genitive); Young-Girls, by comparison, do not resist; they consume and express themselves, they seduce and are seduced, and so their theory never comes together.

For example, Bloom figures a crisis of sexuation, and Young-Girl figures the hypersexuality that is offered as the resolution to that crisis. Asexuals versus the pornosphere… It is in this sense that the figure of the Young-Girl is a diagnostic and critical tool. Its aim is not to represent or replicate a reality whose banalities (including the banality of everyday misogyny) some of us know all too well. Its aim is to allow us to understand the deployment of a particular kind of apparatus that invests the seemingly natural or culturally familiar categories of age and gender as counter-measures to the potential for social disavowal named Bloom. “Young-Girls constitute the most lethal commando THEY have ever maneuvered against heterogeneity, against every hint of desertion” (PM). We begin by cleaving society, along psycho-political lines, into those that resist, flee, or are at least capable of it, and those that do not. We note that the former can become part of the latter; and we note that the categories of age and gender are deployed selectively, qualitatively, as part of that operation.

Two provisional conclusions. First: to discuss the figure of Young-Girl as Weigel and Ahern do—not only ontically, but also apart from its relation to Bloom—is to miss precisely what an antagonist might find useful in it. The writer in Impasses observes that Bloom is a figure of anomie, of anyone’s disinvestment in society and social norms and bonds. This happens first as a seeming alienation, an implosion of the self’s reality:

… Bloom correspond[s] to a sense of being unreal without trusting the path offered back to the real. A first approach to the Young-Girl is to grasp that it is the figure of someone who abandons that sense of unreality in favor of what THEY offer as the path back to the real. Overall this is to be understood as an effect of power, a re-binding to the social real.

This is the Young-Girl as “offensive neutralization apparatus,” according to PM. It is aimed not at everyone, but specifically at Blooms, at what is Bloom in anyone and everyone. “If Bloom’s desire reveals no ultimate truths about oppression or freedom, it does on the other hand permit or prohibit desubjectivation; it increases or diminishes collective potential” (Sonogram). If Bloom is the refusal, sometimes the impossibility of work, look in what company the Young-Girl appears, according to This is Not a Program:

… work also has a more directly militaristic function, which is to subsidize a whole series of forms-of-life-managers, security guards, cops, professors, hipsters, Young-Girls, etc.—all of which are, to say the least, anti­-ecstatic if not anti-insurrectional.

The anon in Impasses comments:

With the figure of Young-Girl we name the two principal contemporary forms of reintegration: identity and consumption as lifestyle. In their closely connected functioning, as identification with the Spectacle, the fundamental ambiguity of Bloom is betrayed, and the plans for exit are botched. The Young-Girl, Tiqqun say, is a model citizen; here citizenship is redefined as an explicit response to the threat of Bloom’s indifference to society.

The apparatus produces the phenomena that are found and figured as Young-Girl. Both aspects, Young- and -Girl, are vectors of commodification and reintegration, working together to generate permanent instability. Gender is part of the operation, but not gender alone. Age may undermine gender, and gender may undermine age. By this I mean that Young-Girl indicates the spurious empowerment of (some) women and (some) youth in societies like ours (the Spectacle’s “praise of femininity” (PM)), and at the same time the way that no position or identity thusly empowered is ever safe or stable. The paths to reintegration may almost always be described as modes of consumption: for young people, to consume what will make them pass as belonging to a world to which they are not yet fully adjusted (making them either mock adults or participants in subcultural pseudo/practice worlds); for women, to consume what will show their proper integration into society (as either an “equal” to men or belonging to a recognizable and recognized political protest ideology or grouping). “Blending into a fatal and complacent intimacy with things has become the mass activity for fetish-compatible Blooms” (Sonogram). The most criminalized, the most persecuted, the most vulnerable in all these games of power are precisely those who do not or can not be reintegrated, because they do not or can not participate in the necessary kind of consumption. Though we may have to fake it for the sake of survival.

Second provisional conclusion: to clearly distinguish between a moralistic, rights-and-recognition based, pro-identification politics and our anti-political alternative would be to rearticulate what is on the lips of so many people, especially young people, these days: that it is not only for seeming to belong to the wrong group that one is put down, shut out, yelled at, chased, beaten, and murdered, but especially for not seeming to belong to any group at all. So say those who today call themselves genderqueer or gender-nonconforming or other phrases that denote not identities but gaps between identities. So say those who for one reason or another are considered less than citizens of the Nation and bad subjects of (normal or other than normal) Sexuality. So say those for whom life in public and in private is lived as an interminable series of sex tests, gender tests, pleasure tests, body tests. One position would ask those of us who feel this way to answer the test questions, to settle on an identity, a name, a social zone, a project of seeking recognition and rights, and to wait for the crumbs to be handed out. Our anti-politics asks what there is left to do to live however we can and however we like, pushing aside every attempt to commodify the way we wear our outsiderness…

The tension is clear. Bloom is the figure of those who escape from identification—their potential rebelliousness, fragility, insanity, dangerousness, and so on. Young-Girl is the figure of those recaptured by identification in a process that makes identification seem liberatory insofar as it appears as their own and not imposed on them. “Reappropriating difference, which meanwhile has become biopower’s primary management tool, is obviously a lost cause” (Sonogram). And if age and gender are at work in this apparatus then what is at stake for us is, indeed, the question of gender. It is also what is glossed over by Weigel and Ahern: the question of youth. Like Mansoor, we are stridently anticapitalist and thus we respond differently to Tiqqun’s critique of social life in societies like ours than Weigel and Ahern. Far from a project of seeking equality or rights, we are driven to observe that almost any affirmation of gender—as natural, as socially constructed, as culturally specific, etc.—may be absorbed by the Young-Girl operation. That does not mean that any given one is or has been; but we are brought to admit that we need ethical criteria where none are to be found. Which is why some of us have been trying to elaborate more clearly (which may simply mean: practically) what the abolition of gender means. And though no one is speaking about the abolition of age, there is also an implicit negativity in our conversations towards the very path of life as it is set out for us. People used to, perhaps still do, talk about the liberation of youth.

Some of that is relevant here; but really the issue is that the age category itself makes increasingly less sense to those who have no discernible path to a stable adulthood, and those for whom adulthood can only be envisioned as a “comfortable” slow-motion implosion, for all of us torn from any acquaintance with a biological progression in our own bodies that is not also an awareness of the movement, pulse, gestures of power.

None of this is to say that what are clearly marked as Preliminary Materials for a Theory that, almost fifteen years later, has yet to appear, are sacrosanct or sufficient for an understanding of this tension, this terrain, this power. But it is to say that those who set out to criticize Tiqqun’s text without acknowledging such matters, or chalking them up to the rhetorical hyperbole of radical theory, are assuming precisely the normalcies and normativities that anarchists of our Tiqqun-reading stripe are out to destroy. “Because the only honorable departure from a minority status is not the achievement of recognition by the dominating majority or a change in force relations, but the deconstruction of the whole mechanism of recognition itself and of the idea of victory” (Sonogram). “A communization of bodies is to be expected” (PM).

source:
http://anarchistnews.org/content/mind-dash

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Contemporary anarchism offers a mid-range movement organized somewhere between the levels of everyday life, to which it is closest, and insurrection. Rooted in the former they seek to move towards the latter.  Anarchists look to the aspects of people’s daily lives that both suggest life without rule by external authorities and which might provide a foundation for anarchist social relations more broadly.  This commitment forms a strong and persistent current within diverse anarchist theories.  This perspective expresses what might be called a constructive anarchy or an anarchy of everyday life, at once conserving and revolutionary.

Colin Ward suggests that anarchism, “far from being a speculative vision of a future society…is a description of a mode of human organization, rooted in the experience of everyday life, which operates side by side with, and in spite of, the dominant authoritarian trends of our society” (Ward, 1973: 11). As Graeber (2004) suggests, the examples of viable anarchism are almost endless. These could include almost any form of organization, from a volunteer fire brigade to the postal service, as long as it is not hierarchically imposed by some external authority (Graeber, 2004).

Even more, as many recent anarchist writings suggest, the potential for resistance might be found anywhere in everyday life.  If power is exercised everywhere, it might give rise to resistance everywhere. Present-day anarchists like to suggest that a glance across the landscape of contemporary society reveals many groupings which are anarchist in practice if not in ideology.

Examples include the leaderless small groups developed by radical feminists, coops, clinics, learning networks, media collectives, direct action organizations; the spontaneous groupings that occur in response to disasters, strikes, revolutions and emergencies; community-controlled day-care centers; neighborhood groups; tenant and workplace organizing; and so on (Ehrlich, Ehrlich, DeLeon and Morris 18).

While these are obviously not strictly anarchist groups, they often operate to provide examples of mutual aid and non-hierarchical and non-authoritarian modes of living which carry the memory of anarchy within them. Often the practices are essential for people’s day-to-day survival under the crisis states of capitalism.  Ward notes that “the only thing that makes life possible for millions in the United States are its non-capitalist elements….Huge areas of life in the United States, and everywhere else, are built around voluntary and mutual aid organisations” (Ward and Goodway, 2003: 105).

Kropotkin (1972: 132) notes that the state, the formalized rule of dominant minorities over subordinate majorities, is “but one of the forms of social life.”  For anarchists, people are quite capable of developing forms of order to meet specific needs and desires.  As Ward (1973: 28) suggests, “given a common need, a collection of people will…by improvisation and experiment, evolve order out of the situation — this order being more durable and more closely related to their needs than any kind of order external authority could provide.”

Order, thus arrived at, is also preferable for anarchists since it is not ossified and extended, often by force, to situations and contexts different than those from which it emerged, and for which it may not be suited. This order, on the contrary is flexible and evolving, where necessary giving way to other agreements and forms of order depending on peoples’ needs and the circumstances confronting them.

Living examples of the anarchist perspectives on order emerging “spontaneously” out of social circumstances are perhaps most readily or regularly observed under conditions of immediate need or emergency as in times of natural disaster and/or economic crisis, during periods of revolutionary upheaval or during mass events such as festivals.  Anarchists try to extend mutual aid relations until they make up the bulk of social life.  Constructive anarchy is about developing ways in which people enable themselves to take control of their lives and participate meaningfully in the decision-making processes that affect them, whether education, housing, work or food.





Anarchists note that changes in the structure of work, notably so-called lean production, flexibalization and the institutionalization of precarious labour, have stolen people’s time away from the family along with the time that might otherwise be devoted to activities in the community (Ward and Goodway, 2003: 107).  In response people must find ways to escape the capitalist law of value, to pursue their own values rather than to produce value for capital. This is the real significance of anarchist do-it-ourselves activity and the reason that I would suggest such activities have radical, if overlooked, implications for anti-capitalist struggles.

For Paul Goodman, an American anarchist whose writings influenced the 1960s New Left and counterculture, anarchist futures-present serve as necessary acts of “drawing the line” against the authoritarian and oppressive forces in society.  Anarchism, in Goodman’s view, was never oriented only towards some glorious future; it involved also the preservation of past freedoms and previous libertarian traditions of social interaction. “A free society cannot be the substitution of a ‘new order’ for the old order; it is the extension of spheres of free action until they make up most of the social life” (Marshall, 1993: 598). Utopian thinking will always be important, Goodman argued, in order to open the imagination to new social possibilities, but the contemporary anarchist would also need to be a conservator of society’s benevolent tendencies.

Primitive accumulation: Capital against mutual aid

Capitalist society consists largely of “the accumulation of life as work,” to use Cleaver’s (1992: 116) apt description.  Valorization speaks to the processes by which capital can manage to put people to work, and to do so in such a way that the process is repeated on an ever increasing scale (Cleaver, 1992a). The structure of the wage, the division of labour and surplus value are all mechanisms through which exploitation is organized (Cleaver, 1992a). Notably, the circuit of valorization involves circulation (exchange) as well as production.

Valorization expresses the fact that, from the perspective of capital, the specific character of each productive activity is unimportant, so long as that activity produces something that can, through its sale, realize enough surplus to allow the process to start all over again (Cleaver, 1992a).  The enormously diverse range of human activities, mental or physical, that people are capable of are rendered the same in the eyes of capital.  What is important is that they can be put in the service of (exchange) value creation (for capital).  More recently theorists, including Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, have discussed the way in which contemporary capital makes use of “immaterial labour,” especially emotional or psychological capacities that allow people to care for each other, a point that echoes historic anarchist concerns.

If valorization represents the subordination of people’s productive activities to capitalist command, Cleaver (1992a: 120) suggests that disvalorisation expresses people’s loss of those abilities taken up by capital. This effects a broader impoverishment of social life as the specific qualities of a diversity of skills and abilities are replaced by a narrower range of commercialized, mechanized skills (Cleaver, 1992a).

A central, and ongoing, process in the history of capitalism is “the replacement of the self-production of use-values by the consumption of commodities” (Cleaver, 1992a: 119).  This is in large part what a whole series of practices, from the enclosures through colonialism more broadly, have been geared towards.  This separation of people from the capacities for self-production of use-values has entailed the various forms of violence that Marx has called primitive accumulation.  An ongoing process, primitive accumulation involves the actual, often bloody, practices by which capitalism takes over and commercializes growing areas of human life. This has included the clearing of peasants from common lands, the destruction of artisanal workshops, the canceling of local rights to the land and the destruction of entire homes and villages.  As Cleaver (1992a: 119) notes, a central aspect of primitive accumulation has been “the displacement of domestic food and handicraft production by capitalist commodities.”  Nowhere has the creation of the “home market” been established without such displacements.

But of this we gain little insight from Marx.  In his city-boy ignorance of rural life and perhaps in a desire to avoid any backward-looking sentimentalism, Marx seems to have spent little time or energy during his studies of primitive accumulation in England and in the colonies trying to understand what positive values might have been lost. Unlike many of his generation who did worry about the nature of those social ties and communal values which were rapidly disappearing, Marx kept his attention fixed firmly toward the future (Cleaver, 1992a: 122).

Interestingly, the response to primitive accumulation, and its effects, has been one of the key points distinguishing Marxists from anarchists historically.  Anarchists have taken a vastly different, and less sanguine, approach to primitive accumulation from that taken by many Marxists, and certainly from the approach taken by Marx. Speaking about Marx, Cleaver (1992a: 121) notes:

When we examine his writings on primitive accumulation and colonialism — from the Communist Manifesto to Capital — we often find little or no empathy for the cultures being destroyed/subsumed by capital.  He certainly recognised such destruction/subsumption but frequently saw its effects on feudalism and other pre-capitalist forms of society as historically progressive.  For Marx, workers were being liberated from pre-capitalist forms of exploitation (they ‘escaped from the regime of the guilds’) and peasants from ‘serfdom’ and ‘the idiocy of rural life.’

Such an uncaring approach found its most widespread and influential expression within Marxism under the Second International view that societies could not be revolutionary until they had entered the capitalist stage.  This perspective was used among other things to argue against the possibility of revolution in Russia since it was a feudal rather than capitalist society.

Anarchists  have been deeply concerned about exactly the values that have been lost.  For anarchists these lost abilities and skills extend beyond tasks of labour to include important elements of social life such as decision-making or social interaction.  Cleaver discusses this loss, and related centralization and professionalization, in terms that are reminiscent of the historic anarchist analysis as discussed below:  “The rise of professional medicine, for example, not only produced a widespread loss of abilities to heal, but it also involved the substitution of one particular paradigm of healing for a much larger number of approaches to ‘health’, and thus an absolute social loss — the virtual disappearance of a multiplicity of alternative ‘values’” (1992a: 120).  It is the attempt to identify, to understand and to recover the values that have been lost, overlooked or subsumed under capitalism that has inspired major anarchist projects whether Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, the works of Elisee Reclus or, more recently, Graeber’s False Coin.

More than the destruction of villages, workshops, farms or houses, primitive accumulation entails the destruction of entire ways of life, communities and cultures.  Primitive accumulation involves fundamentally the theft of people’s independent means of production and living.  Cleaver (1992a: 124) suggests that the very history of capitalism has been, fundamentally, “a history of a war on autonomous subsistence activities” (what we might at this point call the history of disvalorisation). He suggests that there has been such a war “because such subsistence activities have both survived and been repeatedly created anew — more so in some places than in others” (Cleaver, 1992a: 124).  It is in no way simply coincidental that primitive accumulation has been directed specifically at indigenous practices of gift economies, for example.

Related to these processes is the degrading of skills experienced by many workers and the monopolization of skilled labour by higher paid “mental workers” such as engineers.  Opposing, and to some extent reversing, this replacement is a crucial, perhaps the key, aspect of anarchist activity today.  It is this opposition that underlies anarchist criticisms of the monopolization of learning skills by professional instructors or the monopolization of care-giving skills by professional social workers.

At the same time, anarchists are careful not to over-estimate the success of capital’s destructive power or to fail to appreciate the tenacity and perseverance of non-capitalist social relations. Indeed, a vast array of struggles against capitalism, both historically and contemporarily, have been based on precisely these supposedly “archaic” relations. Anarchist styles of sociation and organization express the persistence of archaic forms within the (post-) modern context. They reveal the return of the repressed in sociological types exemplary of “mechanical solidarity” and Gemeinschaft [community].

Anarchists attempt to organize against dependency on commodities and professional “experts,” the manifestations of the commodification of needs and of market supplied services.  Anarchists emphasize the significance of autonomous creativity in the struggles against states and capital.  Anarchists view these activities in terms of the possibilities for a post-capitalist future.

Constructive anarchy: Communism as mutual aid

In many of his writings the anarcho-syndicalist Sam Dolgoff stresses the importance of constructive anarchism, rich in positive and practical ideas rather than instinctual acts and negative or reactive stances. Still, constructive anarchy does not rely on ready-made plans or “scientific” calculation. The basis for constructive anarchism, as in Cleaver’s discussion of auto-valorization, is already available in currently existing social relations, even if these relations are dominated and obscured by the authoritarian society around them.

The anarchist theoreticians limited themselves to suggest the utilization of all the useful organisms in the old society in order to reconstruct the new.  They envisioned the generalization of practices and tendencies which are already in effect.  The very fact that autonomy, decentralization and federalism are more practical alternatives to centralism and statism already presupposes that these vast organizational networks now performing the functions of society are prepared to replace the old bankrupt hyper-centralized administrations.  That the “elements of the new society are already developing in the collapsing bourgeois society” (Marx) is a fundamental principle shared by all tendencies in the socialist movement (1979: 5).

If society is “a vast interlocking network of cooperative labour” (5) then those networks of cooperation will provide a good starting point, if only a starting point, towards throwing off the bonds of coercion, authoritarianism and exploitation.  It is in the relations of cooperative labour, which encompasses millions of daily acts, that one can find the real basis for social life.  Without these networks, often unrecognized and unpaid, society would collapse.

What is needed is emancipation from authoritarian institutions OVER society and authoritarianism WITHIN the organizations themselves.  Above all, they must be infused [with] revolutionary spirit and confidence in the creative capacities of the people.  Kropotkin in working out the sociology of anarchism, has opened an avenue of fruitful research which has been largely neglected by social scientists busily engaged in mapping out new areas for state control (1979: 5).

A beginning step in these processes of emancipation is the abolition of the wage system and the distribution of goods and services according to the old communist principle, “from each according to ability, to each according to need.”

Libertarian Communism is the organization of society without the State and without capitalist property relations.  To establish Libertarian Communism it will not be necessary to invent artificial forms of organization.  The new society will emerge from the “shell of the old”.  The elements of the future society are already planted in the existing order.  They are the syndicate (union) and the Free Commune (sometimes called the ‘free municipality’) which are old, deeply rooted, non-Statist popular institutions spontaneously organized and embracing all towns and villages in urban and in rural areas.  The Free Commune is ideally suited to cope successfully with the problems of social and economic life in libertarian communities.  Within the Free Commune there is also room for cooperative groups and other associations, as well as individuals to meet their own needs (providing, of course, that they do not employ hired labor for wages).  The terms ‘Libertarian’ and ‘Communism’ denote the fusion of two inseparable concepts, the individual pre-requisites for the Free Society: COLLECTIVE AND INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY (1979: 6).

Of course, experiences of both the syndicate and the free commune have been greatly eroded, if not entirely eliminated, over centuries of statist imposition.  This situation has been addressed by the anarchist Paul Goodman in rather poignant terms: “The pathos of oppressed people, however, is that, if they break free, they don’t know what to do.  Not having been autonomous, they don’t know what it’s like, and before they learn, they have new managers who are not in a hurry to abdicate” (Goodman quoted in Ward, 2004: 69).  That means that people have to construct approximations in which the social relations of a future society can be learned, experienced and nurtured.

This is part of the impetus behind the creation of “free schools,” “infoshops,” industrial unions and squats. These are places in which the life of the free commune, buried beneath the debris of authoritarian systems, can be glimpsed again, if only in a limited form.

Anarchism envisions a flexible, pluralist society where all the needs of mankind would be supplied by an infinite variety of voluntary associations.  The world is honeycombed with affinity groups from chess clubs to anarchist propaganda groups.  They are formed, dissolved and reconstituted according to the fluctuating whims and fancies of the individual adherents.  It is precisely because they “reflect individual preferences” that such groups are the lifeblood of the free society (1979: 8).

In his discussion of the US labor movement, “The American Labor Movement: A New Beginning”(ALM), Dolgoff reminds readers that the labor movement once put a great deal of energy into building more permanent forms of alternative institutions.  An expanding variety of mutual aid functions were provided through unions in the early days of labor.

They created a network of cooperative institutions of all kinds: schools, summer camps for children and adults, homes for the aged, health and cultural centers, insurance plans, technical education, housing, credit associations, et cetera.  All these, and many other essential services were provided by the people themselves, long before the government monopolized social services wasting untold billions on a top-heavy bureaucratic parasitical apparatus; long before the labor movement was corrupted by “business unionism” (1980: 31).

That Dolgoff learned these often forgotten or overlooked lessons from a critical engagement with the labor movement is telling.  As a militant anarchist Dolgoff had little time for those who, seeking comfort or moral privilege in anarchist “purity,” refuse to engage in the real struggles in which people find themselves.  Anarchy cannot be abstracted from day-to-day life situations and the difficult choices with which people are confronted.

There is no “pure” anarchism.  There is only the application of anarchist principles to the realities of social living.  The aim of anarchism is to stimulate forces that propel society in a libertarian direction.  It is only from this standpoint that the relevance of anarchism to modern life can be properly assessed (1979: 8).

As Dolgoff concludes, anarchism is no “panacea that will miraculously cure all the ills of the social body” (1979: 10).  Anarchism is simply a “guide to action based on a realistic conception of social reconstruction” (1979: 10-11).  Far from the economic determinism or workerism which syndicalists are so often accused of, Dolgoff’s vision shares many important insights with the views of recent “cultural” anarchists such as Paul Goodman and Colin Ward.

Lineages of constructive anarchy: Kropotkin and mutual aid

Among the primary historical influences on everyday anarchy, perhaps the most significant is Kropotkin’s version of anarcho-communism and, especially, his ideas about mutual aid. In Mutual Aid Kropotkin documents the centrality of co-operation within animal and human groups and links anarchist theory with everyday experience.  Kropotkin’s definition suggests that anarchism, in part, “would represent an interwoven network, composed of an infinite variety of groups and federations of all sizes and degrees…temporary or more or less permanent…for all possible purposes” (quoted in Ward and Goodway, 2003: 94).  As Ward (2004: 29) reminds us: “A century ago Kropotkin noted the endless variety of ‘friendly societies, the unities of oddfellows, the village and town clubs organised for meeting the doctors’ bills’ built up by working-class self-help.”  Both Kropotkin and, to a much lesser extent, Marx, commented on and were inspired by peasant collaboration in various aspects of daily life from the care of communal lands and forests, harvesting, the building of roads, house construction and dairy production.

Kropotkin’s political archeology, and especially his studies of the French Revolution and the Paris Commune, informed his analyses of the Russian revolutions of 1905 to 1917 and coloured his warnings to comrades about the possibilities and perils that waited along the different paths of political change (Cleaver, 1992b).  This remains an important social and political undertaking in the context of crisis and structural adjustment impelled by the forces of capitalist globalization.

In 1917 Kropotkin saw the dangers in the crisis: both those of reaction and those disguised in the garb of revolution, whether parliamentary or Bolshevik…In 1917 Kropotkin also knew where to look for the power to oppose those dangers and to create the space for the Russian people to craft their own solutions: in the self-activity of workers and peasants…In 1917, as we know, the power of workers to resist both reaction and centralization proved inadequate — partly because the spokespersons of the latter cloaked their intentions behind a bright rhetoric of revolution.  Today…such rhetoric is no longer possible and in its place there is only the drab, alienating language of national and supranational state officials (Cleaver, 1992b: 10).

Kropotkin’s vast research into “mutual aid” was motivated by a desire to develop a general understanding of the character of human societies and their processes of evolution.  It was partly concerned with providing a sociological critique of the popular views of social Darwinists like Huxley and Spencer. More than that, as Cleaver (1992b) notes, his work was aimed at laying the foundation for his anarcho-communist politics by showing a recurring tendency in human societies, as well as in many other animal societies, for individuals to help each other and to cooperate with other members of the species, rather than to compete in a Hobbesian war of all against all.

In several book-length research works, including Mutual Aid, The Conquest of Bread and Fields, Factories and Workshops, Kropotkin tried to sketch the manifestation and development of mutual aid historically. What his research suggested to him was that mutual aid was always present in human societies, even if its development was never uniform or the same over different periods or within different societies. At various points mutual aid was the primary factor of social life while at other times it was submerged beneath forces of competition, conflict and violence. The key, however was that, regardless of its form, or the adversity of circumstances in which it operated, it was always there “providing the foundation for recurrent efforts at co-operative self-emancipation from various forms of domination (the state, institutional religion, capitalism)” (Cleaver, 1992b: 3).

Kropotkin was not, in a utopian manner, trying to suggest how a new society might or should develop.  In his view it was already happening.  The instances were already appearing in the present.

Anarchism is not involved in the drawing up of social blueprints for the future.  This is one reason that anarchists, to this day, have been so reluctant to describe the “anarchist society.”  Instead anarchists have tried mainly to identify and understand social trends or tendencies, even countervailing ones.  The focus is resolutely on manifestations of the future in the present.

In major works such as The Conquest of Bread, Kropotkin seeks to detail how the post-capitalist future was already emerging in the here and now.  His research in this case was concerned with, and indeed managed to offer examples, of practical cases in the present, which suggested aspects of a post-capitalist society.  In this way Kropotkin’s work, as with the work of other anarcho-communists, offers something more than simply a proposition. Thus his politics were grounded in ongoing, if under-appreciated, aspects of human societies (Cleaver, 1992b).

Kropotkin argued that human societies developed through processes involved in the ongoing interplay of what he called the “law of mutual struggle” and the “law of mutual aid.”  These forces manifested themselves in various ways depending on historical period or social context but significantly for Kropotkin, they were typically observed in conflict rather than in stasis or equilibrium. Neither was this a strictly evolutionary schema, since Kropotkin included critically within his view of the interplay between these forces, periods of revolutionary upheaval.

On the one side were the institutions and behaviors of mutual struggle such as narrow-minded individualism, competition, the concentration of landed and industrial property, capitalist exploitation, the state and war.  On the other side were those of mutual aid such as cooperation in production, village folkmotes, communal celebrations, trade unionism and syndicalism, strikes, political and social associations (Cleaver, 1992b: 4).

According to Kropotkin, one or the other force tended to be predominant, depending on the era or instance, but it was his considered opinion that forces of mutual aid were on the rise, even as capitalism appeared triumphant. In fact, in his view the sort of industrial development for which capitalism was famous could not be possible without an incredible degree of co-operative labour.  Kropotkin argued against capitalist myth-making that presented the rapid growth of industrial development as the result of competition and instead suggested that the scope and efficiency of cooperation were more important factors (see Cleaver, 1992a; 1992b).  In this his analysis was remarkably close to that of Marx, who indeed saw the mass co-operation of industrial production as a prerequisite for communism.

Where economists emphasized static comparative advantage, Kropotkin demonstrated the dynamic countertendency toward increasing complexity and interdependence (cooperation) among industries — a development closely associated with the unstoppable international circulation of knowledge and experience. Where the economists (and later the sociologists of work) celebrated the efficacy and productivity of specialization in production, Kropotkin showed how that very productivity was based not on competition but on the interlinked efforts of only formally divided workers (Cleaver, 1992b: 5).

Anarchist sociologists might do well to remember Kropotkin’s advice concerning the methods to be followed by anarchist researchers.  In his 1887 book, Anarchist Communism, Kropotkin suggests that the anarchist approach differs from that of the utopian:  “[The anarchist] studies human society as it is now and was in the past…tries to discover its tendencies, past and present, its growing needs, intellectual and economic, and in his [sic] ideal he merely points out in which direction evolution goes” (quoted in Cleaver, 1992b: 3).

This focus on tendencies, or developing patterns of concrete behavior, differentiated his approach from both early utopians and later Marxist-Leninists by abandoning the Kantian “ought” in favor of the scientific study of what is already coming to be.  Neither Fourier nor Owen hesitated to spell out the way they felt society ought to be organized, from cooperatives to phalansteries.  Nor were Lenin and his Bolshevik allies reluctant to specify, in considerable detail, the way work should be organized (Taylorism and competition) and how social decision-making ought to be arranged (top down through party administration and central planning) (Cleaver, 1992b: 3).

Marx’s writings offered much less detail than Kropotkin’s works when it comes to the issue of working class subjectivity in contrast to the rather extensive analysis Marx provided with regard to capitalist domination.  It was only through the decades of work carried out by various autonomist Marxists that there was developed any Marxist analysis of working class autonomy that came close to a parallel of Kropotkin’s work (Cleaver, 1992b: 7).
Constructive anarchy in action: Colin Ward’s sociological anarchism

Perhaps the broadest and most sustained vision of constructive anarchy comes from Colin Ward. Ward is best known through his third book Anarchy in Action (1973) which was, until his 2004 contribution to the Oxford Press “Short Introduction” series, Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction, his only book explicitly about anarchist theory.  Longtime anarchist George Woodcock identified Anarchy in Action as one of the most important theoretical works on anarchism and I would have to agree. It is in the pages of that relatively short work that Ward makes explicit his highly distinctive version of anarchism, what I term ‘an anarchy of everyday life.’

Ward follows Kropotkin in identifying himself as an anarchist communist and has even suggested that Anarchy in Action is merely an extended contemporary footnote to Mutual Aid (Ward and Goodway, 2003: 14).  Still, Ward goes beyond Kropotkin in the importance he places on co-operative groups in anarchist social transformation.

Ward is critical of anarchists’ preoccupation with anarchist history and in his own works prefers to emphasize the here-and-now and the immediate future (Ward and Goodway, 2003).  Ward describes his approach to anarchism as one that is based on actual experiences or practical examples rather than theories or hypotheses. Through the responses of readers to articles published in Anarchy Ward found that for many people anarchy aptly described the “organized chaos” that people experienced during their daily lives, even at their workplaces.  Incredibly, this perspective on anarchism was so outside of the parameters of mainstream anarchism that in 1940, when Ward tried to convince his Freedom Press Group colleagues to print a pamphlet on the squatters’ movement “it wasn’t thought that this is somehow relevant to anarchism” (Ward and Goodway, 2003: 15).

While having no formal background in sociology Ward argues for the importance of taking a sociological approach to the world. In developing a sociological anarchism Ward takes up the call of fellow anarchist and popular sex educator Alex Comfort who was one of the first to argue that anarchists had much to learn from sociologists.  In his work Delinquency (1951) Comfort called for anarchism to become a libertarian action sociology.

Ward draws some of his inspiration from the sociology of autonomous groups.  His readings of the now out of print sociology bulletin Autonomous Groups contributed to understandings of capacities for influencing social change within informal networks such as the Batignolles Group, founders of Impressionism and the Fabian Society.  Notably these groups were incredibly effective, exercising an influence well beyond their numbers.  As Ward (2003: 48) notes because anarchists traditionally “have conceived of the whole of social organisation as a series of interlocking networks of autonomous groups.”  Thus it is important that anarchists pay serious attention to the lessons to be learned from successful ones.

Autonomous groups that he has studied or participated in are characterized by “having a secure internal network based on friendship and shared skills, and a series of external networks of contacts in a variety of fields” (Ward, 2003: 44).  Among these groups Ward includes the Freedom Press Group, A.S. Neill’s Summerhill School of alternative education, Burgess Hill School and South London’s Peckham Health Centre which offered approaches to social medicine.  Autonomous groups are distinguished from other forms of organization characterized by “hierarchies of relationships, fixed divisions of labour, and explicit rules and practices” (Ward, 2003: 48).  Autonomous groups are marked by a high degree of individual autonomy within the group, reliance on direct reciprocities in decision-making, for decisions affecting all group members, and the temporary and fluctuating character of leadership.

When people have no control over, or responsibility for, crucial decisions over important aspects of life, whether regarding housing, education or work, these areas of social life become obstacles to personal fulfillment and collective development. Yet when people are free to make major decisions and contribute to the planning and implementation of decisions involving key areas of daily life there are improvements in individual and social well-being (Ward and Goodway, 2003: 76).  Ward finds resonance in the findings of industrial psychologists who suggest that satisfaction in work is very strongly related to the “span of autonomy,” or the proportion of work time in which workers are free to make and act on their own decisions.

The provisions of the welfare state are, of course, contradictory and most anarchists do not take a cavalier approach to what have been important, and often necessary, services for many people, including many anarchists.  In discussing the welfare state, Colin Ward sums up its positive and negative aspects in short: “The positive feature of welfare legislation is that, contrary to the capitalist ethic, it is a testament to human solidarity.  The negative feature is precisely that it is an arm of the state” (Ward and Goodway, 2003: 79). Ward points out that the provision of social welfare did not originate from government through the “welfare state.”  Rather, it emerged in practice “from the vast network of friendly societies and mutual aid organizations that had sprung up through working-class self-help in the 19th century” (Ward, 2004: 27).  This is the same point made by Sam Dolgoff with reference to the importance of mutual aid groups for the provision of education to elder care within the labour movement in the US.

In numerous works Ward has illustrated how, since the late nineteenth century, “‘the tradition of fraternal and autonomous associations springing up from below’ has been successively displaced by one of ‘authoritarian institutions directed from above’” (Ward and Goodway, 2003: 17).  As Ward suggests, this displacement was actively pursued, with often disastrous results, in the development of the social citizenship state: “The great tradition of working-class self-help and mutual aid was written off not just as irrelevant, but as an actual impediment, by the political and professional architects of the welfare state…The contribution that the recipients had to make…was ignored as a mere embarrassment” (quoted in Ward and Goodway, 2003: 18).  From his research on housing movements Ward comments on “the initially working-class self-help building societies stripping themselves of the final vestiges of mutuality; and this degeneration has existed alongside a tradition of municipal housing that was adamantly opposed to the principle of dweller control” (Ward and Goodway, 2003: 18).

Ward’s work is directed towards providing useful “pointers to the way ahead if we are to stand any chance of reinstituting the self-organisation and mutual aid that have been lost” (Ward and Goodway, 2003: 18).  Ward focuses on recent examples, such as holiday camps in Britain, “in which a key role was played by the major organisations of working-class self-help and mutual aid, the co-operative movement and trade unions” (Ward and Goodway, 2003: 17).  A significant theme in the perspectives of everyday anarchy is “the historic importance of such institutions in the provision of welfare and the maintenance of social solidarity” (Ward and Goodway, 2003: 17).

Theoretical affinities: Rethinking communism

The collapse of the “actually existing” socialist states and the crisis-inducing development of capitalist globalization have in various ways impelled a re-thinking of issues of social transformation and the surpassing of capitalism by anarchists as well as Marxists. Various streams of anarcho-communism, most notably those that are part of the stream of everyday anarchy from Kropotkin to Goodman to Ward, can be seen to have strong similarities, or even affinities, with certain traditions of libertarian socialism. This is especially so when one considers the anarcho-communist and libertarian socialist approaches to the questions of constructing alternatives to capitalism in the here and now.

There are striking similarities, for example, between autonomist Marxist writings on self-valorization and anarchist writings on mutual aid and affinity. The types of concrete/actually existing mutual aid activities initiated or supported by anarchists certainly embody the notion of self-valorization and the self-constitution of alternative modes of living, as discussed by Cleaver (1992a). These are autonomous self-valorizing activities which, as discussed again by autonomists, are confronted by capitalist attempts at disvalorization.

As noted above, Harry Cleaver (1992b) finds a great resonance, especially, between the analyses of Peter Kropotkin, and his concern with the emergence of a new society from within capitalism, and the analyses of autonomist Marxists who suggest that the future might be glimpsed within current processes of working-class self-valorization, or those autonomous practices by which people attempt to create alternative social relations, either at work or in their communities.  Cleaver (1992b: 11) notes that as “a replacement for an exhausted and failed orthodoxy” the autonomist Marxists offer a more vital and engaged Marxism, “one that has been regenerated within the struggles of real people and as such, has been able to articulate at least some elements of their desires and projects of self-valorization.”  Given this close political affinity, Cleaver (1992b) suggests that, against more sectarian positions, those inspired by Kropotkin might do well to pay attention to the libertarian socialists just as the Marxists might find inspiration for their own work in Kropotkin’s efforts.  I would agree and suggest that contemporary anarchists, who have tended to eschew analyses of class, can gain much especially through an engagement with autonomist Marxist ideas of auto-valorization.  Auto-valorization helps to create some broader possibilities for people, individually and collectively, to take further actions to act in their own interests and to gain greater opportunities for the self-determination of larger parts of their lives.

The notion of auto-valorization, as used by contemporary anarchists and libertarian communists builds upon Marx’s discussion of use value versus exchange value.  While under communist social relations there will be no exchange value, what is produced will still retain use value.  People produce things because they have some kind of use for them; they meet some need or desire.  This is where the qualitative aspect of production comes in.  Generally people prefer products that are well-made, function as planned, are not poisonous and so on. Under capitalism, exchange value, in which a coat can get two pairs of shoes, predominates use value.  This is the quantitative aspect of value that does not care whether the product is durable, shoddy or toxic as long as it secures its (potential) value in sale or other exchange with something else.

And capitalism’s driving focus on the quantitative at the expense of the qualitative also comes to dominate human labour. The quality (skill, pleasure, creativity) of the particular work that people do is not primarily relevant for the capitalist (except that skilled labour costs more to produce and carries more exchange value). That is partly because exchange is based on the quantity of ‘average-socially-necessary-labour-time’ embodied in the product human labour produces.  That simply means that if some firm takes a longer time to produce something on outdated machinery they cannot claim the extra labour time they take, due to inefficiencies, compared to a firm that produces more quickly using updated technology, and that is one reason why outmoded producers go under.

Capitalist production is geared towards exchange as the only way that surplus value is actually realized rather than being potential; the capitalist cannot bank surplus as value until the product has been exchanged.  Use value plays a part only to the extent that something has to have some use for people or else they would not buy it; well, if the thing seems totally useless the bosses still have advertising to convince people otherwise.  Under other non-capitalist “modes of production”, such as feudalism, most production is geared towards use value production rather than exchange value.

Surely, if under communism, people are producing to meet their needs, they will continue to produce use values (and even a surplus of them in case of emergency) without regard for exchange value (which would, certainly, be absent in a truly communist society anyway): Unless one is talking about a communism of uselessness.  Certainly people would value their work (qualitatively) in ways that cannot be imagined now since they would be meeting their community’s needs and would try to do so with some joy and pleasure in work, providing decent products without fouling up the environment.

Anarchists try to avoid a productivist vision of life, emphasizing the great diversity of ways in which human life might be realized.  Anarchists again share common ground with autonomist Marxists in arguing that the only way that work can be an interesting mode of self-realization for people is “through its subordination to the rest of life, the exact opposite of capitalism” (Cleaver, 1992: 143, n. 59).  Anarchists are attempting to organize their productive activities, and to extend this organization, in order to impede, initially and, eventually, to break capitalist command over society.

What is common in the approach taken by Kropotkin to the issue of superceding capitalism and that taken by the autonomist Marxists is the emphasis on manifestations of the future in the present. The shared concern is with, as Cleaver (1992b: 10) suggests, “the identification of already existing activities which embody new, alternative forms of social cooperation and ways of being.”  Autonomist Marxists, like anarchists, emphasize the primary importance of the self-activity and creativity of people in struggle.

The attempt to reconceptualize the process of moving beyond capitalism, as developed in the works of autonomist Marxists, bears quite striking similarities to the approach offered by Kropotkin regarding this question (Cleaver, 1992b).  Autonomist Marxists share with most anarchists a rejection of concepts of “the transitional period” or “the transitional program.”  In place of “the transition” autonomists and anarchists emphasize some version of what Hakim Bey calls “immediatism,” or activities that suggest the revolution is already underway.

The focus on workers’ autonomy has led to a rejection of orthodox Marxist arguments that the transcendence of capitalism and movement to a post-capitalist society requires some form of transitional order, i.e. socialism, characterized by party management of the state in the name of the people (Cleaver, 1992b).  Autonomist Marxists’ emphasis on the autonomy of working class self activity stresses not only autonomy from capital but also autonomy from the “official” organizations of the working class, especially from trade unions and socialist (or more specifically, social democratic) parties. This approach shares with anarchism an analysis of the Russian revolution of 1917 that saw the Bolshevik takeover of the soviets as the beginning of the restoration of domination and exploitation (Cleaver, 1992b).  Thus the subversion of the revolution is viewed as occurring much earlier than with the emergence of Stalinism to which most Leninists and Trotskyists point as the moment that marked the revolution’s betrayal.

Autonomists, like anarchists, argue that the process of building a new society must be the work of the people themselves lest it be doomed from the outset. Class struggle has a dual character and its categories can be understood from either the perspective of capital or the perspective of the working class. The shift in focus away from capital, the domain of orthodox Marxist approaches, and towards workers has opened new realizations, including a recognition that the “working class” is itself a category of capital, and, crucially, one that people have struggled to avoid or escape (Cleaver, 1992b: 7).

Conclusion

Anarchists argue that for most of human history people have organized themselves collectively to satisfy their own needs. Social organization is conceived as a network of local voluntary groupings.  Anarchists propose a decentralized society, without a central political body, in which people manage their own affairs free from any coercion or external authority. These self-goverened communes could federate freely at regional (or larger) levels to ensure co-ordination or mutual defence. Their autonomy and specificity must be maintained, however. Each locality will decide freely which social, cultural and economic arrangements to pursue.  Rather than a pyramid, anarchist associations would form a web.

Anarchists sometimes point to post offices and railway networks as examples of the way in which local groups and associations can combine to provide complex networks of functions without any central authority (Ward, 2004).  Postal services work as a result of voluntary agreements between different post offices, in different countries, without any central world postal authority (Ward, 2004).  As Ward suggests: “Coordination requires neither uniformity nor bureaucracy” (2004: 89).

As we have seen, anarchists do disagree over the tactics which they view as necessary to realize a free society. Anarchists also vary greatly in their visions of the libertarian future.  Unlike utopian thinkers, anarchists exercise extreme caution when discussing “blueprints” of future social relations since they believe that it is always up to those seeking freedom to decide how they desire to live. Still, there are a few features common to anarchist visions of a free society. While anarchists are not in agreement about the means to bring about the future libertarian society, they are clear that means and ends cannot be separated.

The moment we stop insisting on viewing all forms of action only by their function in reproducing larger, total, forms of inequality of power, we will also be able to see that anarchist social relations and non-alienated forms of action are all around us.  And this is critical because it already shows that anarchism is, already, and has always been, one of the main bases for human interaction. We self-organize and engage in mutual aid all the time. We always have (Graeber, 2004:76).

The anarchist future present must, almost by definition, be based upon ongoing experiments in social arrangements, in attempting to address the usual dilemma of maintaining both individual freedoms and social equality (Ehrlich, 1996b). The revolution is always in the making. These projects make up what the anarchist sociologist Howard Ehrlich calls “anarchist transfer cultures.”

Despite the dominant authoritarian trend in existing society, most contemporary anarchists therefore try and extend spheres of free action in the hope that they will one day become the mainstream of social life. In difficult times, they are, like Paul Goodman, revolutionary conservatives, maintaining older traditions of mutual aid and free enquiry when under threat.  In more auspicious moments, they move out from free zones until by their example and wisdom they begin to convert the majority of people to their libertarian vision (Marshall, 1993: 659).

Some critics might dismiss constructive anarchy as being “non-revolutionary.” To do so is to repeat the mistake, common in much thinking on the left, of conceiving of revolution narrowly as a specific moment of upheaval or seizure of power (usually in terms of the state). Under this sort of narrow view, which insists on a rather abstract opposition between revolution and reform, a wide variety of anarchists would be conceived as reformists, regardless of their actual practice. Constructive anarchists recognize that revolutions do not emerge fully formed out of nothing. This perspective emphasizes the need, in pre-revolutionary times, for institutions, organizations and relations that can sustain people as well as building capacities for self-defence and struggle.

As Goodman notes: “The pathos of oppressed people, however, is that, if they break free, they don’t know what to do.  Not having been autonomous, they don’t know what it’s like, and before they learn, they have new managers who are not in a hurry to abdicate” (Goodman quoted in Ward, 2004: 69). Taking a more nuanced approach to revolutionary transformation one can understand constructive anarchy as concerned with the practical development of revolutionary transfer cultures. Anarchist organizing is built on what Ward calls “social and collective ventures rapidly growing into deeply rooted organizations for welfare and conviviality” (2004: 63). Colin Ward refers to these manifestations of everyday anarchy as “quiet revolutions.”

References

Cleaver, Harry 1992a. “The Inversion of Class Perspective in Marxian Theory: From Valorization to Self-Valorization.” In Essays on Open Marxism, eds. W. Bonefeld, R. Gunn, and K. Psychopedis. London: Pluto, 106–144.

———. 1992b. “Kropotkin, Self-valorization and the Crisis of Marxism.” Paper presented at the Conference on Pyotr Alexeevich Kropotkin, Russian Academy of Science, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Dimitrov, December 8–14.

Dolgoff, Sam. 1980. The American Labor Movement a New Beginning. Resurgence.

———. 1979. The Relevance of Anarchism to Contemporary Society. Minneapolis: Soil of Liberty.

Ehrlich, Howard. 1996. Reinventing Anarchy, Again. Oakland: AK Press.

Ehrlich, Howard, Carol Ehrlich, David DeLeon, and Glenda Morris. 1996. “Questions and Answers about Anarchism.” In Reinventing Anarchy, Again, ed. Howard Ehrlich. Oakland: AK Press.

Kropotkin, Peter. 1902. Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution. London: Heinemann.

Marshall, Peter. 1993. Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism. London: HarperCollins.

Ward, Colin. 2004. Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

———. 1973. Anarchy in Action. New York: Harper Torchbooks.

Ward, Colin and David Goodway. 2003. Talking Anarchy. Nottingham: Five Leaves.

Woodcock, George. 1962. Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements. New York: World Publishing Company.

[Thank you Jeff for this contribution and your support]

The writer is a community organizer, rank-and-file union activist and anarchist. He has contributed articles to Anarchy, Social Anarchism, Green Anarchy, Earth First! Journal, and Northeastern Anarchist. His books include Constructive Anarchy: Building Infrastructures of Resistance, Active Anarchy: Political Practice in Contemporary Movements and Against All Authority: Anarchism and the Literary Imagination. He is also editor of Racism and Borders: Representation, Repression, Resistance and A Creative Passion: Anarchism and Culture. His website is http://jeffshantz.ca

If publishing or re-posting this article kindly use the entire piece, credit the writer and this website: Philosophers for Change, philoforchange.wordpress.com 
Thanks for your support.

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…not to demand the Right to Work which is but the right to misery, but to forge a brazen law forbidding any man to work more than three hours a day, the earth, the old earth, trembling with joy would feel a new universe leaping within her.

A feminist concept of labour has to be oriented towards the production of life as the goal of work and not the production of things and wealth, of which the production of life is then a secondary derivative. The production of immediate life in all its aspects must be the core concept for the development of a feminist concept of work. (…) A feminist concept of labour has, therefore, to be oriented towards a different concept of time, in which time is not segregated into portions of burdensome labour and portions of supposed pleasure and leisure, but in which times of work and times of rest are alternating and interspersed. If such a concept and such an organisation of time prevail, the length of the working day is no longer very relevant.

• 1.A counter-tendency here is the proliferation of affective labour in things like food service jobs, ‘the human touch’ being the one thing robots can’t offer.
• 2.Furthermore, she argues it relies on the continued exploitation of women’s housework, and of neocolonial exploitation of much of the world for the raw materials.
•  
• article’s source: http://libcom.org/blog/wrong-work-two-perspectives-abolition-work-03012013

The post “Wrong to work! Two perspectives on the abolition of work” by Joseph Kay appeared first on Void Network.

Tired of waiting for authentic community, love and adventure…
Tired of waiting for the end of money and forced work…
Tired of looking for new pastimes to pass the time…
Tired of waiting for a lush, rich existence… Tired of waiting for a situation in which you can realise all your desires…
Tired of waiting for the end of all authorities, alienations, ideologies and moralities…
…then we think you’ll find what follows to be quite handy.

I

II

III

Am I enjoying myself?
How’s my life?
Am I getting what I want?
Why not?
What’s keeping me from getting what I want?

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

Post-notes

Preamble

The post The Minimum Definition of Intelligence (Theses on the Construction of One’s Own Self-theory) by For Ourselves appeared first on Void Network.

The post “On the Degradation of Language and the Art of Listening”, a short essay from blog “FROM POLITICS TO LIFE” appeared first on Void Network.