(The following paper was to be given at the London Anarchist Forum
Meeting on June 12th, 2009 but, circumstances beyond the control of the
organisers meant that it could not be presented. However, I was grateful to the LAF for triggering this paper which looks at anarchism from a
contemporary democratic socialist point of view, with special thanks to
Steve Ash now deceased who suggested it. It is really here just as a matter of record and I have added notes in italics where I have changed my mind in the intervening half decade or have something to add or something needs contextualising or explaining)
The Current Crisis - A Challenge to the Utopianism in Anarchism
I am not going to speak as an anarchist but as a mainstream
democratic socialist who is sympathetic to the anarchist tradition from
the libertarian Left - and who thinks that far more was lost than was
gained when the Left made its successive turns towards sole
concentration on Parliamentary action on the one hand and towards
Marxism and vanguard parties on the other.
I do not think that the decision to organise in political parties
was entirely wrong but the nature and purpose of those parties has
clearly become corrupted so that what passes for the Left has become
degraded into a professional political class seeking to administer the
state for its own benefit - far more than for that of its own
constituents.
Similarly, the impatience and a-morality of Marxism created a
monstrosity in the consequent management of the 1917 Revolution, even if
a lot of the terror must be put down to the determined attempt by the
Western liberal powers to strangle what started as a people’s rising. In
the pantheon of cowards, Kerensky must go down in history as a man who
failed to seize the moment for peace and land redistribution.
In other words, the victors over the nineteenth century anarchist
tradition have proved worse than flawed, they have proved themselves
either self-regarding opportunists or vicious tyrants. But what do both
have in common that gave them the energy to overcome the fluid
leaderless resistance of early anarchism? They had a commitment to
hierarchical organization.
They introduced both solidarity and a fixed ideology and this
allowed some to step over others to acquire the sort of centralized
power epitomized by Blair in the one tradition and Stalin in the other.
The similarities between these monsters are greater than we may think –
centralization led to sclerosis and ultimately to failure.
Greed for power and office and incompetence are built into
institutions that set the rules for themselves. Just as the Communist
Party of Russia set the rules for a whole society, so Parliament sets
rules that allowed its members, in secret, to take what it wanted as if
of right [1]. In both closed societies, the perpetrators had no
consciousness of their having done any wrong.
They had literally become institutionalized into crime – the Vatican
gives us another example. Think of the link between the Catholic Church
and the Inquisition or the Ustase and then think of the ideals in the
Gospels. This is the common theme of institutionalisation – the
perversion of fine theory into cruel practice.
But this is precisely where anarchist utopianism gets challenged.
First, if anarchism is so good why does it rarely win a straight
fight and then, if it does, not for long. The experience of the
communards and of POUM in Spain suggests that others tend to win in a
fight and, unless you are prepared to rely on some abstract theory of
evil, there must be some reason for this in history. It may be different
in the future and we will come on to that but history tends to show
that anarchists don’t win for long [2].
Second, the conduct of MPs in modern Britain and of Communist Party
cadres in twentieth century Russia shows very little sign of human
nature being benign. Of course, the anarchist argument is that the
system makes the man and that if you removed social and institutional
pressures on man, the natural co-operative spirit of mankind will out.
Unfortunately, this sounds rather like the essentialist fallacy of human
nature that the Communists themselves held to when they stated that a
New Man would arise from a change in the conditions of the working
class.
This was perhaps Marx’s own transfer of the romantic imaginings of
Rousseau via German Idealism - a nod to anarchist ideals - when he
proposed that the state would wither away when the dictatorship of the
proletariat had been established. It is not that there is no evidence
for this misreading of our animal aspects but that the evidence of
psychology in recent years is in precisely the opposite direction.
Stanley Milgram’s experiments demonstrated what cruelties we will
undertake if sufficient authority is applied to us. To the anarchist
mind, this might merely show that we should seek a state of no
authority, yet other experimentation and observation tends to tell us
that differential intelligence and personality will lead to manipulative
exploitation. Some will always fall into that class of sociopath that
is so problematic for those who believe that humans are intrinsically
good.
(I don’t want to get into the problem of evil, sin and the fall of
man here because these are just attempts to create a moral explanation
from outside of man for contingent facts about what it is to be human.)
Perhaps the most devastating account of human cruelty does not lie
in the bare account of bureaucratic murders in the last century or the
savage conduct of so-called barbaric peoples but in the most disturbing
book that I have read in a long time because it is made up of the
testimonies of individuals who were victims and perpetrators on all
sides of what happens when the rule of law really is removed completely –
the conditions of the second world war in two theatres.
This is Laurence Rees’ 2008 book, ‘Their Darkest Hour’, which
demonstrates the co-existence of great altruism and exceptional sadistic
cruelty but certainly gives no cause to believe that a society without
law would not be anything other than a vicious jungle. Human beings are
complex and only contingently ‘good’ (if good means co-operative and
engaged in non-exploitative conduct, without us even getting into the
possibility of altruism).
There is no reasonable condition of life, including the unlikely
situation of no competition for basic resources, which would not involve
some form of psychic vampirism or exploitation by some over others
because our minds are structured to be limited in perception and to
react to events according to past experiences – unless, that is, we are
prepared to countenance some drug-induced social control such as that
envisaged by Aldous Huxley in ‘Brave New World’ or see the ‘withering
away’ being undertaken as a massively long evolutionary process.
Unfortunately, politics is immediate and messy ....
So we have the problem that progressive anti-anarchisms have failed because the human condition expresses itself as egotism within theoretically
otherwise benign systems, but that anarchism itself cannot succeed in political
practice for long because of that same human nature in its competitive
and reactionary mode. There are even libertarians who would claim to be
brothers and sisters of anarchists but are in direct opposition to them as
persons who see the good society as one of dynamic competition rather
than collaboration.
Are we to be left with conservative pessimism then? Is the Left
project, essentially one of liberation, equality and of fraternity,
doomed on the altar of our animal nature. I think not, not because I am
a utopian but because I am an anti-utopian. The findings of
psychologists about the unthinking or limbic aspects of human nature and
their ineluctability and their ‘unknownness’ (we cannot know other
minds and we are certainly not fixed essentially in any particular
moment of time) provide an argument for a politics that is much closer
to anarchism than it is to organized socialism as it exists today within
(say) the British Labour Party or the European Socialists [3].
It is socialism that has to adapt to anarchism more than anarchism
to socialism to create a workable Left project. The introduction [4]
referred to my co-ordination (over a decade now ago) of the Centre-Left
Grassroots Alliance within the Labour Party. Its failure was instructive
on two grounds.
First, it did not fail from within. Very disparate left-wing groups
with a radical democratic model of party reform were able to collaborate
on a very limited programme and operate against the party machine to a
very high level of propaganda success (including a supportive editorial
in the Guardian) through using new technologies. The campaign was an
early user (1995/6) of e-mail as a consultative and decision-making
tool.
It failed eventually because a deal was made in a smoke-filled room
between the rising faction in the party and the political officers of
the union backers of that party. The rising politicians were engineering
a deal to remove themselves from membership scrutiny, indeed from all
constraints. They traded a special interest agenda with executive
officers who operated without reference to their own union members.
The lesson is that people can self-organise effectively BUT that they are
soon faced with structures that hold power so tightly that no protest,
demonstration or campaign can break the hold of those few who command
it. This was brought home to people in the massive anti-war protests at
the beginning of the century - the public was simply ignored by the
decision-making calculation of, in fact, one man and those close to him.
A traditional revolution, under these circumstances, merely replaces
one set of the few with another … the control systems remain.
This coup by New Labour gave us twelve years or so of the most
viciously anti-libertarian non wartime government since Castlereagh and
the most war-mongering government since Salisbury or perhaps Palmerston.
The harvest was reaped only in the last few weeks [5] – not only in a
devastating defeat for it in the political field, the democratic
equivalent of the Fall of Berlin, but a defeat that has given legitimacy
not merely to the centre-right and to the propertied interest but to a
vicious racist rump (the BNP)
What happened in 1996 when the CLGA failed and events today are intimately
connected [as argued in Lobster 55]. Political recovery on the
democratic socialist Left is going to require the spirit of the anarchic
to overcome it. Let me explain. The current crisis is a crisis of
big-ness and centralization. Globalisation has created a need for
technocratic institutions at a global or regional level that can never
be properly scrutinised by anything other than other experts of a
similar degree of alleged sophistication [6].
An argument that such institutions cannot be democratic and must
work against democratic and popular accountability does not need to be
made to this audience. The people becomes a mob mediated by, yes, the
media. This is the politics of Berlusconi yet, in a sense, it is more
authentic than the cod-progressivism served up by contemporary liberals.
The strategy of post-Soviet socialism has been to try match the
technocracy blow for blow, to capture its commanding heights and to turn
it to ‘progressive ends’. But such a strategy means bigger and bigger
trades unions, NGOs and political parties whose ruling membership is
self-appointed, and often interchangeable with each other and even with
the big business that it purports to contain and restrain.
For example, a typical career path today might involve a young
trades union bureaucrat getting into Parliament in early middle age and
then advising a corporation as a public affairs consultant to a
corporation. Another might involve a young public affairs consultant
entering Parliament and then running an international NGO. Under such
conditions, group think and acceptance of the status quo must be the
normal way of doing things. It would be like the flow of think tank
professionals, military men and party officials in Nazi Germany or
Soviet Russia.
Through the Parliamentary and party process, State, progressives and
institutions become one liberal totalitarian whole. Since the
totalitarian process is nearly indistinguishable after a while between
‘progressives’ (whether called Democrats or PES) or ‘conservatives
(whether called Republicans or the EPP) [7], it is no wonder that effective
resistance to this cold machinery comes only from the Far Left and the
Far Right or from the many differing types of economic, political and
social libertarian.
The Ayn Rand worshipping radical free marketer, the polyamorous or
transgendered sexual revolutionary and the political anarchist or
dissident democratic socialist, let alone neo-pagans and thelemites,
will have more in common as dissidents against liberal orthodoxy than
they do with the system against which they struggle.
Excessive regulation that levels people down and assumes that no one
can be trusted, a sexual culture of licentious imagery and commodity
fetishism instead of natural sexuality, centralized power and
bureaucracy and the presumption that unaccountable theocratic appointees
can represent more than themselves … all are part of the same general
culture which turns people into stereotypes, none worse than that of
leftist identity politics.
The socializing tendencies of the machine means that the real
resistance will now always tend to come more effectively from the Right [8].
David Cameron may be more acute than liberal commentators think in
associating himself with euro-critical Polish and Czech parties than
with those who take all this at face value. Berlusconi adopts yet
another model of resistance – nationalist populism that operates with
almost carnival flair to pinprick the po-faced political correctness of
his dull opponents [9].
Since entrepreneurs, artists and dissidents are generally
ineffective political organizers, the bureaucratic Left steadily cedes
ground to the populist Right which offers a moderated social and
economic freedom in return for authoritarian state governance.
Berlusconi may protest at pictures of his nearly erect willy in a
Spanish newspaper but it does no harm to his electoral fortunes anymore
than racism did to the BNP’s or Jobbik’s. When excluded from any power,
the public starts to get a taste for sex and violence. As Disraeli said
of old Palmerston when it was revealed that he was allegedly having an
adulterous affair, “Let’s hope that it does not get out or he’ll win by a
landslide”. In despair at progress or under threat, bloodlust soon
becomes normal – give me an imposed Roman Peace and I shall soon give
you the slaughter in the Coliseum.
Socialism has thus lost the plot for the third time in history. The
first time was when it dropped its international trousers in 1914 and
allowed itself to become the catamite of militarists. The second was
when it adopted vanguardism and cornered itself into state terror and
trying to explain complex political philosophy to peasants. The third
moment is now – when it tries to enforce good on a population that is
not ready to be bored in heaven by choirs of angels.
So let’s get back to anarchism. While socialism has made three
attempts at changing the world – in one country, through global
revolution and through progressive internationalism – anarchists have
contemplated their navels or engaged in hobbyism. Read any text on
anarchism and you see nothing but the small scale up to a point. This is
good. This is of the essence of anarchism but it is not doing anything
to drag the mass of the world’s population out of poverty or
redistribute wealth and power in the first world.
What is happening is that anarchists are pauperising themselves to
live a dream, abstracting themselves from a wasteful and incompetent
global system and perhaps hoping it will all go away. But be warned, if
the fascists, communists or even progressive liberals seize the organs
of state and the monopoly of force, then the fate of anarchists is
extinction - whether by aggression or stealth.
The general population will be sucked into the totalitarian mind-set
and, for them, it will be just a case of waiting for the wheel of
fortune to turn again and give them some new noble lie, some totalizing
world view that tells them what to think and what to be.
So, if anarchists have a wrong-headed view of the essential niceness
of the human condition and seem incapable of moving far beyond stunts,
localised insurgencies and happenings and if socialists have proved
malign, incompetent and authors of their own destruction, where do we go
from here …
My proposal is that anarchism does NOT change its essential nature,
which is self-organisation, nor its default position in favour of
collaboration and altruism. What it should be looking at now is having
the courage to return to the experience of POUM in Catalonia which was
snuffed out by force and to the techniques (though not the ideology) of
urban welfare systems like those of Hezbollah and Hamas. Yes, you heard
me right. Though common sense suggests that guns should not be part of
the equation.
The BNP has overlaid its gangster class on very real distress and
anxiety amongst the weakest sections of the urban working class. The
Labour Movement, though not the socialists (i.e. the 3% of the vote that
emerged last week), has abandoned them and no longer has the will or
the manpower to organize them. If the Left does not adopt an organizing
approach to these communities, they will turn to fascisms or populisms
with more determination than we have seen to date.
This is a rare opportunity to apply anarchistic organizational
principles, even along the original rather than the debased model of the
Soviets, to real social problems and to create an organizational
structure that, in non-sectarian alliance with democratic socialists,
can create a non-racist and non-authoritarian model for localities under
pressure – one that can put the fear of the people into the liberal
establishment, the opportunists in the political class, the State and
the fascists. [10]
This is true revolution from below and it has a place for direct
action strategies. Indeed, direct action strategies like Raven’s Ait and
the Tyting Farm Community [11] and the organization of economic and anti-war
protest, will be more effective to the degree that they have a sea of
support in which to swim. The alliance underpinning the campaign against
the third runway at Heathrow in which middle class residents and street
environmentalists is one to watch [12].
In the event, Raven’s Ait was re-occupied with impunity and its
bland Liberal Democrat MP reduced to mildly sympathetic impotence
because the assumption in society was that the island involved could
only be administered through procedures far distant from the community
in which it was situated.
But there is a price anarchism will have to pay … It will have to
cease to be hobbyist. It will have to cease to be utopian. It will have
to cease to be an aesthetic position. It will have to realize that the
dispersal of power means the acquisition and management of power and
that the control of opportunists, incompetents and exploiters from below
needs to be, yes, institutionalized in a demotic form of the original
liberal vision of 1688.
What we are talking about here is the next stage in the slow
evolution of that long revolution from Magna Carta through 1688 and on
to the welfare state that started to go into reverse under Thatcher and
which reached criminal levels of reaction under Blair.
The point is that positive democratic, social, economic and legal
reform was bought at the cost of the steady centralization of the State
and of culture. This has proved to be a devil’s pact, the sort of
devil’s pact that could order its young to die for diplomatic
misjudgements, listen to only four national radio stations and take that
as arbiter of culture and give, in return, decent welfare provision.
Bismarck did something similar without having to piddle around worrying
about democracy.
National welfare was traded, quite legitimately up to a point for
many working people, for decreasing freedom. The pact was a balanced
one, a social democratic one. But when the system decided to start to
remove key freedoms and community institutions in order to permit
market-led social and economic changes, the pact was broken. Working
people have got neither welfare nor democracy and our Roman Peace is now
inclining them towards a limbic rage about their condition [13].
Yet the collapse of the shared social democratic (or was it national
socialist?) political structure also meant the collapse of strategies
of moderate resistance. Freedom is not a matter of liberal
constitutional reform, of proportional representation, republicanism and
bills of rights, or the current tinkering of Gordon Brown – these
merely lock in the power of the propertied. It is about the seizure of
power from below in an orderly and sustained way. It is truly
revolutionary, preferably bloodless.
There is a great deal at stake here. An established constitutional
state, such as the US, can apparently lance the boil of mass discontent
with a decisive victory for a President but the UK’s informal
constitution and Europe’s half-baked constitution provide an unusual
opportunity for constructively disruptive action. If the liberals get
their way and impose a written constitution or the Lisbon Treaty is
imposed on the constituent states of the EU through the rank treachery
to the people of their political classes, the game is probably up.
If either happens, anarchism may as well abandon any pretensions in
the developed world to a political life and revert to alternative
lifestyles, aestheticism and community work. So the urgency is clear.
Anarchists, if they have a political sense, need to work in an organized
way with libertarians and socialists against both the Lisbon Treaty [14] and
similar attempts to create a federal state and against the liberal
elite’s attempt to give itself cover through regulation and legal
structures that will enable a permanent state of manipulation of us by
them.
If they succeed in these plans, political anarchists, libertarians
and 'true' socialists will become neutered or forced into insurgency –
or, in modern parlance, they will become ‘terrorists’. And, before you
think this fanciful, consider the amount of effort going into
intelligence-based policing against dissidents and protesters, often at
the expense of the basic maintenance of social order in the inner
cities [15].
But what I have not referred to is the ‘good society’ and what it
comprises. I have taken a fairly negative view of human nature but this
is not a true reflection of my views. My view is similar to that of many
sensible anarchists – that we are neither good nor bad in essence, just
human, and that our actions are directed, by chance and necessity
(including poverty and history), down channels that may be good or bad
for others or for ourselves.
We are good and bad only in contexts and in relation to others and
our own true will. This is where society comes in because it is the
context against which we measure our true will. It can enable and it can
repress. It can be fair or it can be exploitative. The good society is
one where all are equally enabled and none are exploited. And the best
judge of what is good for me is me and not some cod-progressive in an
office in Whitehall or Brussels.
The difference between me and many anarchists is only in emphasis
and means, The libertarian in me sees the only structure for the good
society as being one in which I have a voice and a stake and which
minimizes its interference in my life and that of others.
However, the issues surrounding enablement and resistance to
exploitation require, for me, some sort of governance, a framework with a
rule of law. That is where we may agree to disagree because at the end
of the day that framework has to be democratic (based on the collective
will of the population at large) and socialist - or at least welfarist
(representing the interests of the whole community).
The great political parties are broad churches and there is no
reason why the resistance to them, to the state and to exploitation
should not be a non-sectarian broad church as well. Contemporary
technology – from contraception through medical intervention to internet
communications – provides much greater opportunities for
self-awareness, self education and self determination than at any other
time in history [16].
This is the essence of the current potential for revolution. We are
not now free because we are told that we are free – whether by Rousseau
or Marx – but we are free because we are actually free, not potentially
but actually, sexually and in our right to self-expression as much as in
any other respect. We are not beyond good and evil but we are beyond
convention and custom.
For some reason, the ‘authorities’, perhaps existing as no more than
a neurotic authoritarian mind-set, are becoming deeply frightened by
what this may mean in terms of our willingness to be taxed and told what
to do [17]. Their entire machinery is designed to constrain and contain our
free spirits. Our freedom is contained within a ready-made mass culture
of titillation and received ideas, an overt sexual culture that is
observed rather than lived [18], and a rhetoric of rights and democracy
without the practice.
Now is the time to say that we will not take any more and that
anything, I say again, anything, is permissible to preserve our real
freedoms.
So I shall end there … if you think I have a point, then it is time
for anarchists to start to consider how they will organise themselves at
this critical time.
And if you do not, then I thank you for your time and advise you to
abandon political dreaming and make pots or take up flower arranging.
NOTES
[1] The reference here is to the then-recent Parliamentary expenses scandal.
[2] A current case study in this is going on, while we write, in the streets of Greece where a non-anarchist neo-socialist movement is facing the might of institutional capital after serious errors of judgment by pseudo-socialists in the preceding administrations. If such an organised alternative to anarchism and to neo-liberalism fails to achieve anything at all in defending the Greek people from the past mistakes of their own ruling classes, then we are in very murky waters indeed, driving, perhaps, populations to total submission to undemocratic technocracy, to neo-communist alternatives or to social and political breakdown.
[3] Close but not identical with - Syriza seems to have some anarchistic elements within an essentially socialist structure while the Russian Marxist Boris Kagarlitsky has recently offered us a Marxism that makes significant concessions to the anarchist position on social structures.
[4] This refers to an introductory political biography to the talk.
[5] This was a reference to political conditions at the time which saw a rapid rise in the vote for the Fascist BNP and its subsequent rapid fall. In fact, I was on record in other papers as dismissing the BNP threat and condemning the liberal-left hysteria surrounding, as, more recently, I have comndemned the hysteria surrounding the Charlie Hebdo hysteria. However, June 2009 saw massive falls in electoral support for Labour in the European and local elections and, although not sustained for the 2010 Election, Labour lost power to a Conservative-Liberal coalition a year later. I probably over-egged the crisis for the Left for the audience but it was a shock that eventually resulted in a slight shift to the Left in the Party with the election as leader of Ed Miliband.
[6] Events since 2009 appear to have confirmed that the international institutional infrastructure that was being built up in the decades before the 2008 crash was coming under severe strain half a decade later. This 'not fit for purpose' aspect of the attempt to contain and control globalisation through liberal institutional structures is self evident to anyone observing the cracks in the system appearing in every direction - political, social and economic - and yet the liberal centre ground persists in avoiding and evading analysis of the facts placed before them by history.
[7] To some extent we are seeing changes in the cosy situation where global governance is a matter of the competition betwen two bourgeois factions of the same global centrist party. In the years since the talk was drafted, the main revolt has been on the national populist Right represented by non-fascist entities such as the Tea Party, UKIP and the National Front in France as well as national and more neo-nationalist and quasi-fascistic operations in Eastern Europe and Greece. Only recently have we seen a countervailing Left populism emerge with Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Italy and perhaps signs of incipent organisation in Italy and in the US. Taken together, the liberal bourgeois centre faces a war on two fronts but one where the Right is more destabilising and driving power to the liberal-left whose instincts are to ignore reality and expand provocatively their international liberal internationalism - at obscene cost in terms of human suffering on the Western periphery.
[8] This was definitely true in 2009, especially as Occupy and Femen represented the height of middle class liberal posturing. However, there are signs that the Left is now beginning to even up the resistance score as the centrist model continues to fail to deliver economic growth, the posturing liberals dig themselves into ever deeper holes and the centre appears to have no option left according to its own rules of engagement but to drive an austerity programme that seems to be unfairly directed at the weakest and most vulnerable.
[9] Berlusconi, like Dominique Strauss-Kahn, eventually fell victim to a centrist liberal strategy of using the law to discredit inconvenient persons and there was a natural end to his tenure because of age but the principle he represented not only persists but flourishes in the smaller European countries whether directed at neonationalism (as in the Czech Republic or Hungary) or a curious form of hyper-liberal Westernism linked to NATO (as in the Baltic Republic and Poland).
[10] The point I would have made more strongly here (and bear in mind that the rhetoric at this point has moved into persuasive mode designed to shake up anarchists from their torpor) is that the liberal Left took a dramatic wrong-turning with the adoption of identity politics as the basis for coalition-building to the exclusion of locality, family, cultural tribe and work-place organisation. It 'went against nature' by encouraging the attribute of a person instead of the person as the core unit of society.
[11] A matter of local concern to London Anarchists at that point in history.
[12] This, resistance to Cross Rail and the Gatwick extensions are still ones to watch. Fracking would have been added to the list except that Cameron suddenly back-tracked from the aggressive promotion of the shale gas industry in anticipation of its effect on the Southern English vote in core Tory areas. The plan was to come back to it after the election with a solid majority and damn the hides of the English middle classes. If he had not drawn back, the Greens might be more of a threat than they are and built up a 'Blue' Green support much as UKIP has defied its right wing tag and built a 'Red' element.
[13] In fact, as the last 2015 Election TV Debate showed, the limbic rage has moved up the social scale to the articulate middle classes.
[14] Unsurprisingly, the Lisbon Treaty came into full force at the end of that year (2009) and the post-Crash European Union has looked increasingly ramshackle ever since, hanging on to its constitutional position as substitute for any form of policy that would offer democratic solutions for problems to its population. Needless to say, it was the bankrupt centre-left (or rather 'radical centre') that engineered this farce and so the resistance to its failed model has fallen to the populist Right rather than to the popular Left.
[15] This was a very serious concern at the time - at a point where the structures imposed on society by the rather spurious 'war on terror' overlapped with the panic in the system about a crisis in the very means of production and distribution. The legislation is still in place but the middle classes themselves started to baulk and fight back at the implications of the security agenda - at least in the UK and Europe if less so in the US. The moment has probably passed for the worst to be imposed, It is fascinating to note in this context that the attempt by NATO to drive public support for its forward policy against Russia has failed in the West of the Continent, including usually militaristic Britain, and that the heavy lobbying for guarantees on defence spending achieved nothing but the opportunistic appropriation of the policy by UKIP.
[16] Since this was written, we have taken an interest in the rise of transhumanism and the formation of Transhumanist Parties across the West. Our judgment is that these are single issue parties that repeat the intellectual errors of the Greens but the application of technology for the benefit of humanity is a serious issue that deserves being higher on the agenda as a matter for community action. The anti-technological position of the neo-conservative (not in the US sense of the term) environmentalist Left has gone too far.
[17] I think this fear of the people is the defining aspect of the politics of our time. Though the 'system' has a monopoly of force and could do terrible things if it wished, the complexity and interdependence of society has made the risks of doing so far too great for the safe survival of elites and States. It is not that the people can do much about their situation in a positive sense at this point in history but the disruption caused by non-compliance, selective resistance and sheer bloody-mindedness to a weak and vulnerable system gives it a sort of negative power based on its lack of predictability. This helps to explain the State's obsession with surveillance, Big Data, nudge and behaviourial psychology ... it hopes to manipulate rather than force us into compliance. It is probably a forlorn hope because complexity is not only built into the system but is growing exponentially - the arrival of artificial intelligence is expected by the authorities to be a means of exerting control again but this is to be doubted. AI merely adds another layer of complexity.
[18] This should not be misunderstood as socially conservative statement - quite the opposite. The fact of an increasingly sex-positive culture is to be applauded. The argument is the opposite - that repression has merely been replaced by voyeurism and that a form of cultural self censorship in the population means that people are still hiding behind the curtain watching others have fun rather than having fun themselves.
Position Reserved - amateur philosophical and political news and reflections ... "Qui non intelligit aut discat aut taceat"
Showing posts with label Anarchism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anarchism. Show all posts
Saturday, 2 May 2015
Saturday, 11 April 2015
For and Against Situationist Thought
Situationist thought might seem like a mere historical foot-note from Cold War
history but it is worth some reconsideration now that we have seen
‘capitalism’ go through one of its periodic bouts of creative
destruction. It depended intellectually on yet another
attempt by mid-twentieth century Marxists to weasel out of the tough
fact that their Idealist origins meant that they could never actually
relate to the human condition as most people lived it – life for Marxists
is an expression of theory. On the other hand, shorn of
its ridiculous and patronising Marxist rhetoric, it has been 'detourned'
into every avenue of commercial art, that is where it has not become
the hobby of marginalised contemporary anarchists operating on the
fringe of political reality - and sometimes of reality itself.
Where Situationist Thought Sits
Yet it would be foolish to under-estimate its importance. Although derived from an untenable Hegelianism, still being played out by the buffoons in the European Commission, it had one big thing to offer. What the situationists wanted to do was to make individuals, especially individuals at the very base of society, critically observe and analyse their daily conditions of life, calculate their own intrinsic desires and act on them.
Forget the Young Hegelian padding, this was potentially pre-Socratic in form, a half-way house to a proper existentialist political ethic. Perhaps they needed to claw their way out of the very ideology in which they had set themselves and just failed and perhaps we should honour them simply for trying. Their contribution to Western culture is precisely to expose the impossibility of one’s own desire being encompassed by any theory.
Debord recognized this to a degree by opposing any attempt to turn the situationist impulse into 'situationism', an ideology. Unfortunately, he failed to escape the dominant intellectual ideology of his time. One can imagine a group of Christian radicals (anti-trinitarians perhaps) playing with similar ideas, yet getting trapped into a necessary but ultimately fruitless faith in God.
The Situationist and the Left
Debord understood Sartre’s insight into one aspect of our condition – that the will to the universal, embedded in ‘official’ left-wing thought, is deeply absurd. He saw ideology as legitimated in modern society ‘by universal abstraction and by the effective dictatorship of illusion’. What the Situationists expressed was a peculiar form of revolt that has resonance today. Within the Left, it was a revolt against the bureaucratic impulse of contemporary socialism and the repulsive dictatorship of Stalin’s nomenlatura. That particular argument was won in any case by history. From the Left, however, it was a revolt at the process of having one’s reality, desires and needs dictated by machineries that were no less bureaucratic than those of sclerotic communism but which were hidden within the operations of capitalism.
Later, the great left-wing weasel himself, Gramsci, managed to perform a trick whereby the official Left simply abandoned overt bureaucratism and adopted the manipulative techniques of capitalist enterprises for social engineering purposes. The Situationist impulse is thus important because the problems they identified have not gone away but have merely transformed themselves. Mow, the manipulation of reality comes not only from advertising agencies but from liberal-left infiltration of our culture.
Anti-Capitalism and Neo-Bureaucratic Socialism
What we have now is a culture of self-righteous and manipulative activists, all talking their book and using their minority power to force universalist regulation and legislation on a powerless population. From a Cold War situation of communist bureaucratic tyranny and ‘free world’ corporate drabness, we have transformed into a world of government by liberal-left elites amidst an economic chaos which they are incapable of managing.
The Situationist International was anti-capitalist (whatever that can mean today) but their revolutionary impulse embraced what they saw as the positive elements within capitalist development. Despite the bleatings of Marxist-Leninists, there are positive aspects. Capitalism, by lurches and starts, eventually provides for needs and desires far better than any other system, better than political traditionalism and provenly better than communism.
At a certain level of development, people began to have the opportunity for personal choice. This was certainly not the case in the industrial factory culture of mid-twentieth century France and it is not the case across most of the world for most of the time but, where the market (let us drop the loaded term capitalism) operates well, persons do have more choices although this does not mean that the choices are the ones we always want ... better is not to be taken here to mean good, just not-so-bad.
Puritan Reactions
There is a current attempt at a back-lash against choice from the sourer elements of the liberal-left but this neo-puritanism, which can descend to complaints about the complexity of mobile phone tariffs in a world of stupid and lazy people, deliberately ignores that late capitalism gives us other more critical choices of real value.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century in the developed west, we have been given remarkable choices over our sexual identity, who we associate with, where and how we live, what we take into our bodies and what we can say (despite liberal-left attempts to control this last). These freedoms derive entirely from our relative prosperity and so from late capitalism. The tragedy of the current economic crisis is that many people have not found a way to extend their freedoms independent of prosperity and regardless of the cynical interest of the ‘capitalists’.
This is where the situationist impulse comes in because the situationists were ahead of their time by half a century in asserting the primacy of the ordinary person’s ability to assert his or her right to choose his or her condition of life according to his or her desires - against centuries of social control. What we can continue to do is bring desire as a reality to the forefront of the population’s minds so that these desires can be recognized as good in themselves and, if transgressive against some dictated norm, inspirational towards changing the norm itself.
Sanguinetti
Instead of the liberal-left activist transforming a norm to meet abstract universalist principles over the heads of the population, the population might be liberated to assess its own condition and then demand that ‘norms’ be transformed away from the universal and back to the particular. What they can also do is what Sanguinetti and Debord did in their hoax pamphlet of 1975 where they ‘tricked’ major figures into showing their true thoughts and feelings on the murderous fascist interventions in Italy at that time.
This was unforgivable to elites – Sanguinetti had to flee Italy and was denied entry to France. Yet all he had done was to get the elite to show its true sentiments to the ruled. This should have been the task of journalism but journalists were and are fully embedded in the elite. As we have seen in the outpourings of garbage over the Ukrainian and Greater Syrian situations, the 'free Press' is little more than the 'father of lies' (on all sides).
Marxism & Value
Let us turn to what is wrong with Situationist Thought. Almost everything that is wrong with it can be put down to its Marxist origins and its easy acceptance of Marx’s labour theory of value. Everything in Marxism depends on this theory – and on its elaborations such as commodification, reification and alienation – so that any theory that did not accept it could not be called Marxist. The Situationists had to see themselves as Marxist if they were to be credibly ‘of the Left’.
In fact, value is not created by work but by perception, in a very different way from Marx’s simple view of all production being simply economic and ‘scientific’. How we perceive value arises from considerations that relate to our desires as much as our needs. The Marxist impulse is not merely to diminish these desires but to start creating concepts such as 'false consciousness' that will be the basis of the totalitarian manipulation of desire. Above all, the Marxist will not investigate and respect (and socialise) the animal core of desire and the 'divine' aspiration within it. While not going so far, the Situationists made the revolutionary step of interpreting Marxist theory in terms of experience and perception but laid claim to this being a stage in capitalism, ‘advanced’ capitalism.
Today, the capitalist seeks out and enables a creativity which would not be expressed at all if it was not for the capitalist who permits both efficient and wasteful organisation of resources. The Situationists, however, were hobbled by their need to fit in with ‘progressive’ historicism. Their profound insight was vitiated by the fact that they failed to understand that all value is based on experience and desire once very basic needs are met and that even those needs are contingent on experience and desire. In short, experience and desire (if only to continue living) are far more intrinsic to value than some gobbledy-gook that inserts the capitalist between the worker and his product. Even the form of basic needs can be dictated by perceptions and experience as in those situations where markets are perverted by taboo.
The Age of Spectacle
The Situationists assumed that we lived in an age of Spectacle that was different from all other ages. The latest adaptation of this is the current interest in the hyper-real, best exemplified by the work of Baudrillard. But they were entrapped within Marxist historical thought here as well. In fact, all ages are ages of spectacle and of simulacra because that is the central fact of the human condition. The only difference today is the sheer extent of the technological enhancement of the real that is available to us.
The human condition is always one of interpreting too much data from too many sources through perceptual apparatus that are not only limited by genetics but by history, habit and other people. Our species is constantly creating a version of reality that is pragmatically designed for survival.
Our reality at any one time is not the only possible reality. If it is true that it is constructed (as Marxists claim) from a particular relationship to the means of production, it is also true that it is constantly being recreated by the minds of millions of persons with instinctive wants and desires that are independent of those means.
This spectacle, this unified and always growing ‘thing’, made up of objects perceived and turned into value by the perceiving (detached from any underlying reality and certainly from the analysed reality of the intellectual) is a Heraclitean flux that can never be made solid or fully understood (despite the fantasies of the AI and Big Data enthusiasts). The Marxist theory of alienation may be true analytically but it also contains an intrinsic problem that it derives from the Judaeo-Christian cultural tradition – that is, it does not want it to be true. Implicitly the Communist society is supposed, if not to abolish it, to reduce alienation of this type and yet this alienation is precisely what makes us evolve and be creative.
Why Alienation May Be A Good Thing
It may be far more sensible to embrace the flux, identify one’s own desires and then pragmatically seek fulfillment without collapsing into madness, in other words to be functionally happy within the flux by creating islands of vital personal rather than of sclerotic collective stability. Marxism is deeply conservative, terrified of change (unless a revolutionary blood-letting to end change), and nervous of emotion, desire and instinct.
Many Leftists would stand aghast at my comment and immediately suggest that such an acceptance of these things must be intrinsically ‘fascist’. So be it ... they misunderstand because they are wired to misunderstand these things. The Situationists embraced radical change in the short term, but their grand narrative still assumed that somewhere further down the line ‘revolution’ would bring some concordance between real reality and imagined reality. In this, they were wrong.
Though we may develop as a species in a robotic or purely intellectual direction over tens of thousands of years, we are defined now by having an individual reality (embracing our desires) that is disconnected from social reality ('norms’) which, in turn, is often out of kilter with the facts of the matter in the world. To seek to align our own situation with the ‘pseudo-reality’ of society by transforming the social into something that is in accordance with our own reality is absurd, utopianism of the worst sort, the basis of Hitlerism to name but one manifestation.
Utopian Absurdity
Why? Because there are millions of such realities, all competing and without any clear common class, race, sexual or other identity that is not created by the very society that we recognize as un-real. Faced with the flux of our desires and situation in a world where imbalances of power dictate the social norms which are imposed on us, where these same norms might be counter-productive to the effective management of scientific reality (as in some faith-based cultures), the Situationists have something to tell us but not precisely what they thought they wanted to tell us.
The Spectacle is not just a matter of contemplation but one of action where we, as individuals, have considerable opportunity to transform our and other lives if we only understood the degree of our freedom within our material and power constraints (so much, so Sartre).
What is not going to happen is any lasting transformation of society that is simply derived from a manipulative cadre – the sort of activist element we noted above – where a few individuals impose their phantasy on the majority without their own participation or informed consent. In practice only education (the art of questioning) and the market (the art of choosing) can liberate enslaved minds. Situationist events and cadres, in that context, are useful only insofar as they jolt us into questioning and into considering the value of our choices to ourselves.
Ideology as False God
From this perspective and as an example, AdBusters, which ‘detournes’ commercial advertising, is extremely valuable not because it will overthrow capitalism (it won’t) but because it raises questions outside of formal schooling institutions and it allows us to ask questions about our own values. However, if AdBusters simply replaces one world-view (slavery to the market) with another (slavery to an anti-capitalist rhetoric) nothing has been achieved.
The choice must include a value-driven choice for the product or service by the individual where that choice is informed and functionally useful to them. When an ideology like feminism raises questions for a woman (or man) about their relationship and offers a choice (to accept or not accept it) as well as a means of action (to act to make it a positive and effective choice), it is doing good.
But when it dictates an agenda that precludes questioning (‘all men are predators’) or forces a choice (‘sisterhood requires such-and-such an action'), then it is as oppressive as their invented Aunt Sally ‘patriarchy’. All ideologies need to be questioned in the same way. Debord’s ‘pseudo world’ of the spectacle is thus seen as a problem whereas in fact it is also a solution. There is no possible world that cannot be a pseudo world, in effect an imaginative construct limited by material reality, because the human species is defined positively by its own intrinsic alienation.
Taking Hold of the Spectacle
Once this is understood, we can abandon our puritanical moral panic about the lack of stability within existence and see the spectacle as something that we can create incrementally in our own image to the degree that we can ensure its and our functionality. What Debord is right to point out is the dangers of a liar lying to himself but, even here, we should not go too far.
A phantasy that is functional for the person is a tolerable madness. The issue is whether it is functional and not whether it is a phantasy. There is nothing wrong with phantasy at all. The liberatory element lies in an assertion (the only concession to the universal abstract) that the rights of persons to their phantasies are all equal and that the conditions of life should not include the acceptance of an unwilling submission of (or dominance over) one of another.
The lie that the liar may be telling himself is that he is happy or content when he has repressed and suppressed his true nature. An effective situationist response would be a socialized psychotherapeutic one, a revolutionary act of multiple enablings of self-assertions against the ‘given’. The current late capitalist spectacle works quite well at this critical level – the power of the consumer (which offsets the disempowered position of the employee or family member) permits an assertion of personal desire against the desire of capitalism to desire more resources.
The Hidden Moralism of Debord
A situationist economics might even emphasise the power of withdrawal of desire or the deferral of desire as a tactical act to get more of what is desired – not unlike the sexual politics within many relationships. The Spectacle is thus not the ‘concrete inversion of life’ (the Situationist view) but life itself, or rather what happens to life once individuals (who are truly alive) start to deal with one another in a constant process of gaming and trading.
Debord would have had much fun with our current obsession with zombies. This fascination is largely a construction of commercial interests but it is almost certainly hitting a sense in the population that the ‘system’ does treat them like zombies, units of production and consumption. But this does not mean that we are zombies, only that we are aware that we might become zombies. Zombies do not know that they are zombies.
Debord also argued that ‘things that were once directly lived are now lived by proxy’ but he exaggerates, sounding like a Christian moralist of the late pagan era. He has no proof for his statement because he was not 'there'. The literary evidence for the claim can be shown to be flawed and suppositious. He says that ‘once an experience is taken out of the real world, it becomes a commodity … the spectacular is developed to the detriment of the real. It becomes a substitute for experience’. But there is no harm in anything becoming a commodity if the trade is still good for the desiring subject. There is certainly no reason why the spectacle should not be regarded as being as real as the ‘real’ if it is felt as real by the person.
The Real
There is no real to be had in the sense that Debord is implying. Commodified experience is not only real to all intents and purposes but ‘more real’ insofar as it is the purchased expression of the fulfillment of a desire (albeit usually partially) that would otherwise not be experienced if it was not purchased. Marxism is riddled with pseudo-Judaeo-Christian moralizing about authenticity of experience and Debord cannot escape it. Here he is again: ‘our psychic functions are altered, we get a degradation of mind and also a degradation of knowledge’. He puts this down to capitalism. I put it down to socialisation under any system.
As soon as we relate to a single other person, we are beginning to see our psychic functioning altered, our mind is ‘degraded’ (meaning limited in its imaginative options) and our knowledge ‘degraded’ (made functionally useful to the system rather than ourselves). This altering and degradation increases to the degree that we are embedded in bigger and bigger institutions.
Intellectual Arrogance
We have to recognize that this ‘degradation’ applies to all human systems (not just capitalism) and that many people actively choose such ‘degradation’ as enhancing to them (our bureaucrats, corporate men and women, the military, the churches). But it is the height of intellectual arrogance to assume that such people are somehow inferior in their choice to libertarians like Debord and myself – all we can ask is that they do not force us into their mould.
Where he has an important point to make is where he says that ‘knowledge is not used [any more] to question, analyze or resolve contradictions but to assuage reality’. The ‘any more’ is highly questionable but the statement is a true representation of most people for most of the time but whether this state of affairs can ever be changed by revolutionary action is to be doubted. What the 68-ers and most Leftists of that and earlier periods did not and could not ‘get’ (because of the scientific knowledge of the period) is that this is the human species – mostly uninterested intrinsically in questioning, analysis and resolving contradictions. It is the creature that lives rather than 'thinks through' its contradictions.
Contradictions
In fact, the last thing most people want to do is resolve contradictions. Contradictions are the only way they can cope with life. No revolutionary operation is going to remove the reality of and necessity for contradiction. There is no evidence that the allegedly ‘real’ experience was, in fact, ever more interesting or pleasurable or life-changing than any acquired experience through the market. To think otherwise is a moralistic myth, an ‘ought’ from a traditionalist perspective rather than an ‘is’. It is what we think that we ought to think – no more.
Contemporary technology has made this clearer. Most desires cannot be fulfilled and will never be fulfilled wholly. The reality was always that experiences of value were few and often turned sour – think of the romp in the hay that led to a lifetime being shackled to a podgy harridan. New technologies create a culture of life-enhancing vicarious pleasure that, far from making persons less able to cope with ‘reality’, lance the boil of desire and create the language for getting some simulacra of desire into private life.
These technologies allow desires to be identified and then managed. The commodification of sexuality has included Ann Summers whose very existence has permitted sex-positive discussion between couples and has created an atmosphere of desire that counters the inability to speak of pleasure – as was the case in the past.
The Spectacle as Process
How does Debord see authority in this Society of the Spectacle? As always, he follows the Marxist pattern of making authority a thing rather than a process. There is some intention in someone somewhere apparently to maintain social control and handle threats. This is absurd.
There is no controlling mind at the centre of capitalism inventing processes for social control. It is a process in itself. Social controls are intrinsic but also subject to our own engagement in personal and so social liberation. The process includes ‘recuperation’ (the interception of radical ideas, their commodification and safe incorporation) but this is not sinister or willful. It is just natural evolution. It should be regarded as a good thing.
Even attenuated once-radical ideas (like, say, the scientific reality of human racial equality) become included within the ‘spectacle’ and the whole moves forward on the basis of its functionality and facts on the ground. Intellectuals want perfection where there is no perfection to be had. Capitalism is not degrading the life of the people. The people degrade their own lives as victims of circumstances they fail to will to change. As all intellectuals (especially Marxist intellectuals) do, Debord treats the mass of the population as fools, to be enlightened by types like himself.
What We Need
The ‘people’ (that is actual persons in the world) are embedded in a process which is ‘given’ to them but which they change each and every day of their waking lives through their actions. We do not need grumpy Marxist theory. We only need a commitment to a questioning education and the freedom to make choices for ourselves – and intervention, the legitimate role of the community as collective, to ensure that no person is hobbled from making informed choices.
Under this more moderated form of the Situation, questioning and assertive persons can create ‘situations’, reconstruct their localities, choose their relationships, engage with their environments and merge playfulness, free choice and critical thought. There will be no help from a revolutionary proletariat while any ‘art’ that thinks it will transform the conditions of humanity is living in a phantasy all of its own. It is the other way around. The transformation of society will enable an art that can exist for its own sake and is not burdened by theory or politics. Rather Wilde than Marx …
The aim of the Situationist International was much the same as mine – a world of luxury, happiness and freedom but allowing education and the market (a proper market and not socialism for corporations) to thrive is almost certainly more likely to produce these goods over the long term than reliance on a revolutionary proletariat and a bunch of artists.
Friday, 3 April 2015
The Indiscipline of Protest
There have been at least
two great intellectual failures in the last hundred years - the first
is Marxism-Leninism and the second has been the liberal rejection of
some of the central insights of the Marxists.
Class But Not As We Know It, Jim
This is not to praise Marxism except as an analytical tool under defined conditions because Marxism is, fundamentally, a poor guide to our human condition. Despite its alleged materialism, it is an idealist philosophy which has been quite historically effective for seizing power. But idealism is intellectually sanctioned lying about the world. Marxism is Hegelian which, in turn, is an historicism derived from the Western Christian tradition which, in turn and philosophically, is ultimately an adaptation of Platonism.
The trajectory from Plato's Cave to the Gulag has been well if simplistically argued by others but the summary is that this Western tradition of idealism is ultimately religious and 'spiritual' and that it can kill when brooked. But the proverbial baby has been thrown out with the bath water in at least two respects. We have forgotten Marx' and Engels' insights that politics and culture derive intimately from economic conditions and that, though each person is greater than his class, there are class interests in politics.
Modern liberal democracy has tried to eliminate the language of class because it is not convenient for its preferred model of professionals organising functional coalitions of special interests and lobbies to share out the benefits of growth - but when growth falters, then Marx becomes analytically relevant.
Where Should We Be Looking
For this reason, in trying to understand what might develop out of the continuing economic crisis, we have to return both to theory and to what is happening where we are not looking - much as in 1910, we might have been wise not to ignore intellectuals in Zurich or school teachers in Bavaria. We should be studying not the machinations of the ideologues of the future (that is the job of the security services) but what they are saying that resonates with those who are either resentful of the current order of things or who are suffering and have the energy to do something about it.
It is that last clause that matters 'who 'have the energy to do something about it' - because there are an awful lot of resentful older middle class people, intellectuals and poor and vulnerable people who sit in their armchairs or on their sofas and have neither will nor ability to act. Liberal democratic hegemony (indeed, all hegemonies) ultimately relies on inaction - that moan in the pub, grumble in front of the TV, meaningless letter to The Times, rant in a Facebook comment. None of this morphs into organisation or action. It is the 'art of being ruled' (Wyndham Lewis' phrase).
In this context, the Occupy Movement, the hackers of LulzSec and the Anonymous operation both fascinated and appalled the establishment some years ago. It alternately tried to contain them within their laws and infiltrate them with progressive rhetoric or secret policemen (the Tsarist model). In the end, these 'protest movements' seem to have collapsed of their own volition, achieving very little.
Who Are These People?
But who were these failed protestors as a class? Not who was behind the 'attacks' or 'occupations' (some might as easily be provocations by the establishment as genuine acts of revolt) but who was participating not only in 'new' models of political action but in confused riots as states weakened? We have written elsewhere about the new anarchism but it is the class base of this movement that interests us here - and further investigation suggests that we were not seeing something new but something very old, the blockage of the aspirations of an educated young by the failed old.
This was a movement of graduates and not of workers (though there is a separate union-driven public sector defence movement whose self interest is so apparent that even middle class liberals can resent their claims) and of persons who are 'cleverer' than their parents. We get back to Marx. As in the print revolution of the 1500s, a revolution in communications has created a new technological and economic structure where value has shifted from one generation to another but where the necessary political or cultural change is lagging.
It is an old theme of these postings. The new technologies are not so much removing the ability of intermediaries to create value for themselves out of their oligarchical control of knowledge (the professionals, if you like) but are making intermediaries of all sorts potentially wholly redundant.
Paul Mason's Analysis
The young who know things the old do not know, including the absurdity of many of the rules designed to hold the old system together, were starting to use new technologies to combine and protest in ways that were entirely new. Their failures hide the fact that methods may have failed but the intent and the revolutionary potential for technology remain. A February 2011 analysis by Paul Mason of BBC Newsnight gave a number of reasons why this needed to be understood and, to a degree, embraced if we are to transit from one world to another without repression and killing. This is our gloss on that work after four years had passed.
As for protest as 'fun', this should not be underestimated because contemporary protest seemed to permit people to 'take a day off' and join a camp. There is a history of carnival and, of course, situationist theory to fall back on, quite consciously so amongst urban anarchists. But four years on, the fun has gone out of protest - in the non-Western world, it is clear that people can get killed and, in the West, the magistrates are minded to take a dim view of carnival that destroys property
The educated young activist now has a better understanding of power relations than his forebears and has learned a lot since 2008. Most of it has been a repetition of the lesson of the 2003 Iraq protests - that the system is not responsive and will do anything to ensure its own survival, including violate whatever human rights are to hand if necessary.
The alternative is a level of commitment to organisation and discipline that just does not seem to be worth the effort compared to having fun, mating and building tradeable skills for the future. The young do not run on hope any more but on manipulative skills as effective as those of their opponents - it is just that they are choosing to re-direct those skills now to the game of life rather than political change.
There are mobilising exceptions - such as the Scottish Referendum - but the exceptions point up the problem: elites have to concede the opportunity for change. The moment cannot be seized independently. There is no ideological movement seeking to mobilise the masses for change, just minorities of 'activists' ducking and diving between methodologies and compromising with the very system of power they claim to despise.
Internal Contradictions
The fluidity and lack of ideology is the central weakness in the street. Occupy events proved weaker on the ground than they might have been because they attracted every type of conspiracy nut, weak-minded New Ager and middle class narcissist looking for self-expression. It also brings us back to class because young activists are driven by some understanding of power but not by allegiance to class or, bluntly, any real comprehension of economics.
The situationism in contemporary revolt is there for all to see. I am certainly not saying that the young should adopt Marxist models for success, quite the contrary since the end result would be bureaucratism, authoritarianism and soullessness, but there are issues here of organisation. We are only suggesting, by referring to Marx, that this is, despite its lack of self awareness, a form of class action because it is based, despite itself, fundamentally on economics and on technological changes to the means of production and that this leads to some interesting 'internal contradictions'. The protestors rarely seemed to understand their own condition - they could soon become manipulable mobs.
The intellectual base for rejecting Marxism as anything more than analytical tool is well summarised in a quotation from a French intellectual that Mason offered. Foucault advised Deleuze:
This is at the very heart of the debates already current in the British trades union movement at the turn of this century. The decision to go the way of a dogged turning around of the official Left (which has nothing much to say to the wider population as we can see in the lack of enthusiasm for Ed Miliband the front man of the movement) rather than recreate a socialist-labour movement to challenge capitalism was inevitable under such conditions. The Labour Movement might effectively and ideologically 'run' the next British Government and yet, while many individuals will benefit in the short term, nothing will have fundamentally changed at the end of their Party's' term of office. The objective conditions for change are simply not present.
The New Anarchism?
The logic of recent protest was different from that of the 'insider' approach but it is was soon very unclear how it could 'organise' anything at all. The fundamental self interest of the young and the Darwinian struggle between memes within that generation suggest that their primary tools are little more than their effect on the market (the rhetoric of action) and withdrawal from the law.
By withdrawal from the law, I mean not lawlessness but something entirely different and potentially more dangerous to the system - forcing the elite to acknowledge that its authoritarianism is unenforceable in any practical sense. The internet language of 'work-arounds' when systems fail springs to mind. But it still requires courage and involves risk in dealing with a system that likes to make examples of people and frighten the rest by publicising their exemplary law enforcement actions.
Solidarity is required to resist the tactic of control through exemplary fear. The fate of recreational drug users provides the template for the failure of an element in the community to challenge their masters through evidence-based analysis and organisation. The protests of 2011, we were told by Mason, were based on 'autonomy' and personal freedom within a democratic framework and (self-evidently) on opposition to state-protected special interests such as Wall Street and the finance markets. But this was the autonomous behaviour of very few people.
Four years on, nothing (and we mean nothing) had changed in regard to those ultimate power relations. Where the agenda had changed (as in the tax avoidance campaigning), it turns out that the prime beneficiary of increased taxes was only indirectly the people - the prime beneficiary was to be the State in its fight to deal with deficits and maintain social cohesion and its war machine.
This is where things start to get confused because if Anonymous and libertarian socialists are anti-capitalist, it is also clear that the Greek riots around the same time (2011) were also about preserving an economic system that was socialist in the worst sense - corrupt at every level including the level of the working classes themselves.
Syriza has proved to be far more interesting since then, offering perhaps the opportunity to structure an anti-corrupt anti-austerity model but it has had to do so by taking on the Goliath of the Franco-German European Project as a David looking for a Deus ex Machina to emerge out of the hearts of stern-faced Teutons and the opportunists in Moscow. This is David without a catapult.
The young Italians coming to London to escape local corruption are in direct class opposition to the public service workers at home expecting to be feather-bedded for life. Anonymous was with the first and Occupy was increasingly representing the last. This was an internal contradiction within the Western protests that was never resolved, any more than the contradiction was resolved between young liberal middle class liberals in Tahrir Square and young and hungry working class Islamists wanting bread and wives.
Conservative Welfarism And Personal Autonomy
On the one side, hackers, anarcho-libertarians and situationists and, on the other, a special interest socialistic coalition of state workers, liberals and communitarians. On the one side, bourgeois liberals wanting a comfortable freedom and, on the other, traditionalists wanting a legal system and socio-economic structure based on Iron Age texts. These are very different movements and they cannot work long together. The 'neo-socialists', for example, tried appealing to the police by saying that they were protesting to protect their pensions (and making headway with that argument), while the libertarians were wondering what the police were doing there anyway.
The State also needs economic growth and surplus capital to impose law and order. Reducing the need for law and order to its core becomes necessary - and this is why we now have a serious public debate on the treatment of sex workers and the war on drugs. Scarce resources were looking at solving the wrong problems - social cohesion and warlord organised crime are now more of a threat than the pleasures of layabouts. There is some complex intellectual negotiation going here - between justification for tax expenditure on guns and butter, about what constitutes threat to the people and what constitutes threats to the State and about public intrusion into private life.
States & Protest
In both the West and the emerging world, it is likely that States and foreign powers quickly started to identify elite operatives in protest networks and became busy in not merely tracking but 'turning' and infiltrating them. Some of the operatives are often well-heeled and not representative of most of the young by any means - state funds can permit other new entrants to rise rapidly. There is also a rather sinister potential turn to events that the more naive activists may not see. As we noted above, State bureaucrats may see protesters as allies in bringing the market to heel and protecting the tax base for precisely the sort of activities that Anonymous was set on exposing.
We noted this as a possibility three or four years ago and the populist assault on HSBC suggests that we were right - and there is more to come. Radicals are easily diverted into a global rights and anti-corporate agenda that neuters any serious opportunity for changes in the structures of power at home and helps to extend markets for domestic corporations. We predicted that an alliance with liberal NGO-based coalitions might be rather convenient for authority when faced by the demands of finance capital so that the heirs of the Occupy and Anonymous movements might become useful in shifting the terms of political trade back towards auctoritas. And this is what was to transpire.
But, yet another issue identified at that time for the protest movements is one already well identified in the mainstream media ... er, what do they actually want? The 'internal contradiction' here is that much of the rhetoric is anti-State and yet jobs and free education can only be provided by a strong State with a decent tax base. Here we have another possible convergence of State and liberal aspirations at the expense of personal autonomy and libertarianism.
Liberty or Jobs?
In both New York and London, the Occupy protesters appeared to be targeting finance capital rather than government and to be drifting from the territory of Anonymous (which emphasised state action as generally 'wrong') to territory associated with socialism and social liberalism (more state is needed). This internal contradiction is profound, mirroring that between anarchism and socialism in the late nineteenth century. It represents the difference between left-libertarian ideology and the self interest of the coalition of the vulnerable threatened with penury by the current crisis. We certainly saw libertarians moving away from the British Occupy Movement as it fell into the hands of the traditional Left (not helped by an Archbishop backing it).
The real reason we are in economic crisis is not 'imperialism' (which is unwieldy and expensive but probably pays its way in market access and access to resources) but the massively greater social spending and job creation programmes of social liberal states without the investment in infrastructure to support it. When Anonymous strikes at US behaviour in Iraq, it is striking at the State as both imperialist and liberal capitalist (including its size and welfare basis) whereas when Occupy protesters seize territory, they eventually want the State to remain big but do the 'right thing' i.e. give them economic prospects and security. But States do not do the right thing. They never do the right thing. They exist to exist and aggrandise power. This is a lesson the Left should have learned from 1917.
Anarcho-Libertarianism or Neo-Socialism?
This internal contradiction is so profound because it is about whether a new generation will be led by neo-socialists wanting to over-turn capitalism by means of the State or anarcho-libertarians wanting to get the State out of the market and stop supporting big capitalists so that communal self-organisation can take place in 'safe space'. Occupy people reluctantly vote Labour or Democrat (or possibly Green) but Anonymous people probably don't bother to vote at all. Anonymous may be the wiser when faced with rule by a Clinton or a Milliband ... The unpredictability of things lies in another point made by Mason back in 2012 - that there are a multiplicity of narratives from which both the young and dissatisfied older citizens can draw. Fundamental world views do not change but the expression of those views can change very rapidly under the influence of the internet. Support or withdrawal of support from causes no longer takes place within a narrative of 'solidarity' or 'loyalty' but one of 'truth' or 'effectiveness'.
This is why older generation liberals are confused and are becoming reactionary. There is now no fixed feminist, black or gay narrative any more than there is a nationalist or working class narrative. There is just 'my' or 'our' narrative according to who I am or to the interest of my adoptive tribe. Constant self development and neo-tribalism mean enormous adaptability and flexibility but they also mean difficulty in pinning people down to organised collective action as opposed to participation in an action organised by others from which they may withdraw at a moment's notice. In this struggle between modes of resistance, nothing is as yet predictable. Church, unions, police and military may join the protesters for a neo-socialist solution or States may have to adapt to situational anarchism by reducing their scope and being better at what they do. Either is possible. We are in flux.
Class But Not As We Know It, Jim
This is not to praise Marxism except as an analytical tool under defined conditions because Marxism is, fundamentally, a poor guide to our human condition. Despite its alleged materialism, it is an idealist philosophy which has been quite historically effective for seizing power. But idealism is intellectually sanctioned lying about the world. Marxism is Hegelian which, in turn, is an historicism derived from the Western Christian tradition which, in turn and philosophically, is ultimately an adaptation of Platonism.
The trajectory from Plato's Cave to the Gulag has been well if simplistically argued by others but the summary is that this Western tradition of idealism is ultimately religious and 'spiritual' and that it can kill when brooked. But the proverbial baby has been thrown out with the bath water in at least two respects. We have forgotten Marx' and Engels' insights that politics and culture derive intimately from economic conditions and that, though each person is greater than his class, there are class interests in politics.
Modern liberal democracy has tried to eliminate the language of class because it is not convenient for its preferred model of professionals organising functional coalitions of special interests and lobbies to share out the benefits of growth - but when growth falters, then Marx becomes analytically relevant.
Where Should We Be Looking
For this reason, in trying to understand what might develop out of the continuing economic crisis, we have to return both to theory and to what is happening where we are not looking - much as in 1910, we might have been wise not to ignore intellectuals in Zurich or school teachers in Bavaria. We should be studying not the machinations of the ideologues of the future (that is the job of the security services) but what they are saying that resonates with those who are either resentful of the current order of things or who are suffering and have the energy to do something about it.
It is that last clause that matters 'who 'have the energy to do something about it' - because there are an awful lot of resentful older middle class people, intellectuals and poor and vulnerable people who sit in their armchairs or on their sofas and have neither will nor ability to act. Liberal democratic hegemony (indeed, all hegemonies) ultimately relies on inaction - that moan in the pub, grumble in front of the TV, meaningless letter to The Times, rant in a Facebook comment. None of this morphs into organisation or action. It is the 'art of being ruled' (Wyndham Lewis' phrase).
In this context, the Occupy Movement, the hackers of LulzSec and the Anonymous operation both fascinated and appalled the establishment some years ago. It alternately tried to contain them within their laws and infiltrate them with progressive rhetoric or secret policemen (the Tsarist model). In the end, these 'protest movements' seem to have collapsed of their own volition, achieving very little.
Who Are These People?
But who were these failed protestors as a class? Not who was behind the 'attacks' or 'occupations' (some might as easily be provocations by the establishment as genuine acts of revolt) but who was participating not only in 'new' models of political action but in confused riots as states weakened? We have written elsewhere about the new anarchism but it is the class base of this movement that interests us here - and further investigation suggests that we were not seeing something new but something very old, the blockage of the aspirations of an educated young by the failed old.
This was a movement of graduates and not of workers (though there is a separate union-driven public sector defence movement whose self interest is so apparent that even middle class liberals can resent their claims) and of persons who are 'cleverer' than their parents. We get back to Marx. As in the print revolution of the 1500s, a revolution in communications has created a new technological and economic structure where value has shifted from one generation to another but where the necessary political or cultural change is lagging.
It is an old theme of these postings. The new technologies are not so much removing the ability of intermediaries to create value for themselves out of their oligarchical control of knowledge (the professionals, if you like) but are making intermediaries of all sorts potentially wholly redundant.
Paul Mason's Analysis
The young who know things the old do not know, including the absurdity of many of the rules designed to hold the old system together, were starting to use new technologies to combine and protest in ways that were entirely new. Their failures hide the fact that methods may have failed but the intent and the revolutionary potential for technology remain. A February 2011 analysis by Paul Mason of BBC Newsnight gave a number of reasons why this needed to be understood and, to a degree, embraced if we are to transit from one world to another without repression and killing. This is our gloss on that work after four years had passed.
- Young graduate women are emerging who are not stuck in the specific feminist resentments of the older generation but simply get on with practical organisation in their own interest and what they believe to be right. Mason was right that educated women were at the core of protest but what is interesting to observe since his analysis is that the 'feminisation' of protest, conducted in 'feminist' language has developed a counter-reaction from young males not in terms of reactionary politics but political disinterest, a sort of 'why bother?'
- Ideological formulations are dead as organising principles. There will be Marxists, conspiracy theorists, faith-based loons, environmentalists and liberals but none of them can control a propaganda process or impose an organisational model that can stifle internal dissent or insists on a 'line' to assert political discipline. The very fact of seven party leaders with different interests and ideologies sitting in a row on TV last night (in the UK) to present their wares to the public when only two realistically represented the possible ideology of governance for the next five years (and both of those agree on more than they disagree) tells you something about the emergence of hyper-real politics disconnected from the actual levers of power.
- An international 'elite' of protesters seemed to be emerging in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 'crash'. They operated quasi-professionally across borders or supplied technical skills across a borderless internet. This is an analogue with the intellectual diaspora dissidents who fuelled the rise of anarchism and Marxism-Leninism. Unfortunately, it became clearer that their history was not only one of political development a decade before (that is, they were ideologues exploiting a situation rather than emergent from the situation) but that a proportion of them were trained and managed during the Arab Spring by State actors seeking easy wins over rival States.
- The central economic issue remains State and personal debt at a time of lack of employment opportunity. The protests might rapidly disappear with job creation or free education and debt forgiveness but States are in no position to deliver these during the current crisis. The resentments of the young are real but it is not being expressed in revolutionary politics but in evolutionary democratic politics if at all. The real impulse here seems not to be engagement but gritting teeth, getting on with the job and waiting for a righteous revenge when the old codgers start to die off and inflation transfers wealth from the old to the young as recovery gets under way. It may be easier to get on a boat and plane and find a new home than stay in the old one and be left with the burden of paying for the profligacy of parents. Many young people are just voting with their feet.
- If this problem of a generation without prospects and with old codgers getting in the way is causing difficulties in the West, then it is boiling up to violent proportions in the many countries where there is now a massive demographic bulge of frustrated urban young. And yet this explosive material which might have been assumed to have been progressive because it was young, now turns it to be just as likely to be traditionalist, nationalist and even fascistic when it decides to get off its behind and do something. It is not just that ISIS and other insurgencies are fuelled by the young but that a 'fascist' Maidan 3 lurks around the corner and that the student leaders of the Hong Kong revolt are not modern secular atheists but as likely to be Christians with a hot line to the local CIA man.
- Organised labour is pretty well bankrupt as a revolutionary force. It has been a conservative force against 'clercs' (socialists) since the 1940s but it has degenerated further into being representative largely of those who are already ensconced within the State since the 1980s (in the UK) - a truly conservative interest at this time. Yes, there is a slow, steady movement by which a new generation of trades unionists (including a strong feminist element linked to the low paid private and public sectors) is reasserting their position on the centre-left but this is happening just as the official centre-left is beginning to crumble under the burden of managing austerity-lite because of the trap it has got into as the primary promoter of 'capitalism with a human face'.
As for protest as 'fun', this should not be underestimated because contemporary protest seemed to permit people to 'take a day off' and join a camp. There is a history of carnival and, of course, situationist theory to fall back on, quite consciously so amongst urban anarchists. But four years on, the fun has gone out of protest - in the non-Western world, it is clear that people can get killed and, in the West, the magistrates are minded to take a dim view of carnival that destroys property
The educated young activist now has a better understanding of power relations than his forebears and has learned a lot since 2008. Most of it has been a repetition of the lesson of the 2003 Iraq protests - that the system is not responsive and will do anything to ensure its own survival, including violate whatever human rights are to hand if necessary.
The alternative is a level of commitment to organisation and discipline that just does not seem to be worth the effort compared to having fun, mating and building tradeable skills for the future. The young do not run on hope any more but on manipulative skills as effective as those of their opponents - it is just that they are choosing to re-direct those skills now to the game of life rather than political change.
There are mobilising exceptions - such as the Scottish Referendum - but the exceptions point up the problem: elites have to concede the opportunity for change. The moment cannot be seized independently. There is no ideological movement seeking to mobilise the masses for change, just minorities of 'activists' ducking and diving between methodologies and compromising with the very system of power they claim to despise.
Internal Contradictions
The fluidity and lack of ideology is the central weakness in the street. Occupy events proved weaker on the ground than they might have been because they attracted every type of conspiracy nut, weak-minded New Ager and middle class narcissist looking for self-expression. It also brings us back to class because young activists are driven by some understanding of power but not by allegiance to class or, bluntly, any real comprehension of economics.
The situationism in contemporary revolt is there for all to see. I am certainly not saying that the young should adopt Marxist models for success, quite the contrary since the end result would be bureaucratism, authoritarianism and soullessness, but there are issues here of organisation. We are only suggesting, by referring to Marx, that this is, despite its lack of self awareness, a form of class action because it is based, despite itself, fundamentally on economics and on technological changes to the means of production and that this leads to some interesting 'internal contradictions'. The protestors rarely seemed to understand their own condition - they could soon become manipulable mobs.
The intellectual base for rejecting Marxism as anything more than analytical tool is well summarised in a quotation from a French intellectual that Mason offered. Foucault advised Deleuze:
The problem of organisation is a profound one because the current model of power relations only offers inclusion within liberal democratic coalition-building or the sort of bureaucratic organisational ability that allowed socialists to out-manouevre the anarchists between 1910 and 1940.We had to wait until the nineteenth century before we began to understand the nature of exploitation [a nod to Marx], and, to this day [second half of the twentieth century], we have yet to fully comprehend the nature of power.
This is at the very heart of the debates already current in the British trades union movement at the turn of this century. The decision to go the way of a dogged turning around of the official Left (which has nothing much to say to the wider population as we can see in the lack of enthusiasm for Ed Miliband the front man of the movement) rather than recreate a socialist-labour movement to challenge capitalism was inevitable under such conditions. The Labour Movement might effectively and ideologically 'run' the next British Government and yet, while many individuals will benefit in the short term, nothing will have fundamentally changed at the end of their Party's' term of office. The objective conditions for change are simply not present.
The New Anarchism?
The logic of recent protest was different from that of the 'insider' approach but it is was soon very unclear how it could 'organise' anything at all. The fundamental self interest of the young and the Darwinian struggle between memes within that generation suggest that their primary tools are little more than their effect on the market (the rhetoric of action) and withdrawal from the law.
By withdrawal from the law, I mean not lawlessness but something entirely different and potentially more dangerous to the system - forcing the elite to acknowledge that its authoritarianism is unenforceable in any practical sense. The internet language of 'work-arounds' when systems fail springs to mind. But it still requires courage and involves risk in dealing with a system that likes to make examples of people and frighten the rest by publicising their exemplary law enforcement actions.
Solidarity is required to resist the tactic of control through exemplary fear. The fate of recreational drug users provides the template for the failure of an element in the community to challenge their masters through evidence-based analysis and organisation. The protests of 2011, we were told by Mason, were based on 'autonomy' and personal freedom within a democratic framework and (self-evidently) on opposition to state-protected special interests such as Wall Street and the finance markets. But this was the autonomous behaviour of very few people.
Four years on, nothing (and we mean nothing) had changed in regard to those ultimate power relations. Where the agenda had changed (as in the tax avoidance campaigning), it turns out that the prime beneficiary of increased taxes was only indirectly the people - the prime beneficiary was to be the State in its fight to deal with deficits and maintain social cohesion and its war machine.
This is where things start to get confused because if Anonymous and libertarian socialists are anti-capitalist, it is also clear that the Greek riots around the same time (2011) were also about preserving an economic system that was socialist in the worst sense - corrupt at every level including the level of the working classes themselves.
Syriza has proved to be far more interesting since then, offering perhaps the opportunity to structure an anti-corrupt anti-austerity model but it has had to do so by taking on the Goliath of the Franco-German European Project as a David looking for a Deus ex Machina to emerge out of the hearts of stern-faced Teutons and the opportunists in Moscow. This is David without a catapult.
The young Italians coming to London to escape local corruption are in direct class opposition to the public service workers at home expecting to be feather-bedded for life. Anonymous was with the first and Occupy was increasingly representing the last. This was an internal contradiction within the Western protests that was never resolved, any more than the contradiction was resolved between young liberal middle class liberals in Tahrir Square and young and hungry working class Islamists wanting bread and wives.
Conservative Welfarism And Personal Autonomy
On the one side, hackers, anarcho-libertarians and situationists and, on the other, a special interest socialistic coalition of state workers, liberals and communitarians. On the one side, bourgeois liberals wanting a comfortable freedom and, on the other, traditionalists wanting a legal system and socio-economic structure based on Iron Age texts. These are very different movements and they cannot work long together. The 'neo-socialists', for example, tried appealing to the police by saying that they were protesting to protect their pensions (and making headway with that argument), while the libertarians were wondering what the police were doing there anyway.
The State also needs economic growth and surplus capital to impose law and order. Reducing the need for law and order to its core becomes necessary - and this is why we now have a serious public debate on the treatment of sex workers and the war on drugs. Scarce resources were looking at solving the wrong problems - social cohesion and warlord organised crime are now more of a threat than the pleasures of layabouts. There is some complex intellectual negotiation going here - between justification for tax expenditure on guns and butter, about what constitutes threat to the people and what constitutes threats to the State and about public intrusion into private life.
States & Protest
In both the West and the emerging world, it is likely that States and foreign powers quickly started to identify elite operatives in protest networks and became busy in not merely tracking but 'turning' and infiltrating them. Some of the operatives are often well-heeled and not representative of most of the young by any means - state funds can permit other new entrants to rise rapidly. There is also a rather sinister potential turn to events that the more naive activists may not see. As we noted above, State bureaucrats may see protesters as allies in bringing the market to heel and protecting the tax base for precisely the sort of activities that Anonymous was set on exposing.
We noted this as a possibility three or four years ago and the populist assault on HSBC suggests that we were right - and there is more to come. Radicals are easily diverted into a global rights and anti-corporate agenda that neuters any serious opportunity for changes in the structures of power at home and helps to extend markets for domestic corporations. We predicted that an alliance with liberal NGO-based coalitions might be rather convenient for authority when faced by the demands of finance capital so that the heirs of the Occupy and Anonymous movements might become useful in shifting the terms of political trade back towards auctoritas. And this is what was to transpire.
But, yet another issue identified at that time for the protest movements is one already well identified in the mainstream media ... er, what do they actually want? The 'internal contradiction' here is that much of the rhetoric is anti-State and yet jobs and free education can only be provided by a strong State with a decent tax base. Here we have another possible convergence of State and liberal aspirations at the expense of personal autonomy and libertarianism.
Liberty or Jobs?
In both New York and London, the Occupy protesters appeared to be targeting finance capital rather than government and to be drifting from the territory of Anonymous (which emphasised state action as generally 'wrong') to territory associated with socialism and social liberalism (more state is needed). This internal contradiction is profound, mirroring that between anarchism and socialism in the late nineteenth century. It represents the difference between left-libertarian ideology and the self interest of the coalition of the vulnerable threatened with penury by the current crisis. We certainly saw libertarians moving away from the British Occupy Movement as it fell into the hands of the traditional Left (not helped by an Archbishop backing it).
The real reason we are in economic crisis is not 'imperialism' (which is unwieldy and expensive but probably pays its way in market access and access to resources) but the massively greater social spending and job creation programmes of social liberal states without the investment in infrastructure to support it. When Anonymous strikes at US behaviour in Iraq, it is striking at the State as both imperialist and liberal capitalist (including its size and welfare basis) whereas when Occupy protesters seize territory, they eventually want the State to remain big but do the 'right thing' i.e. give them economic prospects and security. But States do not do the right thing. They never do the right thing. They exist to exist and aggrandise power. This is a lesson the Left should have learned from 1917.
Anarcho-Libertarianism or Neo-Socialism?
This internal contradiction is so profound because it is about whether a new generation will be led by neo-socialists wanting to over-turn capitalism by means of the State or anarcho-libertarians wanting to get the State out of the market and stop supporting big capitalists so that communal self-organisation can take place in 'safe space'. Occupy people reluctantly vote Labour or Democrat (or possibly Green) but Anonymous people probably don't bother to vote at all. Anonymous may be the wiser when faced with rule by a Clinton or a Milliband ... The unpredictability of things lies in another point made by Mason back in 2012 - that there are a multiplicity of narratives from which both the young and dissatisfied older citizens can draw. Fundamental world views do not change but the expression of those views can change very rapidly under the influence of the internet. Support or withdrawal of support from causes no longer takes place within a narrative of 'solidarity' or 'loyalty' but one of 'truth' or 'effectiveness'.
This is why older generation liberals are confused and are becoming reactionary. There is now no fixed feminist, black or gay narrative any more than there is a nationalist or working class narrative. There is just 'my' or 'our' narrative according to who I am or to the interest of my adoptive tribe. Constant self development and neo-tribalism mean enormous adaptability and flexibility but they also mean difficulty in pinning people down to organised collective action as opposed to participation in an action organised by others from which they may withdraw at a moment's notice. In this struggle between modes of resistance, nothing is as yet predictable. Church, unions, police and military may join the protesters for a neo-socialist solution or States may have to adapt to situational anarchism by reducing their scope and being better at what they do. Either is possible. We are in flux.
Friday, 20 February 2015
Kropotkin's Message to the Young
“ If you reason instead of repeating what is taught you; if you analyze the law and strip off those cloudy fictions with which it has been draped in order to conceal its real origin, which is the right of the stronger, and its substance, which has ever been the consecration of all the tyrannies handed down to mankind through its long and bloody history; when you have comprehended this, your contempt for the law will be profound indeed.
" You will understand that to remain the servant of the written law is to place yourself every day in opposition to the law of conscience, and to make a bargain on the wrong side; and, since this struggle cannot go on forever, you will either silence your conscience and become a scoundrel, or you will break with tradition, and you will work with us for the utter destruction of all this injustice, economic, social and political.”
Peter Kropotkin, An Appeal to the Young (1880)
Wednesday, 14 May 2014
Against 'Progressivism' ...
Back in late 2010, the UK's Liberal Democrat Leader Nick Clegg announced that he wished to be seen as a 'progressive'. The New Labour Party displaced its old commitment to democratic socialism with the claim that it was 'progressive'. There have been 'progressive' mutterings in the Tory Party.
But what is this thing called 'progressivism' and why should we be wary of taking it at face value? Are we not being conned once again by simplistic rhetoric?
Progressivism is an ideology with a history and a tradition that is as distinct as, say, neo- conservatism with which it converges in practice at the highest state levels in liberal internationalist practice.
The Communists has perhaps the best description of it - bourgeois liberalism at the point of transition between laissez-faire and fascism, a response to threats from below to property and to 'culture'.
Progressivism was initially a creation of the federalisation process in late nineteenth century America when the 'moral' bourgeois, having not quite lost God and Church, sought to reform capitalism in direct opposition to the self-organisation from below of competing radicals.
In fact, effective self-organisation was under way through early trades union, socialist and anarchist movements and even through 'welfarist organised crime' such as Capone's (analogous to Hamas or Hezbollah but built around services to migrants rather than to besieged faith groups).
Capone ensured soup kitchens for the poor and was the major figure in dealing with adulterated milk supplies in Chicago in the 1920s. On the other side, the democratic Socialist Eugene Debs achieved a million votes in the 1918 Election before Edgar Hoover destroyed the movement in the 'Red Terror'.
The period from the 1860s to 1890s and later had been a period of 'settlement chaos' in the West and of migration chaos in the East of the United States. Political dissent was expressed as banditry and racism in the country and mobsters and strikes in the cities.
Progressives were simply high caste East Coast and Mid-Western liberals terrified of the potential threat to property from disorder and of the rise of anarchism and socialism. The American Left tradition had to be appropriated before recalcitrant bosses brought chaos to the country.
Instead of permitting organisation from below to redistribute power and resources as in the European Labour or Social Democratic Parties, the progressives intervened both to reform but also to control. A classic progressive imposition would be the prohibition of alcohol ... rule by matriarch.
For them, the masses could not be trusted. Because the bankers and trusts were behaving provocatively towards the masses, the Federal State had to be brought in to play in order to restore order. Government authority was the solution to chaos ... for progressives as much as Bismarck
Just as neo-conservatism has its base in the German conservative philosophical tradition, the progressive mentality has its base in American philosophical pragmatism, reaching its epitome in John Dewey, interestingly mildly seduced by the Trotskyist camp in his later years.
The high point of American progressivism was perhaps the New Deal but this attempt to create a corporatist partnership with trades unions has to be seen in the context of Woodrow Wilson's earlier consciously progressive admiration for the early Mussolini.
Progressivism had its English analogue in Fabianism in the UK which played gadfly and junior partner alongside Social Liberal thinkers such as Beveridge to the post-26 organised labour movement. In both traditions, the flirtation with Mussolini was a shared interest in corporatism.
Unions were certainly not regarded as positive forces until they had been 'reformed' into partners of the corporatist State. Progressives were Statist, media-driven and 'top-down' - which brings us to our modern day British examples.
Forms of welfare-warfare state emerged when economic dislocation and war permitted an alliance between 'progressives' (aka social stabilisers through concession) and union movements to impose a social liberal (US) or social democratic (Europe) consensus.
But, as New Democrats, New Labour and now Liberal Democrats have quietly dismantled what remained of this consensus in the UK after the depredations of Reagan and Thatcher, we can see that the alliance between progressives and trades unions has shifted to the detriment of the latter.
British organised labour is no longer in a position to assert itself in the street and has not been so since Orgreave. The intellectual approach that dominated the American Left has now come to dominate the British Left, its current leader being the quintessential scion of Hampstead revisionism.
Each imposition of progressive policy by the intellectuals has been a revolutionary act that created regimes that controlled society from the top and provided service delivery without democratic consultation or engagement. It is a political culture that imposes 'oughts' on the population.
The welfare state, for example, was merely the adjunct to the warfare state of total social mobilisation - mobilisation by the state for order and not mobilisation of the state for the people. This perhaps over-simplifies the story but social services only ever appeared as a reward for engagement in war.
War is, in fact, central to progressivism. Hard power is there to be used to impose its idealism and the 'sacrifices' required of the people need to be rewarded as payment for services rendered in sustaining a cohesive polity that protects property and culture.
Progressivism is the theory that the professor knows best and ill-fits liberal values even if it accords with the actual values of its high caste intellectual gentry. It is an ideology of psychological manipulation and of negotiations between the educated (not to be confused with the intelligent).
The pragmatic commitment to the masses soon drifted with the acquisition of power. Once power was attained and the progressive state in command, then a bastardised form of pragmatic populism allying political intellectuals, techno-bureaucrats and media was all that was required.
We must stop here and remind ourselves that the progressives 'cared' about the population but through the prism of social order. The theory was that social order required 'care' but when it became clear that social order no longer required 'care', the incentive to 'care' began to dissipate.
Instead of the ideological comitment to care found amongst socialists, progressives became interested instead in responses to sufficient wants and needs that would ensure power was retained in a democracy. If that meant the lumpenproletariat could now be ignored, so be it.
Warfare also changed. The mass of the population became spectators again instead of participants. Having captured the machinery of hard power, the progressive ideologist could use it selectively for idealistic ends, knowing that, without direct pain to themselves, the voters would sign it off.
Social services as the price for total social mobilisation under Liberal Militarism collapsed because 'care' was no longer a central value in its own right. 'Care' strategies switched from caring for the indigenous working population to caring for people in faraway countries - as potential threats.
As the organised union component has weakened under conservative pressure and its own sclerosis, the atomised masses were left vulnerable to crisis, a crisis which appeared in 2008 but was underway for some time in the relative and growing pauperisation of significant sections of society.
Contemporary post-1992 British progressivism is thus just the latest adaptation of essentially the same phenomenon that I described above that emerged in the US: reactionary, authoritarian and statist - the precise opposite of what was intended by the Labour Representation Committee.
To be progressive is also not what is meant by the Liberal Democrat ideology of localist and individual freedom. And the adoption of the term (admittedly without enthusiasm) by left-conservatives (actually communitarians) is the last phase of our upper middle classes' decadence.
The organised mass component of the Left has now been removed by history, to be replaced by a vague form of populism. Once, progressives provided the devious shock troops for working class entry into the establishment. Now, public school liberals and conservatives compete for the label.
Clegg's claim is a demonstration of the meaningless of progressive rhetoric. New Labour was captured by a small 'progressive elite' by 1998 which ran it into the ground and the 'Orange Book' network surrounding Clegg briefly thought that they could capture the model for their own purposes.
Clegg's desperate grab at the term was an attempt to identify his Party to a gullible centre as the natural reformist wing of the propertied in a world where all see themselves, naively, as propertied and with 'something to lose' from a radical re-thinking of our declining imperium.
The lack of real progress in Clegg's vision can be summarised in one policy issue - tuition fees. In one lie to the student and middle and working class family vote, Clegg showed that he had no conception of the role of education in 'progressing' the best and brightest in a society.
Take away access to credit, reduce the value of property, remove the implicit property rights in state service delivery (including the imposition of tuition fees!) and the idea that Clegg (or indeed New Labour) represents the forward march of progress becomes a truly absurd proposition.
Indeed, there is a sign of a realisation of the vulnerability of these claims in the economically dangerous strategies of letting cheap credit continue to defer an inevitable reckoning for many households and the dangerous unsustainable boom in house prices that must crash after 2015.
Progressivism is very much at the centre of the crisis surrounding democracy and competency within Anglo-Saxon Western politics. It is not the solution to the crisis. Its strategy of order and control to preserve property is actually reaching the point where it endangers property.
The obvious danger arises from our analysis of progressivism as bridge ideology between laissez-faire liberalism and fascism. Right-wing populism already shows the troubled middle voting with its feet and the alliance of Western progressives with Ukrainian fascists is troubling.
At least the unreformed piratical propertied ideology of the truly liberal centre-right is innovative, creative and forward-thinking economically, Progressivism represents, on the other hand, sclerosis ...
... ideologically-driven war, bureaucratic federalism in Europe as well as the US, detachment of politics from the people in favour of bureaucracy, serious errors of judgement arising from grand narratives and the infantilisation of peoples who should learn from the experience of struggle.
Above all, it castrates specifically working class struggle and community self-organisation. The dead hand of the liberal intellectual activist results finally in little more than warfare-lite states poddling along on the rhetoric of freedom but terrified of giving individuals any real choices over their lives.
But what is this thing called 'progressivism' and why should we be wary of taking it at face value? Are we not being conned once again by simplistic rhetoric?
Progressivism is an ideology with a history and a tradition that is as distinct as, say, neo- conservatism with which it converges in practice at the highest state levels in liberal internationalist practice.
The Communists has perhaps the best description of it - bourgeois liberalism at the point of transition between laissez-faire and fascism, a response to threats from below to property and to 'culture'.
Progressivism was initially a creation of the federalisation process in late nineteenth century America when the 'moral' bourgeois, having not quite lost God and Church, sought to reform capitalism in direct opposition to the self-organisation from below of competing radicals.
In fact, effective self-organisation was under way through early trades union, socialist and anarchist movements and even through 'welfarist organised crime' such as Capone's (analogous to Hamas or Hezbollah but built around services to migrants rather than to besieged faith groups).
Capone ensured soup kitchens for the poor and was the major figure in dealing with adulterated milk supplies in Chicago in the 1920s. On the other side, the democratic Socialist Eugene Debs achieved a million votes in the 1918 Election before Edgar Hoover destroyed the movement in the 'Red Terror'.
The period from the 1860s to 1890s and later had been a period of 'settlement chaos' in the West and of migration chaos in the East of the United States. Political dissent was expressed as banditry and racism in the country and mobsters and strikes in the cities.
Progressives were simply high caste East Coast and Mid-Western liberals terrified of the potential threat to property from disorder and of the rise of anarchism and socialism. The American Left tradition had to be appropriated before recalcitrant bosses brought chaos to the country.
Instead of permitting organisation from below to redistribute power and resources as in the European Labour or Social Democratic Parties, the progressives intervened both to reform but also to control. A classic progressive imposition would be the prohibition of alcohol ... rule by matriarch.
For them, the masses could not be trusted. Because the bankers and trusts were behaving provocatively towards the masses, the Federal State had to be brought in to play in order to restore order. Government authority was the solution to chaos ... for progressives as much as Bismarck
Just as neo-conservatism has its base in the German conservative philosophical tradition, the progressive mentality has its base in American philosophical pragmatism, reaching its epitome in John Dewey, interestingly mildly seduced by the Trotskyist camp in his later years.
The high point of American progressivism was perhaps the New Deal but this attempt to create a corporatist partnership with trades unions has to be seen in the context of Woodrow Wilson's earlier consciously progressive admiration for the early Mussolini.
Progressivism had its English analogue in Fabianism in the UK which played gadfly and junior partner alongside Social Liberal thinkers such as Beveridge to the post-26 organised labour movement. In both traditions, the flirtation with Mussolini was a shared interest in corporatism.
Unions were certainly not regarded as positive forces until they had been 'reformed' into partners of the corporatist State. Progressives were Statist, media-driven and 'top-down' - which brings us to our modern day British examples.
Forms of welfare-warfare state emerged when economic dislocation and war permitted an alliance between 'progressives' (aka social stabilisers through concession) and union movements to impose a social liberal (US) or social democratic (Europe) consensus.
But, as New Democrats, New Labour and now Liberal Democrats have quietly dismantled what remained of this consensus in the UK after the depredations of Reagan and Thatcher, we can see that the alliance between progressives and trades unions has shifted to the detriment of the latter.
British organised labour is no longer in a position to assert itself in the street and has not been so since Orgreave. The intellectual approach that dominated the American Left has now come to dominate the British Left, its current leader being the quintessential scion of Hampstead revisionism.
Each imposition of progressive policy by the intellectuals has been a revolutionary act that created regimes that controlled society from the top and provided service delivery without democratic consultation or engagement. It is a political culture that imposes 'oughts' on the population.
The welfare state, for example, was merely the adjunct to the warfare state of total social mobilisation - mobilisation by the state for order and not mobilisation of the state for the people. This perhaps over-simplifies the story but social services only ever appeared as a reward for engagement in war.
War is, in fact, central to progressivism. Hard power is there to be used to impose its idealism and the 'sacrifices' required of the people need to be rewarded as payment for services rendered in sustaining a cohesive polity that protects property and culture.
Progressivism is the theory that the professor knows best and ill-fits liberal values even if it accords with the actual values of its high caste intellectual gentry. It is an ideology of psychological manipulation and of negotiations between the educated (not to be confused with the intelligent).
The pragmatic commitment to the masses soon drifted with the acquisition of power. Once power was attained and the progressive state in command, then a bastardised form of pragmatic populism allying political intellectuals, techno-bureaucrats and media was all that was required.
We must stop here and remind ourselves that the progressives 'cared' about the population but through the prism of social order. The theory was that social order required 'care' but when it became clear that social order no longer required 'care', the incentive to 'care' began to dissipate.
Instead of the ideological comitment to care found amongst socialists, progressives became interested instead in responses to sufficient wants and needs that would ensure power was retained in a democracy. If that meant the lumpenproletariat could now be ignored, so be it.
Warfare also changed. The mass of the population became spectators again instead of participants. Having captured the machinery of hard power, the progressive ideologist could use it selectively for idealistic ends, knowing that, without direct pain to themselves, the voters would sign it off.
Social services as the price for total social mobilisation under Liberal Militarism collapsed because 'care' was no longer a central value in its own right. 'Care' strategies switched from caring for the indigenous working population to caring for people in faraway countries - as potential threats.
As the organised union component has weakened under conservative pressure and its own sclerosis, the atomised masses were left vulnerable to crisis, a crisis which appeared in 2008 but was underway for some time in the relative and growing pauperisation of significant sections of society.
Contemporary post-1992 British progressivism is thus just the latest adaptation of essentially the same phenomenon that I described above that emerged in the US: reactionary, authoritarian and statist - the precise opposite of what was intended by the Labour Representation Committee.
To be progressive is also not what is meant by the Liberal Democrat ideology of localist and individual freedom. And the adoption of the term (admittedly without enthusiasm) by left-conservatives (actually communitarians) is the last phase of our upper middle classes' decadence.
The organised mass component of the Left has now been removed by history, to be replaced by a vague form of populism. Once, progressives provided the devious shock troops for working class entry into the establishment. Now, public school liberals and conservatives compete for the label.
Clegg's claim is a demonstration of the meaningless of progressive rhetoric. New Labour was captured by a small 'progressive elite' by 1998 which ran it into the ground and the 'Orange Book' network surrounding Clegg briefly thought that they could capture the model for their own purposes.
Clegg's desperate grab at the term was an attempt to identify his Party to a gullible centre as the natural reformist wing of the propertied in a world where all see themselves, naively, as propertied and with 'something to lose' from a radical re-thinking of our declining imperium.
The lack of real progress in Clegg's vision can be summarised in one policy issue - tuition fees. In one lie to the student and middle and working class family vote, Clegg showed that he had no conception of the role of education in 'progressing' the best and brightest in a society.
Take away access to credit, reduce the value of property, remove the implicit property rights in state service delivery (including the imposition of tuition fees!) and the idea that Clegg (or indeed New Labour) represents the forward march of progress becomes a truly absurd proposition.
Indeed, there is a sign of a realisation of the vulnerability of these claims in the economically dangerous strategies of letting cheap credit continue to defer an inevitable reckoning for many households and the dangerous unsustainable boom in house prices that must crash after 2015.
Progressivism is very much at the centre of the crisis surrounding democracy and competency within Anglo-Saxon Western politics. It is not the solution to the crisis. Its strategy of order and control to preserve property is actually reaching the point where it endangers property.
The obvious danger arises from our analysis of progressivism as bridge ideology between laissez-faire liberalism and fascism. Right-wing populism already shows the troubled middle voting with its feet and the alliance of Western progressives with Ukrainian fascists is troubling.
At least the unreformed piratical propertied ideology of the truly liberal centre-right is innovative, creative and forward-thinking economically, Progressivism represents, on the other hand, sclerosis ...
... ideologically-driven war, bureaucratic federalism in Europe as well as the US, detachment of politics from the people in favour of bureaucracy, serious errors of judgement arising from grand narratives and the infantilisation of peoples who should learn from the experience of struggle.
Above all, it castrates specifically working class struggle and community self-organisation. The dead hand of the liberal intellectual activist results finally in little more than warfare-lite states poddling along on the rhetoric of freedom but terrified of giving individuals any real choices over their lives.
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