Postanarchism

Saul Newman

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780745688770
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

What shape can radical politics take today in a time abandoned by the great revolutionary projects of the past? In light of recent uprisings around the world against the neoliberal capitalist order, Saul Newman argues that anarchism - or as he calls it postanarchism - forms our contemporary political horizon.

In this book, Newman develops an original political theory of postanarchism; a form of anti-authoritarian politics which starts, rather than finishes, with anarchy. He does this by asking four central questions: who are we as subjects; how do we resist; what is our relationship to violence; and, why do we obey? By drawing on a range of heterodox thinkers including La Boétie, Sorel, Benjamin, Stirner and Foucault, the author not only investigates the current conditions for radical political thought and action, but proposes a new form of politics based on what he calls ontological anarchy and the desire for autonomous life. Rather than seeking revolutionary emancipation or political hegemony, we should affirm instead the non-existence of power and the ever-present possibilities of freedom.

As the tectonic plates of our time are shifting, revealing the nihilism and emptiness of our political and economic order, postanarchisms disdain for power in all its forms offers us genuine emancipatory potential.

1
From Anarchism to Postanarchism

Anarchism: an outline of a political heresy

If this book is concerned with the theorization of contemporary post-statist forms of radical politics, it is necessary to revisit the political theory of anarchism. Here one immediately stumbles up against a problem: anarchism, more so than other political ideologies and traditions, is difficult to define within clear parameters. It cannot be organized around key names – unlike Marxism and Leninism – although it too has its important theoreticians, some of whom I will discuss in this chapter. Nor can anarchism be confined to a certain periodization, and, although it has had its moments of historical prominence, it has for the most part led the marginal life of a political heresy. Let us think of anarchism, then, as a diverse and heterodox assemblage of ideas, moral sensibilities, practices and historical movements and struggles animated by what I call an anti-authoritarian impulse – that is, a desire to critically interrogate, refuse, transform and overthrow all relations of authority, particularly those centralized within the sovereign state. Perhaps the most radical contention that anarchists make is that the state has no rational or moral justification – that its order is inherently oppressive and violent, and, moreover, that life can function perfectly well without this encumbrance. Anarchist societies are stateless societies, in which social relations are autonomously, directly and cooperatively managed by people themselves, rather than through the mediation of alienating and centralized institutions. It is this implacable hostility to state authority that places anarchism at odds not only with more conservative doctrines but also with liberalism – which sees the state as a necessary evil – with socialism and even with revolutionary Marxism – which sees the state as an instrument, at least in the ‘transitional’ period, for building socialism, whether through social democratic reforms or through the revolutionary seizure and control of state power.

The debate between anarchism and Marxism is an old one, going back to the nineteenth century when the First International Workingmen’s Association was split between the followers of the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and the followers of Marx, largely over the question of revolutionary strategy and the role of the state. The more ‘authoritarian’ wing (Bakunin’s characterization) of the socialist movement, including Marx, Engels and Lassalle, saw the state as an instrument of class power which, if it was in the hands of the right class – the proletariat led by the Communist Party – could be a useful tool of revolutionary transformation. By contrast, the more libertarian wing regarded the state, in its essence, as a structure of domination which would only perpetuate itself after the revolution, rather than wither away as was hoped, and was therefore the main impediment to revolutionary transformation. The state was an apparatus which had therefore to be destroyed rather than seized; the pursuit of political power was a trap which would lead only to catastrophe. Other aspects of the dispute involved the organization of the revolutionary party and the question of leadership and authority – which are discussed in Lenin’s State and Revolution (1918). The implications of this great rift in revolutionary theory and practice have resounded for over a century, being tragically realized in the deterioration of the Bolshevik revolution into the Stalinist totalitarian state. The terms of the Marxism–anarchism debate have been explored elsewhere in great depth, and it is not my intention to go into it here (see Newman 2001). Yet, the most powerful insight that emerges from the anarchist side was that the revolution must be libertarian in means as well as ends, and that, if the means are sacrificed to or simply made to serve the ends, the ends themselves would be sacrificed. This refers to the emphasis anarchists place on ‘prefigurative’ politics, which is something I shall expand on later.

So anarchism is a form of politics and ethics which takes the value of human freedom and self-government – inextricably linked to equality – as central and sees authoritarian and hierarchical relations – those enshrined not only in the state, but also in capitalism, organized religion, patriarchy, even certain forms of technology – as external limitations and encumbrances upon human freedom. There is a central opposition within the anarchist imaginary between social relations, which, in their ‘natural’ state, are freely formed and self-regulating, and external structures of power and authority – most prominently the sovereign state – which interfere with these spontaneous social processes and relations, corrupting and distorting them, imprinting upon them artificial, hierarchical and oppressive relations in which human life is alienated. In the words of the eighteenth-century thinker William Godwin, governments ‘lay their hand on the spring there is in society, and put a stop to its motion’ (1968: 92). The state, this infernal machine of domination and violence, justified neither by religious illusions nor by liberal artifices like the social contract, nor even by modern democratic notions of consent, is the chief obstacle to human freedom and development. As dramatically put by Bakunin, ‘the State is like a vast slaughterhouse and an enormous cemetery, where under the shadow and the pretext of this abstraction (the common good) all the best aspirations, all the living forces of a country, are sanctimoniously immolated and interred’ (1953: 207).

The end of the metanarrative

We can see how aspects of anarchist thought might resonate strongly with contemporary political struggles, which situate themselves apart from the state and in autonomous relations towards it. When Bakunin, in his revolutionary programme, calls for a different kind of politics – not the seizure of state power in a ‘political’ revolution but the revolutionary transformation of all social relations (what he calls the ‘social revolution’) – and when he talks of the need for the masses of the nineteenth century to ‘organize their powers apart from and against the state’, he seems to be invoking an insurrectionary form of politics in which people autonomously transform their own lives and relations outside the immediate control of the state (see Bakunin 1953: 377). We need to think and rethink what this injunction ‘to organize [our] powers apart from and against the state’ might mean today.

However, if the current situation demands a reconsideration of, or even a return to, anarchism, what sort of return is possible here? It seems unlikely that the revolutionary anarchism of the nineteenth century has the same currency today or can even be conceptualized in the same way. The anarchist Alfredo Bonanno (1988), in an honest appraisal of the implications for anarchist politics of the emergence of the post-industrial society in the late 1970s and 1980s, says the following:

What is dead for them [anarchists today] – and also for me – is the anarchism that thought it could be the organisational point of reference for the next revolution, that saw itself as a structure of synthesis aimed at generating the multiple forms of human activity directed at breaking up the State structures of consensus and repression. What is dead is the static anarchism of the traditional organisations, based on claiming better conditions, and having quantitative goals. The idea that social revolution is something that must necessarily result from our struggles has proved to be unfounded. It might, but then again it might not.

What is being questioned here, I would suggest, is the revolutionary metanarrative that has in the past impelled anarchist thought and politics. Central to this metanarrative is the story of human liberation from a condition of servitude – forced upon an otherwise free and rational being by the corrosive forces of state power – to a condition of freedom and full humanity. In other words, the revolutionary destruction of the State, along with Capital and the Church, and the building of a free society in their place would emancipate man from his situation of oppression, inequality and ignorance and allow him to realize his full humanity. Furthermore, there is at the core of this revolutionary narrative the idea that beneath the layers of ‘artificial’ political and economic authority there lies a natural commonality, a rational and moral sociability, which is inherent to the human subject but simply lies dormant, latent; this is why anarchism could sustain the idea of social relations as being spontaneously self-regulating once the state was overthrown. Moreover, this innate sociability could be revealed and verified through scientific enquiry. Most famously, Peter Kropotkin (1972) developed his theory of ‘mutual aid’, as opposed to egoistic competition, which he proposed as an evolutionary and biological instinct that could be observed in both animal and human relations. Murray Bookchin, a modern exponent of this sort of positivist approach – which he terms ‘dialectical naturalism’ – saw the possibilities of a rationally ordered society embodied within a sort of social totality that is immanent within nature, and whose dialectical unfolding will produce a flowering of human freedom (see Bookchin 1982: 31). Anarchism, as a revolutionary philosophy, has been shaped by the Enlightenment narratives of emancipation, progress and rationalism; it was at once a revolutionary programme and a science of social relations. And it was these narratives which gave it the deterministic quality that Bonanno regards as now defunct. While revolutionary anarchism has never been as deterministic as Marxism – allowing much greater scope for human contingency outside the ‘iron laws’ of history – it was nevertheless part of a universalizing metanarrative of human freedom, and the social revolution, leading inevitably to the stateless society, was an event that would transform the totality of relations.

This way of thinking about politics and social relations has for some time come into question. Many would claim that we now live in the wake of the crisis of metanarratives; indeed, as Jean-François Lyotard (1991) argued, our late modernity (or postmodernity if one accepts this term) is characterized by a certain scepticism or ‘incredulity’ towards metanarratives. The universal discourses central to the experience of modernity, the category of a universal objective truth that is or ought to be apparent to everyone, or the idea that the world is becoming more rationally intelligible through advances in science – all these structures of thought and experience have been undergoing a profound process of dissolution due to certain transformations of knowledge in the post-industrial age. Processes of legitimation have become ever more questionable and unstable: the contingency and arbitrariness of knowledge’s operation – the fact that it is ultimately based on relations of power and exclusion – is becoming apparent, thus producing a crisis of representation. Moreover, Lyotard pointed to a breakdown of knowledge about society: society could no longer be entirely represented through knowledge – neither as a unified whole nor as a class-divided body. The social bonds which gave a consistency of representation to society are themselves being redefined through the language games that constitute it. There is, according to Lyotard, an ‘“atomization” of the social into flexible networks of language games’ (1991: 17). This does not mean that the social bond is dissolving altogether – merely that there is no longer one dominant, coherent understanding of society but, rather, a plurality of different narratives or perspectives.

Of course, we should not be too sanguine about such developments. Lyotard’s report on the ‘postmodern condition’ was also a report on the emerging neoliberal condition, whose logic of ‘flexible networks’ and atomization it also seems to mirror. However, the decline of the metanarrative refers to a kind of shift or dislocation in the order of social reality, such that we can no longer rely on firm ontological foundations to provide the grounding for thought and, indeed, for political action. Politics can no longer be guided by universally understood Truths or rational and moral discourses, or by a shared experience of Society or Community. Poststructuralist thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have engaged in different ways with this dissolution of universal categories. My previous work on postanarchism has emphasized the productive engagement and synthesis between poststructuralist and anarchist theory (see Newman 2001). Chiefly, I showed how the unseating of the universal human Subject from the centre of the order of experience has profound implications for anarchism: subjectivity henceforth had to be seen as constituted through external ‘assemblages’ of power and discourse, and there can be no clear conceptual separation between the subject who revolts against power and the power which at the same time constitutes his identity and invests him with desire. Foucault’s rejection of the ‘repressive hypothesis’, for instance, and his claim that power was ‘productive’ – of identities, social relations, truth effects, and even of resistance to it – fundamentally complicates the revolutionary narrative in which the subject liberates himself from the external encumbrances of power. As Foucault famously declared: ‘The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself’ (1991: 30).

From anarchism...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• 1 From Anarchism to Postanarchism
• 2 Singularities
• 3 Insurrection
• 4 Violence against Violence
• 5 Voluntary Inservitude
• 6 Thinking from the Outside
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement