Attack the System

A New Anarchist Perspective for the 21st Century

Keith Preston

• Publisher: Black House Publishing Ltd
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781912759415
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Anarquismo

Modern anarchist movements have existed for over 150 years. The black flag of anarchy remains a symbol of political rebellion, particularly for restless or disenchanted young people. However, Keith Preston argues in this volume that anarchism has reached a crossroads as a political philosophy. He criticizes many contemporary anarchists as anachronistic, shallow, or even status quo in their thinking. It is Preston’s contention that anarchist movements will have to grow intellectually and forge new strategic paths for themselves if they are to become politically relevant in the twenty-first century.

Preston offers a substantive critique of not only his fellow anarchists, but of the condition of Western civilization itself. He recognizes the process of unprecedented centralization of political and economic power that is now taking place on a global scale. Preston’s response is an unhesitating call for revolutionary action against this emerging global order. He likewise offers a critique of the inadequacies of the Left and Right and suggests this archaic model of the political spectrum should be discarded. It is Keith Preston’s contention that anarchism should reclaim the position it held over a century ago, that of the premiere revolutionary movement throughout the world.

Preston introduces his visionary tactic of “pan-secessionism” as a means of developing mutual cooperation between resistance movements with widely varying cultural and ideological values. Drawing upon an eclectic array of philosophical and historical currents, Keith Preston offers a revolutionary political vision of decentralized pluralism manifested as a world of self-managed communities.

Part 1 - Philosophical Foundations

The Nietzschean Prophecies

Among the many great and enormously influential thinkers of the nineteenth century, it is Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900) who arguably stands the highest in terms of possessing both the most profound and penetrating criticisms of Western civilization as it was in his time,and the most prescient insights and predictions as to what the future course of the evolution of the West would involve. In our own day, Nietzsche has been a popular topic of academic discourse for some time, and the reading of his works has long been a popular pastime among trendy undergraduates. Yet Nietzsche remained obscure in his lifetime, and his works and ideas would not be widely read or accepted until after his death. Even with the abundance of Nietzsche scholarship that has been produced since his passing over a century ago, his core ideas remain widely misunderstood or misinterpreted. Indeed, Nietzsche has been largely appropriated by the academic Left, a great irony considering his own considerable contempt for the politics of the Left, and the prevailing academic philosophy of postmodernism includes the philosophy of Nietzsche as a direct ancestor in its genealogical line.

No thinker is more important or relevant to the ideas of the Conservative Revolution than Nietzsche. While Marx continues to retain his status as the most influential radical thinker of the nineteenth century, it was Nietzsche who was the more revolutionary of the two in the actual implications of his thought. Nietzsche also stands as a polar opposite of the conservative counter-revolutionaries that arose in opposition to the spread of the influence of the Enlightenment. Nietzsche is no mere traditionalist in the vein of Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre, or Louis de Bonald. His outlook involves a dramatic departure not only from traditional Western thought as it had unfolded since the time of the Socratics, but from the intellectual culture of even the most advanced or revolutionary thinkers of his own time.

The Historical Context of Nietzsche’s Thought

An adequate understanding of Nietzsche is impossible without recognition of the historical context in which he wrote. Nietzsche’s core works were produced between 1872 and 1888. By that time, the intellectual revolution of the Enlightenment was well-established among Western intellectual elites and among the rising educated middle classes. The Enlightenment intellectual revolution and its outgrowths were existential in nature. The most important aspect of the impact of the revolution was what Nietzsche characterized as the “death of God.” Advancements in human knowledge in a wide variety of areas had the effect of undermining the credibility of traditional theological views on cosmology, moral philosophy, the meaning of human existence, and so forth. The overthrow of the Christian world view that had dominated Western civilization for fifteen hundred years left subsequent thinkers with a number of ultimately profound questions.[1] If the purpose of an individual’s life is not to achieve salvation in an afterlife, then what is the purpose of life? If the king or established political authorities do not rule by divine right, then what is the basis of political legitimacy? How should society be organized? If morality is not to be understood according to the teachings of the Church, the Bible, or traditional religious authority, then what is the basis of justice, morality, truth, or “right and wrong”? Do such concepts have any intrinsic or objective meaning at all? If the observable universe was not the product of special creation by a divine power, and if humanity was not “created in the image of God,” then what is the meaning of existence? Does it have any meaning beyond itself ? If history is not guided by divine providence, then how is the process of historical unfolding to be understood? These are the questions that Western thinkers have been grappling with since the older, theological view of the universe and existence was demolished by the intellectual innovations of the Enlightenment.

The New Religion of Reason and Progress

Western civilization existed for millennia prior to the rise of Roman Christianity, so it is unsurprising that anti-Christian, Enlightenment intellectuals found inspiration in the classic works of antiquity. The Enlightenment thinkers (the “philosophes”) developed a world view and philosophical outlook relatively similar to that which prevailed among the great thinkers of Greco-Roman intellectual culture.[2] The traditional Christian emphasis on faith, revelation, mystery, and divine authority was rejected in favor of a new emphasis on the efficacy of human reason and ability to engage in rational criticism. The Enlightenment view of the universe mirrored the human-centered outlook of the Greeks, with the ideas of the philosophes reflecting the Greek adage that “man is the measure of all things” to a much greater degree than Christian thought had ever done.

It was the view of the philosophes that human reason and rational thought alone possessed the capability for the discernment of profound insight into the workings of the universe through the use of science. This confidence had been generated by the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Human reason was likewise capable of discerning the workings of society and of discovering ways by which society and humanity could be improved upon. Out of this conviction emerged an intellectual optimism that expressed great confidence in the possibility and inevitability of progress. This intellectual framework that was bequeathed to subsequent generations of Europeans by the great thinkers of the Enlightenment formed the foundation for most of modern thought.

The concept of progress was a dominant feature of every major aspect of nineteenth-century thinking, whether in the areas of philosophy, politics, or science. Thinkers of the German Idealist school, such as Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel, attempted to retain the notion of justice, morality, and virtue as concepts possessing transcendent characteristics in a manner similar to that found in earlier Christian approaches to moral philosophy. Hegel developed a philosophical doctrine known as “historicism” that characterized the process of human historical development as one by which reason unfolds towards a higher state of rational unity that contains within itself the collection of prior expressions of, and resolved contradictions within, human thought. Hegel gave a metaphysical and quasi-theological gloss to his philosophical system in a way that is still debated and subject to various interpretations. Yet, this linear, progressive view of history postulated by Hegel established the framework for historical interpretation that would dominate Western thought for the next century.[3]

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels developed a materialist conception of Hegel’s interpretation of history as a dialectical process. The core component of the Marxist interpretation of history is a kind of economic determinism. According to Marxism, history is the manifestation of the struggle between competing socio-economic classes. Other aspects of human life such as politics, religion, culture, family, and philosophy are merely expressions or outgrowths of the material foundations of a given society. Marxism regards history as an evolutionary process whereby class conflict serves as the dialectical process whose impact is the advancement of humanity to a higher stage of social development.[4]

The nineteenth-century idea of progress was further strengthened by the scientific advances of the time. Evolutionary thinking became dominant in the natural sciences as the older, religious views on the origins of humanity and the universe fell into intellectual disrepute. The prevailing model of evolutionary theory of the era was the “developmental” model. This framework suggested that the evolutionary process was a manifestation of a linear drive towards a particular end. The analogy often used was that of the growth of an individual. The conventional view was that evolution transpires in a way that demonstrates direction and purpose. This particular rendition of evolution, most famously represented by the theories of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, was exploded by Charles Darwin. Darwin argued that evolution takes place through a process of adaption by means of natural selection.[5]

Darwin’s actual theory indicated that the process of natural biological evolution exhibits a great deal of randomness, and unfolds in a haphazard way with no specific outcome being inevitable regarding the ends of the evolutionary process. The actual implications of authentic Darwinian evolutionary theory severely detracted from the established “developmental” model of biological and social evolution.[6] Yet the publication of Darwin’s work had the effect of popularizing evolutionary thinking, even if his ideas were misunderstood or misinterpreted. Subsequent thinkers would attempt to find justification for their preferred social or political views in Darwinian evolutionary biology.[7] Marx considered Darwin to have found a scientific justification for his own views on socio-economic evolution, and Darwin was also appropriated by racists and proponents of chauvinistic nationalism. Indeed, efforts to interpret human social evolution within the context of a pseudo-Darwinian biological framework became rather open-ended in nature. Proponents of social reform, humanitarians, advocates of predatory capitalism, utopians, racial supremacy theorists, and proponents of class warfare all appealed to Darwin as a justification for their beliefs, all of which were rooted in fundamental misunderstandings of Darwin’s actual ideas.[8] It was the philosophy of Nietzsche that provided the interpretive framework of human history that was the most compatible with the implications of genuine Darwinism.

The Revolt Against Reason and Progress: The Philosophy of Nietzsche

If Darwinian evolutionary biology exploded the nineteenth-century idea of progress in the realm of the natural sciences, it was the thought of Nietzsche that provided the most far-reaching assault on the presumptions of the time in the world of philosophy. Nietzsche is perhaps most well-known for his statements concerning the “death of God,” but the meaning of the “death of God” in Nietzschean philosophy involves a good deal more than mere conventional atheism. Other prominent intellectual atheists had come before Nietzsche such as Diderot, Baron d’Holbach, and (by implication) Hume, and he was by no means the inventor of modern atheism.[9] While Nietzsche was certainly an “anti-theological” thinker in the sense of rejecting a theistic world view in a conventional religious sense, his notion of the “death of God” was also intended as a critique of the intellectual presumptions of his own era, including those of intellectual elites who had rejected conventional religious faith. While Nietzsche was an atheist, materialist, and rationalist of a kind comparable to the most radical Enlightenment thinkers, his outlook sharply diverges from the Enlightenment tradition with regards to the role of reason in human life and thought.

Nietzsche regarded the Enlightenment emphasis on reason as having the effect of denying the role of the passions in forming human character, and shaping human action and human societies. He contrasted the Enlightenment’s orientation towards reason with the earlier manifestations and emphasis on the passions he considered to have been made manifest by the Renaissance. He compared these two eras within the framework of his famous Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy. The Apollonian aspect of human essence is the rational, logical, prudent, and restrained. The Dionysian is the instinctual, impulsive, and emotive. Nietzsche was not a skeptic of the passions in the manner of Hobbes or Burke, who regarded human passion and feeling as prone towards dangerous excesses and in need of restraint. Instead, he counseled human beings to live dangerously. Nietzsche regarded the passionate and the irrational (or non-rational) as the foundation of all high cultures, which he in turn considered to be apex of human existence. The Greeks had emphasized and explored the passions, rather than having feared or shunned them, and for this reason the Greeks had produced the highest of hitherto existing human civilizations. Nietzsche vehemently opposed the rising egalitarian sentiments and trends towards mass society and mass democracy of his era. Only an elite motivated by the passions can produce a high culture. An egalitarian society would be a society of weak and fearful mediocrities concerned only wit...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Part 1 - Philosophical Foundations
• Part 2 - Critiquing the Global Order of Neoliberal Imperialism
• Part 3 - A New Anarchist Perspective
• Part 4 - Strategic Formulations