A ramble on the nature of revolution and the agents of revolt in 2011.
2011 – It seems the whole world is teetering on the edge of a wonderful oblivion. Stable authoritarian regimes have been toppled by their restive subjects, a tyrant beaten and dragged through the streets by a band of armed insurgents. Egyptians are now back on the streets and in the squares, reinvigorating what seemed like a revolution betrayed by hangers-on from the ancien regime. Across the world, resistance against austerity drives and finance capital is mounting, and in England a police shooting led to three nights of sustained rioting, looting and arson that spread across the country via Blackberry. European capital’s wet-dream of a single-currency trading bloc is on its deathbed as Greeks defend themselves against EU-IMF gangsters with strikes, occupations and molotovs. Italy and Spain will soon follow suit.
Today there is no unified struggle against systems of oppression because there is no unified system of oppression. Never has this been more evident than now. Rather than conceiving of the world in terms of an oppressing ‘top’ and an oppressed ‘bottom’, what we have is a whole series of scattered and interconnected power relations that transcend narrow ideological boundaries. Similarly, resistance is both diffused and connected. There is a burgeoning multitudinous opposition that takes a variety of forms. The days of the counter-hegemonic opposition; party, union, leadership and vanguard are over, as they have been subsumed into a growing collage of movements; extra-parliamentary, de-centralised, autonomous and heterogenous. Opposition and revolt is now a constellation of spontaneous, uncontrollable eruptions that work outside the old structures. There is no one movement constrained by a single abstract ideological purism, unified identity, posturing leadership, or the dogmas of a totalising universal system. The occupiers from New York to Cairo, the banlieusards, the rioters in London and Damascus, the squatters, Abahlali baseMhondolo, the MEND, the EZLN: With no common identity, manifesto, flag, banner or over-arching representative body, no mediator, rather a plurality of identities and (often antagonistic) subjectivities, they form a matrix of agonistic forces united in their refusal of the status quo – a multitude in constant flux.
It’s about time we dropped all the teleological ‘our day will come’ bullshit. Anarchism never quite divorced itself from Marxism. It’s still hanging on to Enlightenment baggage and waiting for that one cataclysmic event that’ll usher in a utopian epoch – the end of antagonisms, the end of history. Many still see history as a history of class struggles that will eventually culminate in a kind of Hegelian Grand Synthesis. We must ditch the millenarianism and embrace revolution as a never-ending process rather than an end. We have to stop waiting for Godot. Anarchists have always been better at fusing means with ends, theory with practice, but some still mourn the passing of the blue-collar worker, the urban-industrial proletariat, the unionised producers on the factory-line as the only true agents of social change. Some cling to a syndicalist vision of ‘one big union’ and organising for The General Strike like a life-buoy. It’s not that we should ‘abandon class’ or deny the existence of class relations, but we should realise class as one part of an aggregate of oppressive power relations, not flowing down a neat line from bourgeois institutions to proletarian masses, but emanating from a number of directions, reproducing itself through us as subjects. We should stop defining ourselves in relation to the means of production. This crude economism is of no use to us. Bourgeois/Proletarian is not a clear-cut binary, it’s exalted status as the primary oppression and the Source of all other oppressions masks a far more deeply ingrained and disturbing network of power relations that reproduce themselves through each individual as the products of power. We do not deny the exploitation of employees by employers, nor the uneven distribution of power and wealth, but we see these as elements of multiple sequences of domination that go beyond the reductive categories of ‘worker’ and ‘employer’. In the panoptical society, we all have a cop inside us. Power is not some external entity working against us, but something which we internalise and reproduce.
2011 has seen various struggles escalate all over the world. The insurrections and occupations are playing with new forms, affirming new possibilities and realising their own powers and potentials. Infinite, irreducible subjectivities, continually changing and becoming, negating and affirming, destroying and creating without institution, without unitary theory or binding abstract truth, acting autonomously-within-solidarity.
K.P.B.S.F.S.
http://kpbsfs.wordpress.com
Comments
An odd piece perhaps not
An odd piece perhaps not entirely in sync with the other N30 article in the same blog.
It asserts a lot of newness in the nature of todays struggles around the world without any real back-up and is dismissive of the primacy of class struggle but more it seems based on a narrow understanding of what class struggle might actually constitute.
There may not be any one unified system of oppression but there sure is one integrated global system of capital accumulation and exploitation.
It is certainly true that we internalise and reproduce power relationships (and not just those based on economic class) alongside the exchange relationship fundamental to capitalism but they still operate as a material force against us in practice.
Traditional anarchism and marxism have their faults (especially to the extent they are reduced to competing ideologies) but they still represent a starting point for any theories which seek to analyse and understand the modern world.
This piece sorta reminds me
This piece sorta reminds me of the post-fordist, post-modernist stuff that Marxism Today came out with in the late 80s/early 90s which said there was no single way of seeing the new fluid world, all that bollocks about texts and multiple readings and identity politics rather than class etc. They mistook appearances in a very fluid situation for a settled equilibrium and then wrote off all that had gone before as being irrelevant. I remember arguing then that class hadn't disappeared but was being obscured, that things would become clear again, and I think the conflicts we are seeing around the world fit more into that class dynamic than: "Bourgeois/Proletarian is not a clear-cut binary, it’s exalted status as the primary oppression and the Source of all other oppressions masks a far more deeply ingrained and disturbing network of power relations that reproduce themselves through each individual as the products of power".
There's a 2001 interview in the libcom library with Juan Carlos Mechoso, co-founder of the Federacion Anarquista Uruguaya, who is absolutely spot-on in saying:
I think we should see the current global turbulence as what it is - a conflict of class - because clearly the origins lie in the attack of the capitalist (imperialist/militarist) class on the workers of the world. I don't know how it could be seen differently. We should stick to our guns.
You're right, there is a
You're right, there is a definite disconnect between the 'post-something-ist' feel of 'state and revolution' and the almost 'workerist' slant of the N30 piece. I can only apologise and attribute this to my complete lack of ideological consistency or clarity, as my politics tend to hover back-and-forth around the various sub-genres of ultra-leftism, from insurrectionary anarchism to non-denominational anarchism to the post-marxism/structuralism/anarchism/post-left anarchy. Also, the pieces are meant to be polemical and provocative rather than theoretically uniform. I can accept that totally.
However, I do agree with the idea that conceiving of revolution as a teleological 'end' is outmoded and counterproductive. I also think that an effective anarchist politics must not only address forms of political./economic power, but also take on and challenge the more insidious forms as well. This is not a call to forget class, but we should stop being so reductivist about the whole thing, and ditch the economic determinism. I do not think we can group the world into neat social categories like bourgeois/proletarian, as power relationships are far more complex, i.e; there are plenty examples of 'proletarians' benefiting from the exploitation of other 'proletarians'. There are wars other than the class war. This is not a call for a retreat into reformist 'identity politics', but a call to confront power everywhere, even in ourselves, not just in the workplace or from inside a kettle.