State Power to Create a Nobility, Research Time, 23/02/2015

Friedrich Hayek has a lot of curious critiques of using state/government power to plan, manage, and control economic activity. One critique stood out to me as being, essentially, a product of the radical left. 

His argument goes something like this. Say a hardcore, old-fashioned socialist government takes over from a relatively liberal one. Its plan is just as the technocrats of Hayek’s own age presumed was the inevitable wave of the future, to run all the economic affairs of its country through a centrally planned state infrastructure, nationalizing all industry and making all people state employees. 

Such a socialist government will have to equalize people’s income and living situations. Because the current arrangement of society is economically unequal, this will require giving some people more state benefits than others. Essentially, it creates a favoured class of people, the beneficiaries of more state wealth, support, and services. It would also have to take wealth away from citizens who had an outsized share under the old regime, but concentrate on the people to whom the state gives most for this argument.

This phenomenon is the state itself creating a new most-favoured class within society. All societies have such classes, and one of the purposes of community-scale democratic organization is to give these classes the pokes required to keep them from lording their wealth over everyone else. But in Hayek’s hypothetical example, the institutional machinery of the state itself secures the new ruling class of uplifted poor and bureaucratic managers of the economy.

Such a movement is entirely anti-democratic. But the right-wing or conservative movements that helped promote Hayek's new liberalism weren't really interested in creating a society free of privilege. They didn't want to nationalize the economy under a bureaucratic state's management, but such classes of very wealthy people have seldom opened competition for their fortunes to all.

Two theorists in my research for the Utopias project have already made such critiques of state power to create and secure a ruling or nobility class in their own times: Pyotr Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin. 

Kropotkin discussed the politics of humanity with a longer frame of reference than a lot of the notable political theorists and writers of recent years. He didn’t talk in terms of decades or even centuries, but in reference to millions of years of human evolution. This perspective taught him that humans most naturally and for the longest time lived in small groups whose lives depended on constant interaction and mutual dependence and aid. 

The problem with modern society, from such a perspective, would be that rigid social hierarchies of authorities and noblemen with special privileges over many individuals is a radical shift away from this best practice. It discards a social practice that is easily seen to be evolutionarily superior, and quite a lot about rigid hierarchies show just how maladaptive they are. 

Bakunin spent some of his harshest words decrying the institutions and the economic practices that constituted and enshrined a class of nobles. He went beyond the macro-economic scale of state favouritism, though, and attacked the practice of inheritance of wealth itself. Inheritance is the foundation of nobility on the scale of the individual, allowing personally unearned wealth to jumpstart another person’s fortune unfairly.

I’m not sure what he offered as an alternative to dealing with the accumulated wealth of the dead, and I haven’t managed to think of any alternatives myself. So any direction in this regard would be much appreciated.

It’s another aspect of how libertarian politics seems to converge with anarchist philosophy. Despite this, libertarianism in our public world keeps turning to the right. I’m not sure of the exact cause, and there are probably many. A major practical factor, so I hypothesize right now, is that when Hayek and Milton Friedman formed the first new liberal think tanks, they had so much corporate financial support and influence that their fundamental ideas for the freest markets enabling liberty were corrupted by the new ruling class of our societies. 

One Legacy of Bakunin, Part III: Can a Revolution Come Without Guns?, Research Time, 22/08/2014

Continued from previous . . . Mikhail Bakunin’s writings are filled with admiration for Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, one of the founding figures of the modern tradition of anarchist politics, having lived in the first half of the 19th century. But there were important differences, particularly in their lives as social and political activists, between them as well. 

Bakunin had worked hard for a better life for
the people of Europe, but achieved nothing.

It wasn’t a question of what their political goals were. Bakunin and Proudhon both thought that the ideal human society was the local community, bound together through ecological interdependency and moral obligations. They both thought the modern state was an oppressive institution. The state used mediocre-at-best popular expressions of electoral institutions to enact laws that police forces would enforce. Inter-state relations among states were chaotic collisions of interests that could tip into violence at any time, so required strong militaries for national defence. State government was heavily centralized, taking almost all autonomy of action and independence of mind away from people, their communities, and their associations. To be governed is to be told what to do by an authority that you only trusted because it was your state government.*

* After spending my doctorate at an institution that is a central research hub for contemporary North American legal theory, the tradition that follows from H. L. A. Hart, it is a relief to me to dive into these old texts of anarchist theory and see so many of that tradition’s presumptions called into serious question. I heard and read many arguments for the different ways that the authority of the state and its legal regimes were legitimately grounded. Yet I could never shake my skeptical attitude that there was no such grounding for the authority of a state other than the brute fact of its existence.

Bakunin and Proudon’s difference lay in the means by which they thought such a political order should come to pass. Proudhon advocated the creation of communities and associations of people that would stand back from the centralizing authority of the state. They would reintroduce the norms, moral systems, and ethics of voluntary associations and the neighbourliness of mutual aid at the local level, and encourage these social structures and attitudes to spread to other communities through the simple influence of social networks. 

This proliferation would eventually spread because it offered an ethically better life; a kind of lifestyle or practical political meme, if you want to call it that. You would never attain the kind of absurd wealth that too many of us dream of acquiring. There would be no lottery of capitalism catapulting you to riches on the scale of Mark Zuckerberg, Mitt Romney, or Jordan Belfort. But you would live in a vibrant community of people who would help you develop the skills you would need to help your community prosper materially and artistically. They would help you when you were sick or needy, and you would help them when they were in similar trouble. It pains me that today we see such a community as a dream for fools. But it would be a good life.

This is how I see many anarchist political movements operating today. I don’t mean the black bloc protesters at every major political gathering they can scrounge a bus ride to. I mean ordinary people forming associations of mutual aid in their communities, to grow food, manage a local business, or just to look after each other in stressful times. 

Bakunin, like many anti-Czarist radicals, spent years in
brutal penal colonies. It seems little has changed in the
Russian prison system has changed since then.

Both these men had to become revolutionaries. Bakunin was particularly dedicated to the violent overthrow of the state, himself leading several attempts before his decade of imprisonment in the cells of Czarist Russia and its wilderness penal colonies. After returning from exile, his work with the International Workingmen’s Association made him a social networker of revolution, linking revolutionaries and activists all over Europe to help each other as they each worked on the problems of their own homes and lands. 

Proudhon sought a social revolution through his grassroots organizing of new communities. Bakunin could not support this because he understood that, while state authority still existed, the militarized government would pose a threat to these experiments in living. If people lived well enough in self-organizing communities that they realized that the state was unnecessary for a good life, then the state would either be overthrown or impotent. So Bakunin chose to overthrow the state before the state could crush the new communities.

He was not successful. Neither was Proudhon. The lure of being a political authority was too much even for the revolutionary sector, who, from the dissolution of the First International, largely joined Karl Marx’s militarized, ideologically unified, authoritarian brand of revolutionary communism. The Slavic revolutionaries campaigning for freedom from Austrian and Ottoman domination didn’t want the genuine freedom of managing their own communities. They wanted their own ethnically homogeneous nation-states, or else wanted to be incorporated into Czarist Russia in the name of Slavic unity. Monarchies and bureaucracies gained power throughout Europe.

Not much has changed in the articulation of state power
since Bakunin's day either.

Bakunin, as he was slowly dying, wrote a letter to an old friend where he said that the potential for genuine social revolution in Europe had withered away over the 1870s. He thought that only a total war between the militarized state powers could awaken that potential again. “These gigantic military states must sooner or later destroy each other. But what a prospect!”

The Great War would only create the conditions for even greater destruction, and the militarized monarchies of Bakunin’s era paled in comparison to the oppressive and destructive power of the totalitarian regimes that arose in the 20th century. And nuclear weapons changed the way we thought about the necessity of war. The hostility of state-centric military powers for self-organized communities remain. We are essentially watching the military invasion of a city in the middle of the United States of America today. 

But contemporary global capitalism has changed so much, has decentralized the forces that shape the world from states and spread them around more complex networks whose hubs pay little attention even to militaries. Anarchist experiments have space to breathe again. Will projects of liberation from political and military authorities be more successful in the coming decades?

One Legacy of Bakunin, Part II: A Nation’s Dreams, Research Time, 21/08/2014

Continued from previous . . . And even at the end of his life, Bakunin didn’t have any answers. All there was, was the resignation of a dying man that he would never see the social revolution of which he dreamed. His massive network of labour organizations, the International Workingmen’s Association, was split and torn apart by the internal rifts between his own factions and those of Marx and his authoritarian followers. Meanwhile, monarchist Germany consolidated its position as Europe’s new leading economic and military power, and nationalist movements continued to sweep the continent.

Gavrilo Princip, the nationalist
revolutionary whose terrorist attack
would start the First World War.

Nationalism would come to define the politics of the following century and beyond throughout the world. Today, we often understand nationalism as an entirely negative, destructive politics. In most of its articulations, that’s true.

Mikhail Bakunin interacted with many nationalist movements throughout his political life, and his reflections on the subject at the end of his days shows his usual clarity. When I read Bakunin, his words have a directness that is rare in most philosophical writing, which is usually very detail-oriented, more often to its detriment than otherwise. Reading secondary material about Bakunin’s work, I find snide remarks from the academics who write about him, even admirably, regarding his up-front style. Kolakowski’s giant book of Marxism is a noteworthy example of this subtle derision.

But Bakunin’s direct language crafts some clear assessments and condemnations of the nationalist movements that were growing in Europe at the time. Pan-Slavism is the central object of his criticism, being a major focus of his only long-form work, the career-capping Statism and Anarchy that still remained unfinished. At the time, few Slavic peoples had nations of their own. They were almost all dominated by one of two imperial states: either the Hapsburg monarchy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or the Ottoman Empire.

Pan-Slavism, in its most popular form, reached for what Bakunin rightly considered the worst form of liberation from these two empires: the expansion of Czarist Russian rule over the Slavic territories of the Ottomans and Austria-Hungary. This would simply trade one oppressive regime for another, replacing an Austrian or Ottoman monarch with a Russian one. The kind of Slavic nationalism that embraced domination by the Russian monarch was a notion defined by paternalism. 

As well as Bakunin, Fyodor Dostoyevsky diagnoses this as the pervasive corruption of the Russian character: the tyrannical authority of a father figure weighs over all people at virtually all contexts of self-understanding, individual, familial, communal, bureaucratic and national. This cultural paternalism was the villainous force underlying Dostoyevsky’s most utopian novel, The Brothers Karamazov.

Slobodan Milosevic, an heir to the petty,
exclusionary nationalism that Bakunin
decried in the 1870s. We've come so far,
haven't we?

The only form of nationalism with any genuine potential to liberate is the version that recognizes the singularity of a local culture as it has developed throughout history. In this sense, a culture or a nation has a similar kind of character as an individual person, Bakunin says, and its constituent people should be free of oppressive measures to run its own affairs according to their own logic, dynamic traditions, and decisions. But this kind of nationalism can similarly (and often, or perhaps I should say usually) go horribly wrong when the people in question understand their national character in an exclusive sense. 

This is the petty kind of nationalism that defines itself by its physical and social borders, the ability to reject those who do not conform to its narrow self-definitions. We are all familiar with this brand of insular nationalism, because we’ve all grown up watching the violence and warfare it generates when such a movement takes control of a state apparatus, or even just enough guns to cause trouble. We’ve seen petty nationalisms do violence to minorities in the name of cultural purity, the exclusive definition of community. It’s in the suffering of the Jews, Roma, Albanians, Muslims, African immigrants. The topical term for it is ethnic cleansing.

The petty, superficial definitions of what it means to be of a particular nationality take precedence over what should be a person’s most important expressions of nationhood. The nationalism of brotherhood, of expressing one cultural history as a singular voice in a diverse world of equally unique and therefore valuable social characters, is the nationalism of friendly pride that motivates peace and freedom. Its rarity is another way Bakunin would remain a disappointed man. What could be done? To be continued. . . 

One Legacy of Bakunin, Part I: The Only Self-Justifying Government, Research Time, 20/08/2014

I finished reading the collection of Mikhail Bakunin essays that I had been working on for the last while yesterday, and the chapters excerpted from his unfinished book Statism and Anarchy were remarkably insightful for both his own time and ours. The immediate discussion of the book was his critique of the pan-Slavist movement that was gaining popularity in the last years of his life, the 1870s, but his concepts apply to all utopian anarchist thinking.

Again, this has turned out to be essential for my Utopias book. As of now, the basic structure has a rough sketch: the materialist utopianism that would overcome humanity’s weaknesses to create a totally mechanistic man receives an antidote in the Spinoza-Bergson-Deleuze-dynamism tradition of scientific metaphysics, and the socio-political manifestation of this scientific tradition is an anarchist mode of organizing ourselves. 

One thing that impressed me was how some of the anarchist political philosophy that I’ve read that dated more than a century after his death are essentially just catching up to Bakunin. This March, I read a monograph by Robert Paul Wolff from the 1970s, an argument for why anarchism is the only democratically legitimate form of government. He spends 80 pages arguing against the conceptions of the methods of how a representative assembly secures democratic legitimacy to act on behalf of its voters, ultimately concluding that such representative legitimacy is impossible.

Bakunin explains this in a single paragraph, then uses this notion as a premise in a much larger argument against his contemporary enemies, the authoritarian communist movement of Karl Marx that had just taken over the First International from anarchist leadership at their Hague conference in 1872. Marx’s communism as a revolutionary political movement had the essential goal to wrest control of the state from the current ruling classes and invest it in the intellectual proletarians and scientists who would manage society and the economy through a comprehensive dictatorship. 

I don't have Stalinist Russia in mind here, a case more of
pure totalitarianism than elite rule. Better examples of
Marxist states that replaced an old elite with an elite of
Communist Party bureaucrats are the petty states of the
Eastern bloc, like Czechoslovakia.

In this, the ideas of Antonio Gramsci and Alain Badiou surpassed Marx, at least as a revolutionary political activist: to seize state power would simply recast you as a new elite, and all you will have done is destroy an old elite so you could replace them yourself as the new oppressors of the masses. A revolution worth being called such would actually reorganize society so that the state itself did not have to exist. The ideological uniformity that Marx instituted throughout the First International after the Hague conference is another symptom. The state, just like the networks of the First International under Marx’s control, is a means to enforce uniformity of thought, word, and action. All the different models of the state government only truly differ in terms of what the moral and political values of the elite are and how that elite justifies its rule. This would have been true under a Marxist state, as indeed it was.

The anarchist idea is that people and communities should have the power to develop their own frameworks of thought in a dynamic relationship to their local conditions. All these diverse localities would work together in voluntary associations for larger political, social, economic, and ecological goals in common. 

The question for an anarchist political movement is how you manage to make this total revolution in all of a society’s ideas about how to organize itself actually happen. To be continued . . . 

Solidarity for Who? Part II: One Theory of the Union Movement’s Downfall, A History Boy, 15/08/2014

Would Bakunin have liked Rage
Against the Machine?

Bakunin’s writings about the politics of the First International and the conflicts among the trade union movements in 1860s-70s Europe also carry some important lessons for the modern era. They have a lot to do with the limits of solidarity, and intersect quite a lot with my own most formative union experiences. 

Here’s how deep union solidarity goes in my family. When I came back to visit St. John’s after being out on the one and only strike I’ve so far gone through in my life (McMaster University Teaching Assistants CUPE local 3906 in Fall 2009), my aunt and uncle, both pushing 70 at the time, played me old school British union anthems from the 1960s. It was a wonderfully strange moment of family solidarity, especially as I had to inform them that we spent most of the strike listening to Dead Prez and Rage Against the Machine. That’s generation shifts for you.

But for my part, whenever I’ve heard union chants of “Solidarity!” among my own generation, I’ve tended to feel more excluded than included, even when I’ve been a union member. Here’s an example of the corrosion of solidarity that Bakunin identifies as a key means in which a union movement self-destructs, as workers with different interests turn against each other. 

The union leadership of CUPE 3906 when we were on strike came almost exclusively from humanities and social science faculties, where TAs legitimately are overworked, often having to read and correct assignments and papers for 35-50 students while also attending lectures and familiarizing themselves with the course material enough for them to correct them effectively. 

There was almost no outreach to the engineering and science faculty TAs, whose correction labour mostly consisted in making sure the Scantron cards were properly collated and stored without bending. An entire faculty worth of TAs thought the union’s claims of overwork were bullshit because they had never actually been told what humanities and social science TAs had to do for their work. No wonder we accepted the administration’s terms when the entire union membership actually came out to vote. Our union couldn’t even maintain solidarity in a single local.

Bakunin also describes a macro-economic way to break worker solidarity. Since he was writing in the context of the First International, the first attempt among the European trade union / socialist / revolutionary communist movements to network all the different local groups into one organization for mutual support and knowledge sharing, continent-sized processes were important for his thinking. It has to do with the fact that every local situation is different.

Union demonstrations no longer face violence, but they
also rarely achieve the transformative political power that
they used to wield.

So some regions or industries would successfully unionize before others. In that case, if you’re a venture capitalist opposed to union organization, it doesn’t really make sense to combat that unionized sector directly. I mean, people did. That’s what the Pinkertons and other private security forces were for in the early 20th century. But there was a much less violent, more morally and politically legitimate, and insidious way to break organized labour. Citing greater efficiency accruing to lower labour costs, you could divest your investments in a unionized sector and instead plough your capital into non-unionized sectors or regions. I think this is analogous to the pressure between American states with unionized manufacturing sectors and right-to-work policies.

If enough venture capitalists do this, then you’ll break a union movement through simple impoverishment. A manufacturing industry without any investment capital grinds to a halt. You can’t work in an industry whose investors have all pulled up stakes and financial obligations and gone to right-to-work or militarily-ruled pastures. They could then pressure unionized workers to move to these greener pastures if they wanted work: after all, better a poorly-paid job than no job at all.

This, says Bakunin, is why an international network of communication and mutual support among workers’ organizations is so important. It would build connections of solidarity across regions so that people in right-to-work states or the 19th century equivalent would see the change for what it was: a means to break unionization movements in more progressive regions. Such networks of communication would let workers learn more about the struggles of other areas, and better understand the global economic system in which they were embedded.

When I was on strike in 2009, I spoke to an independent contractor who was driving onto campus to do some electrical work. He asked me what some of the issues were that we were striking for. I told him that one issue close to me was that we wanted improved benefits for graduate students with children, because several of my colleagues had kids and they struggled to stay on their feet financially on their TA incomes and stipends. 

His response was that I could go fuck myself because he’d been working as a journeyman electrician for years and he never came anywhere near getting employment benefits at all, and he slammed his truck through our picket line. 

When I was looking for entry-level sessional work teaching in universities in my area on a per-course basis, I spoke to several department heads and adjunct union officials, and relatives also inquired on my behalf at unions in other regions. I had supported the unionization of per-course faculty as a student, but once I became an academic labourer, those unions actively worked against me. A sessional faculty union's first priority is to institute seniority as the major or only criteria for hiring, guaranteeing jobs to those who have already taught courses in their unit.

One department head told me that he actually had no control over who was hired for a per-course position; he requested one from the union and the union named the professor. The head of one per-course union openly told my relative that the purpose of his job was to prevent better-qualified new PhD graduates from being able to compete with his members for work.

Maybe if, instead of simply looking out for their own members, union locals spent more time networking with other labourers in their industries and their communities who were outside union locals to educate each other about all their different struggles, the Western workers’ movement would be in somewhat better shape. It's not as if these networks aren't being made. But there aren't nearly enough of them to be effective, and too many leaders and executives of individual locals are too willing to deny the rights of outside workers in the name of protecting their own.

Solidarity for Who? Part I: Network Against Authority, Research Time, 14/08/2014

One of the reasons we read and teach the works of political philosophy from bygone eras is that they can help us work through problems in our own times. That’s why the history of anarchism is so important to Utopias: it’s a tradition of thought that has always existed in a cult form, flying under the mainstream of political life in the modern era, that in its current non-violent organizations occupies a place where experiments in new ways to run a society can happen.

Because there are many fronts in contemporary politics where the left is falling down. One is in the collisions of racial inequalities and cultural segregation with the universal militarization of domestic police forces in the United States after the September 11 attacks. These have been growing in tension over the years, but have finally come to a grotesque and catastrophic head in the last days of mass rioting in Ferguson, Missouri.

No city has suffered greater romantic idealization of its
political revolutions than Paris.

But I’m not here to talk about institutionalized racism in all its levels. That’s actually a little outside of my expertise, though I’m knowledgeable enough to get incredibly upset about it. I’m actually here to talk about a remarkable insight in the texts of Mikhail Bakunin about the vulnerabilities of the union movement. When Bakunin himself was writing his last essays that make up the bulk of his philosophical texts, he was working in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War and the destruction of the Paris Commune. He was also writing as a senior Yoda figure for Europe’s union movement, the organization of workers’ associations, particularly their networking organization, the International Workingmen’s Association.

The First International was first intended to be an organization of revolutionary communists, reformist socialists, and trade unions throughout Europe. It was the network by which these different organizations around the continent would communicate, share ideas, solve problems, and help in the local struggles of each one. When the strike funds of a trade union were on the verge of running out, allied organizations would send money to support their workers. The International was always intended to be a network of localities, its programs determined from the bottom up. Bakunin wrote that the International should not be “vested with any official authority or political power whatsoever.” It should only be a network allying diverse actors.

In Bakunin’s last years, conflicts over whether the International was to be a network or an authority ended up destroying the organization. At the Hague conference of 1872, Karl Marx and his supporters wanted to enforce ideological uniformity across the International, leaning on all the member organizations to conform their political activities to Marxist orthodoxy. Bakunin and the members who thought similarly resisted, advocating that the International remain a network, and were ejected for their trouble.

Antonio Gramsci would eventually make similar critiques of the Third International – better known as the Comintern – in his prison writings. The direction of Stalin destroyed its genuinely revolutionary potential. It would only work to liberate people as a network to connect allied organizations whose goals, strategies, and ideologies were developed for the particular circumstances of their own local struggles. If a political and social ideology and program for revolutionary agitation were imposed from a centralized authority (such as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in Moscow), then its activity would never actually liberate people from unjust political and social institutions around Europe. It would only replace one repressive authority with another. 

Liberation of an oppressed community can never come from following a leader or some imposed political program with pretensions to universality. The only universality is the non-ideological connections of diverse actors through a network, Bakunin’s vision of the International which he saw snapped away from him under the banner of Marxist authoritarianism. 

Pete Townshend would still be right. When you meet the new boss, he’s the same as the old boss. A network has no boss.

The Alleged Usefulness of War, Research Time, 06/08/2014

Yesterday’s post is important to my historical research too, because of how anarchism differs from its 19th century form from today. Modern anarchism is a study in finding forgotten spaces, places in society where state power has no interest in enforcing people’s behaviour and corporate interests don’t bother to reach their tendrils down to monetize. In these spaces, marginal and obscure they may often be, people experiment together with new lifestyles to organize our communities on more just and open lines.

But anarchism wasn’t always this way. There’s a significant reason why the bulk of the essays in the Mikhail Bakunin collection I’m reading were written during the last few years of his life. It’s because he spent the bulk of that life running guerrilla campaigns throughout Europe to organize the working classes and peasants of countries across that continent to overthrow the state and build a new culture from their communities on up. And any of the moneyed or aristocratic classes who got in their way were reactionaries to be removed. 

Anarchism used to be a violent movement to destroy the entire institution of the militarized state by insurrection. Many of the first politically violent groups in Europe were anarchists. Bakunin himself continually refers to the necessity for organizing the peasant populations of Europe for violent revolution, overthrowing the monarchs, bureaucrats, and the bourgeoisie. 

One of the key philosophical texts of Bakunin’s writings is his “Letter to a Frenchman,” a long essay rhetorically addressed to the French people as they face the catastrophe of German invasion in 1871.* Bakunin refers to the many authors and intelligentsia of France who are lamenting the prospect of a civil war in response to the German invasion. But Bakunin openly encourages such a war, as a civil war started by the peasantry to overthrow the government whose idiocy began the war would permit the end of the French state and the resistance of voluntary associations of peasants would drive out the Germans through guerrilla militia tactics. 

So you refuse to shake hands with me, eh? Then I'll start a
war that will ultimately ruin my own country!

* The Franco-Prussian War is, incidentally, one of the most ridiculous conflicts I’ve read about in some time. This nine-month conflict between France and the unified German states led by the kingdom of Prussia was, like the First World War, a conflict that the French assumed they would easily win. But unlike the First World War, the German side actually had a tremendous military advantage over the French: not only was their technology superior, but they had a fighting force of men 30% larger than the French once the Bavarian states joined the Prussian drive for unification. Also, the war was started over an insult to the French ambassador. Yes, the same reason Groucho Marx started the Fredonia-Sylvania war was the reason for this real-life conflict.

The techniques of terrorism that would eventually be associated with ethnic nationalist groups around Europe (and eventually the rest of the world) began in radical anarchist cells. Anarchist violence was so prevalent, or at least so visible in the public eye, throughout the 19th century that Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent was written about a secret service officer tracking down an anarchist terror cell. The US President William McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist terrorist.

So, given yesterday’s long lament about the violence of contemporary politics, why would I go to anarchism for the framework to enact a non-violent utopian vision? Precisely because the violent revolution failed, just as I think violent revolutions tend to do. One of the lessons I took from Fanon, which I’ve discussed before, is that a violent uprising against an oppressor is in terrible danger of self-destruction, in becoming a domestic oppressor taking the place of a foreign one. 

In addition to Fanon’s analysis, consider this principle: that having fought so hard to establish a new political order, any critique of the revolutionaries’ order is interpreted as a threat to be destroyed. As a result, the fundamental freedom that the revolution was supposed to ensure is annihilated. 

This is why I’m glad the violent anarchist revolutions were ultimately defeated: had they won, they would only have defeated themselves. As it is, anarchistic experiments exist in the marginal spaces of society, waiting for the opportunity to proliferate, not through violence, but through persuasion that they offer a better way of life. 

The Myth of the Truly Isolated Man Is Dangerous, Research Time, 01/08/2014

I’ve been working on a lot of projects since returning from Eclipse Festival last weekend. I’ve gotten back to work at my freelance editing gig, am finishing up the edits to my play script You Were My Friend, preparing for the actual launch of Under the Trees, Eaten, and starting work on a feature film script adapting my old short story about Alice. Also, I’m reading philosophy. Never stopped through the festival, as I would quite often chill by our tent or walk to the chillout stage to read. 

Rousseau was the most liberatory of the
social contract theorists. Even so, he put
people in more chains than he thought.

But Mikhail Bakunin offers more and more philosophical surprises, one of which is a profound denunciation of social contract theory as the central concept of political philosophy. I call it a denunciation because it isn’t exactly an argument in the formal academic sense. Bakunin wrote philosophically dense polemics and speeches, not academic articles or books. His deep thinking and creative concepts animated his writing, but they were always for a different kind of audience and context of delivery than the institutionalized academe of 19th century Europe.

So he doesn’t choose a particular foundational text to analyze per se. Instead, he identifies the main schools of his time’s social contract theory of politics, drops the names of a couple of key authors, and proceeds to target the essential form of the concept, the premises that are invariant across all the different approaches and frameworks a theorist may take while still calling their creation a social contract theory. In a way, it reminds of what Gilles Deleuze does with his philosophical analyses, except with language that is far more direct.

That core premise is that humanity only became social with the foundation of the contract, constituting a proto-state. As a result, the state becomes understood as the primary form of human association. The only means humans have of genuinely keeping order are, therefore, the authoritative arms* of the state like police, schoolteachers, bureaucrats, and the military. Laws, law givers, and the enforcers of law. 

* There are, in English, two key senses to the word ‘authority.’ One is the authority of an expert, and the other is the authority of a political-military power. You obey the former in deference to their knowledge, the latter out of fear for your life. I think I’ll have to incorporate a little Joseph Raz into this dimension of Utopia’s theorizing.

Bakunin denounces this as simply a falsehood: Humans have always lived in social groups, their members cooperating with each other for a common good. We as individuals were born into these groups and raised as members, negotiating our individual identities in dialogue with the social forces such as ethical obligation, pressure toward fairness, and the complex bonds of family, friendship, and community. Contemporary evolutionary and anthropological research has borne out the empirical truth of this notion. Instead of laws dispensed and enforced through authorities and their institutions, we governed ourselves through customs that were always subject to adaptation to changing circumstances or spontaneous transformation through the critical powers of thinkers. This is a conception of politics as immanent to political life itself.

Even in our earliest days, humanity was a social creature.

 It’s fitting that Bakunin initially choose Rousseau’s social contract theory as the primally focal theorist for his conception of social contract theory. He spends much of the relevant section of the essay “Federalism, Socialism, Anti-Theologism” railing against the presumption in most social contract theories that humanity would be inescapably violent to each other without submission to the authority of a state. But this is because of the polemic nature of his style.

Rousseau’s social contract theory is an exception to the principle that a society before the state is necessarily violent. Pre-state people, for Rousseau, are happy and peaceful. And he even describes the social contract as putting humanity in chains. But Bakunin chooses him as the key representative of the theory because, even in their happy pre-state sense, humans are still conceived as isolated. They are naturally individuals. 

Bakunin opposes this, because he understood intuitively, more than a hundred years before scientific confirmation, that we are only complete humans insofar as we are part of vibrant communities of neighbours, colleagues, and friends. This simple fact about the world itself makes every theory of the social contract into false philosophy leading us in directions that are nonsense for human nature itself.

By Demons Be Driven, Research Time, 23/07/2014

I’ve been reading a little about the history of anarchism lately too, familiarizing myself with the contexts in which Peter Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin’s ideas and activism arose. The 19th century was a time of incredible political upheaval, after all. The stereotype of the Victorian era’s stability is often used to gloss over the genuinely radical activities of the period and the popular resistance.

This was a century that began with the Napoleonic Wars, a military movement that lasted two decades, whose ostensible goal was quite literally the conquest of Europe. Globally, the century was dominated by the rise of colonial empires across the world. The colonial possessions of Britain and France (and the other major countries of Europe, but these were the major powers) enabled those states to build their armies and navies to such a degree that they would conquer parts of the world that were never within reach before. 

Because of the incredible ethnocentrism and racism that had developed in European culture, they had no qualms about overwriting the cultures and moralities of the people in their newly colonized lands. Instead of simply exploiting the locals’ labour and extracting their resources, as most colonial empires had done before,* the European empires set about marginalizaing the cultures of the subjugated peoples. Only the horrifying trauma of the First World War could bring this process to a skittering halt. Even then, the true wind-down never occurred until after the Second World War, when the European economies and military had literally been exhausted fighting each other in a conflict that literally spanned the Earth, making the Second World War the only truly unified global war of states. 

* When you look at the investments that state and Communist Party owned corporations have made throughout Africa today, it’s easy to see that this economic colonialism continues today. The Chinese, however, have the good business sense simply to strip these lands of their resources and not rub salt in the wound through further cultural destruction in the name of a false sense of moral and rational superiority.

Bakunin, the revolutionary who never
lost his hope, even after he lost all his
teeth from scurvy developed in a
Russian prison.

The story of anarchist movements in the 19th century is the story of domestic resistance to these powerful state militaries and the institutions that they supported. These movements, of which Mikhail Bakunin was a central leader throughout Europe, sought to dismantle the modern militarized state and restore a new form of governance adapting the model of the communal city-state to the industrial era. We’ll never know precisely how these forms of government would have developed over time, because the political revolutions in 1848 and 1870 that tried to institute such governance models were all stamped out by the state militaries of the time.

Reading through a long biographical essay on the life of Bakunin, I am struck by the ferocity with which he advocated violent revolution, and the equal ferocity with which he denounced violence. One of the more important stories of Bakunin’s life was his brief relationship with a Russian revolutionary named Sergey Nechaev. Nechaev advocated revolution by any means, that whatever violence and despotism was necessary to install and maintain a true communist regime was justified through the justice of its goal. Bakunin could not tolerate this, and eventually broke with Nechaev because of the younger man’s utter amorality. Bakunin himself advocated violence against the state and its agents in the army and the police, but he drew the line at Machiavellian murder.

Nechaev was eventually arrested in Russia. He murdered a former member of his revolutionary cell and attempted to manipulate the murder’s public image to encourage revolt against the Tsarist regime. This plan was an utter failure, and a few years later, he was captured and locked away in the hells of the Russian prison system.

If the story sounds familiar to you, the murder and its motivation is the basic plot of Pyotr Verkhovensky’s story in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Demons. Dostoyevsky himself had been a political revolutionary, but abandoned the cause of radical socialism after the trauma of receiving a pardon from the Tsar, timed to arrive literally seconds before his execution by firing squad. After serving his prison sentence, he became a staunch social conservative and Orthodox Christian, and wrote some of the greatest works of literature in human history, including Demons.

Demons is Dostoyevsky’s most explicitly political novel, engaging with the liberal and socialist revolutions that were rocking Russia and Europe at the time. His story offered revolutionaries a powerful challenge in the figures of the Verkhovensky father and son, Stepan and Pyotr. Violent revolution, articulated in the machinations of Pyotr (who was, remember, based on a real communist revolutionary, Nechaev), could only achieve empty violence that inspired no true believers in the cause of liberation from despotism. 

The route of persuasion, meanwhile, led you to the position of Stepan. A writer of moving works of political philosophy, Stepan essentially was a self-parody. A man who spent decades writing to advocate the overthrow of the Tsar and to inspire a democratic culture, he was employed as a teacher and scholar through the support of the very landed gentry he thought at the heart of such intolerable despotism. His figure cuts close to my own anxieties, as I believe in using my books to advocate and inspire social change. 

So if both paths are ultimately impotent, says Dostoyevsky, what choice is left, either for the activist or the writer?