Edmund Berger :: Unconditional Acceleration and the Question of Praxis: Some Preliminary Thoughts @ Deterritorial Investigation Unit, 27 March 2017

Edmund Berger :: Unconditional Acceleration and the Question of Praxis: Some Preliminary Thoughts @ D.I.U. / Deterritorial Investigation Unit, 27 March 2017

One of the major points of contention concerning unconditional accelerationism (henceforth U/ACC) is a perceived slight or rejection of any ‘positive’ form of political activity or organizing. The complaint can be summed up with the single phrase “U/ACC lacks praxis”. In the common leftist deployment of the phrase, this is exactly correct. Moreover, we could go as far to say that U/ACC rejects praxis, even that it is anti-praxis – yet, at the same time, this is not so straightforward. If we step back take praxis in its most broad sense – the higher form of acting in the world – then U/ACC is hardly anti-praxis; it simply asks that the limits and the inevitable dissolution of things be acknowledged (there is no contradiction between posing this alongside the Xenofeminist mantra “if nature is unjust, change nature”). No, U/ACC manifests an anti-praxis line when a very specific sort is proposed, that is, the political-territorial subordination and navigation of the forces in motion by a mass subject – the politics of striation. For this reason, perhaps it is best to view U/ACC not as anti-praxis, but as anti-collective means of intervention.

The rejection of collective intervention does not, in the first instant, derive from a normative political claim, though it can (and should up to a certain degree, in my opinion). Instead, U/ACC calls attention to the manner through which collective forms of intervention and political stabilization, be they of the left or the the right, are rendered impossible in the long-run through overarching tendencies and forces. Thus, while left-accelerationism (L/ACC) and right-accelerationism (R/ACC) seek to recompose or reterritorialize Leviathan in accordance with each of their own political theologies, U/ACC charts a course outwards: the structures of Oedipus, the Cathedral, Leviathan, what have you, will be ripped apart and decimated by forces rushing up from within and around the system, which in turn mobilize the entirety of the system towards its own dissolution point. Unlike L/ACC and R/ACC, U/ACC is not at the bottom a political theory; it is one of mobilizing materialism.

Consider the classic Marxian formula: M – C – M’. This is, of course, a simple pathway of capital, beginning with money (M), which is translated into the commodity (C) to be sold on the market. If successful sold, the commodity is translated into a greater amount of money than at the beginning (M’) – and it is at this point that the process restarts. M – C – M’ – C…. on and on and on. If this is the ‘general formula of capital’, as Marx describes it, then it is also the general formula of modernity itself. This, in turn, clues us into the abstract force, glimpsed through diagrammation, which can lurks behind modernity rendered as historical totality: positive feedback. M – C – M’, the process looping for what appears as eternity, forever pushing itself to higher and higher heights. The processual relations of capital appear here as far from any sort of homeostasis.

Positive feedback not only marks the evolution of a given system, or a generalized forward direction. It is also indicative of dissolution, of breaking apart, of past forms being undermined and propelled towards catastrophe. While for many the catastrophe might appear as something like communism, Marx as early as the Communist Manifesto was enraptured by the image of capitalist modernity as unfolding through creative destruction. As Marshall Berman describes, Marx’s depiction of “all that is solid melting into air” is a vision of these processes rendered “luminous, incandescent; brilliant images succeed and blend into one another; we are hurtled along with a reckless momentum, a breathless intensity.”i From here it is only a small leap to Lyotard’s depiction in Libidinal Economy of Marx slowly going mad, seduced by the delirious circuitries of exchange of capitalism and committing himself to “microscopic analysis of the aberrations of capitalism… no longer able to detach himself from it.”ii It begins with a general formula, a singular positive feedback code, and compounds itself endlessly, its circuitries deepening and widening, expanding and contracting, an array of falls and upward-propelling factors.

The positive-feedback processes does not end in the modular pathways of the transmutation between money, commodity, and labor. It radiates out across the entirety of social, cultural, political, even ecology strata (it is for this reason that we can describe capitalism as a historical era, even if all these elements were in play long before capitalism itself). The widening of commodity production over here generates trade networks, churning up market expansion over there. Rapid technological development diffusing through a given industry pushes prices down, bringing more into the cycles of production and thus consumption – and technological development radiates into newer, faster, more adaptive technologies. Technocommercialism begins to shake culture, society, and polity, forcing them into fragmentation and new forms. Firm structures and deeply-held beliefs buckle and break under the movement of people, money, and goods. All these forces lock into momentum with one another and act as force multipliers, each looping through the other, pushing it forward, faster, moving the entirety of the system towards… something – and it is this something that control systems, of either the left or the right, would be forced (and will always fail) to contend with.

Yaneer Bar-Yam, founder and head researcher of the New England Complex Systems Institute, describes the bulk of human civilization as capable of being characterized, first and foremost, as a “control hierarchy”, in which (at the ideal level, at least) “all communication, and thus coordination of activities, must occur through the hierarchy.”iiiWorkplace dynamics must be routed through management, just as military affairs pivot on the chain of command. Nations deploy presidents and prime ministers, and businesses bring on CEOs. In spaces where control hierarchies prevail, the controller not only serves to properly manage and direct the channels of communication for coordination (thus presaging directly the concerns of first-order cybernetics); it also plays the role of forging that sense of continuity, the inscription of organic wholeness on the myriad of parts.

Yet it is not so straightforward as simple control hierarchies. Through the passage of time, the prevailing organizational dynamics have shifted not only at the immediate, everyday level (say, on the factory production line or in the corporate boardroom), but at the civilizational level as well. Hunter-gatherer societies often organized in clusters based on direct hierarchy, while the passage from early civilization to the industrial revolution(s) saw this hierarchy move from wider chain-of-command systems to be dynamic entanglements. With each passing iteration, the status of the hierarchical formation itself declines as the relations tend towards the network, or even post-network, formations. This is precisely because, Bar-Yam notes, of a rise in the ‘complexity profile’ being shaped within civilization. As the nonlinear processes driven by cascading positive feedback intensify and rise, organization itself becomes more complex, more heterogeneous, more multiplicitious, and less congenial to control systems. Rising complexity, in the end, trashes the orderly nature of organic wholeness.

The L/ACC critic might stop here and decry the construction of a strawman. “Of course we aren’t for firm hierarchy,” they are probably saying. “We’re interested in flexible forms, in hybridity and multiplicity.” They might add, as their neo-communist cousins are oft to do, that they even reject planning as traditionally conceived: “we support decentralized planning”. Allow me to respond to these oppositions quickly: flexible control, modular hierarchy, and decentralized planning all fall victim to the same forward rush of rising complexity as their more formalized and concrete kin.

Control systems always rely on a high degree of legibility, the ability to observe a given territory (physical or otherwise) down to its minutia and classify and categorize the elements within it in order to properly enable generalized management and specific intervention.iv Any and all forms of planning require legibility and the capability to tabulate and command every potential variable – yet this becomes its very Achilles’ heel. Consider Andrew Pickering’s description of the conclusions gleamed by the cybernetician Ross Ashby’s research into homeostats: “The only route to stabilisation is to cut down variety – to reduce the number of configurations an assemblage can take on, by reducing the number of participants and the multiplicity of their interconnections.”v The reason that this is immediately is because the control system, regardless of its inflexibility or flexibility or how centralized or decentralized its planning is, operates in a manner akin to that of the homeostat: the movement of a spectrum of variables in play towards a zone of equilibrium in order to promote generalized stability through the system. Pickering at length:

Ashby was interested in the length of time it would take combinations of homeostats to achieve collective equilibrium. He thought of them as models of the brain, so the question for him was whether one could build a brain that would adapt to the world in a reasonable length of time. Both calculations and his machines showed that four fully interconnected homeostats, each capable of taking on twenty-five different inner states, could come into equilibrium in a couple of seconds. But if one extrapolated that an assemblage of one hundred fully interconnected homeostats the combinatories were such that chance on an equilibrium arrangement would entail search-times orders of magnitudes greater than the age of the universe. Even if 99 of them found a way to settle down, chances are that the 100th would set them spinning again.

This is the point to focus on. It takes time to run through homeostat-like processes of reconfiguration, putting possibilities to others who are doing the same back, proposing and counter-posing, vetoing and counter-vetoing. And the length of time it takes to stabilise such an arrangement increases astronomically with the number of participants and the density of their connections, meaning the number of others with which entities interacts directly. Finding stability can easily become a practical impossibility.vi

To properly operate in the real, some sort of sociopolitical island of stability, L/ACC or R/ACC praxis would be contingent upon the expunging of variables upon variables to push the complexity profile downwards, to make it more manageable (which is something that R/ACC tends to admit more than L/ACC). But to do this would not only mean restricting flows of people, goods, and money, as the populists of the left and right both are rushing over one another to do. It would also require roadblocks thrown up in the path of technological development, and the suppressing of the capability of making and using tools to operate in the world. The promotion of a collective cognitive project would, ironically, be forced to suppress cognitive activity on the molecular scale.

In the end this scenario does not seem very likely. Multitudes of positive feedback processes have long since become deeply entrenched, and the system as a whole is undeniably veering far from order. The lingering populisms have rebooted themselves merely as a cynical effort to stave off the dissolution, and from certain angles are more symptomatic than truly reactionary. The complexity profile is rising and will continue, and as it does the capability for collective intervention will become all but impossible. From the perspective of sites of collective intervention both existing (nations, corporations, etc.) and envisioned (variants of post-capitalist planning), these runaway processes cannot but look like entropic decay. From the perspective of power, perhaps the forces rushing upwards are not to be visualized as all that is solid melting into air, but the crushing of all that is stable and standing into disparate granules.

Contra any gamble for collectively scalable politics of bootstrapping and navigation, Bar-Yam suggests that in the face of mounting complexity, organizational design is forced to tend towards “progressively smaller branching ratios (fewer individuals supervised by a single individual)”.vii As mutational development speeds up and legibility fades, size becomes a liability. James Scott has shown that detachment of large managerial forces from the chaotic ‘on-the-ground’ environs is a recipe for disaster. Similarly, Kevin Carson has illustrated the way that the Hayekian knowledge problem (which posits that in complex, evolutionary systems, knowledge distributes in a way that undermines any attempt at planning) not only applies to state-centric command economies, but to the organizational black box of the modern corporation.viiiAs such problems intensify, any possibility for navigation falls downward, to smaller and more dynamic firms, greater marketization (technocommercialism begetting technocommercialism), and ultimately individual actors themselves.

It is at this point where one might happen on something that looks like U/ACC praxis. If one’s goal is the dissolution of the state and/or rule by multinational monopoly capitalism, then why recourse to the very systems and mechanisms that seek to stabilize these forms and shore them up against the forces that undermine them? This question is at the core of Deleuze and Guattari’s insight in the ‘accelerationist fragment’ that to “withdraw from the world market”, as opposed to going deeper into the throes of it, is a “curious revival of the fascist ‘economic solution’”.ix The intellectual complicity of the broad left with this ‘economic solution’ is also why Nick Land – in a moment of incredible anti-fascist theorizing – charged that

re-Hegelianized western Marxism degenerates from the critique of political economy into a state-sympathizing monotheology of economics, siding with fascism against deregulation. The left subsidies into conservatism, asphyxiating its vestigial capacity for hot speculative mutation in the morass of a cold depressive guilt-culture.x

To accelerate the process, and to throw oneself into those flows, leaves behind the (already impossible) specter of collective intervention. This grander anti-praxis opens, in turn, the space for examining forms of praxis that break from the baggage of the past. We could count agorism and exit as forms impeccable to furthering the process, and cypherpoliticsxiand related configurations arise on the far end of the development, as the arc bends towards molecularization of economic and social relations. It is in these horizons that conversation and application must unfold.

No more reterritorializing reactions. No more retroprogressivism.

iMarshall Berman All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity Penguin Books, 1988, pg. 91

iiJean-Francois Lyotard Libidinal Economy Athlone Press, 1993, pg. 97

iiiYaneer Bar-Yam “Complexity Rising: From Human Beings to Human Civilization, a Complexity Profile” New England Complex Systems Institute http://www.necsi.edu/research/multiscale/EOLSSComplexityRising.pdf pg. 9

ivOn legibility, see James C. Scott Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed Yale University Press, 1999

vAndrew Pickering “Islands of Stability: Engaging Emergence from Cellular Automata to the Occupy Movement” University of Exeter, 2013, pg. 10 https://www.academia.edu/20618708/Islands_of_Stability_Engaging_Emergence_from_Cellular_Automata_to_the_Occupy_Movement

viIbid, pg. 6

viiBar Yam “Complexity Rising” pg.

viiiSee Kevin Carson Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective BookCurge, 2008, pgs. 205-223

ixGilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia University of Minnesota Press, 1983 pg. 239

xNick Land “Meltdown” Swarm 1 http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm

xiUnion of Researchers for a Collective Commons “Cypherpolitical Enterprises: Programmatic Assessments” P2P Foundation, March 15th, 2017 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/cypherpolitical-enterprises-programmatic-assessments/2017/03/15

Pics/Artwork :: Zoorex

Saul Newman :: War on the State: Stirner and Deleuze's Anarchism @ Anarchist Library

Simon Choat: Politics, power and the state: a Marxist response to postanarchism @ Journal of Political Ideologies, Volume 18, Issue 3, 2013 - Published 14.Oct.2013

Simon Choat: Politics, power and the state: a Marxist response to postanarchism @ Journal of Political Ideologies, Volume 18, Issue 3, 2013 - Published 14.Oct.2013

Recent years have seen the development of a new form of anarchism. Under the label ‘postanarchism’, writers such as Todd May, Saul Newman and Lewis Call have sought to combine the insights of anarchism with those of recent Continental philosophy, in particular post-structuralism. A central but neglected element of postanarchist thought is its critique of Marxism. The main aim of this article is to counter the postanarchist dismissal of Marxism. It will: introduce the key ideas and arguments of postanarchism; locate its critique of Marxism, demonstrating its importance to the postanarchist project; and highlight weaknesses in the postanarchist critique of Marxism. It argues that the postanarchist portrayal of Marxism is reductive and misleading. Contrary to postanarchist claims, many post-structuralists have drawn inspiration from Marxism rather than rejecting it: as such, Marxism anticipates many of the post-structuralist-inflected ideas of postanarchism, in particular their approach to the state, power, subjectivity and politics. In addition, some Marxist criticisms of classical anarchism apply equally to postanarchism, thus raising questions to which postanarchists should respond.

Read more @ JPI

Read Simon Choat interview on Crowd, Power and Postdemocracy

Simon Choat: Postanarchism from a Marxist Perspective (From Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies, Volume 2010.1)

Simon Choat: Postanarchism from a Marxist Perspective

Abstract

Postanarchists have tended to portray Marxism as an anachronism, taking the alleged redundancy of Marxism as a starting point for their revitalization of classical anarchism via post-structuralism. Critical assessments of postanarchism have so far failed to interrogate this portrayal of Marxism. This is unfortunate, I argue, because Marxism plays an important function within the postanarchist project, and because it allows postanarchist characterizations of Marxism and post-structuralism to go unchallenged. The first part of this paper delineates the role of Marxism in postanarchism, before examining connections between post-structuralism and Marxism: I argue that Marx’s work anticipates post-structuralist concepts of power and subjectivity. The aim of the paper is not to offer a Marxist critique of postanarchism but to establish equal relevance for both anarchism and Marxism to contemporary political thought and practice.

Introduction

The postanarchist attempt to revitalize classical anarchism by rereading it through the lens of post-structuralism has not gone unchallenged. Critics have raised questions concerning both the relevance of post-structuralism to anarchist thought and the accuracy of postanarchist readings of classical anarchism — questions which in turn bring up broader issues about the impact of post-structuralism, the direction and significance of contemporary anarchism, and the relations between theory and practice. One element that has remained largely unquestioned, however, is the place of Marxism within postanarchism. This is perhaps understandable: it is to be expected that not everyone will welcome a Marxist perspective on postanarchism; in fact, it is possibly the last thing that some anarchists want. When Marxists have intervened in debates around anarchism, they have often adopted the condescending and hectoring tone that Marx himself used when dealing with Bakunin, Proudhon, et al: anarchism has been derided by Marxists as a naive or utopian creed that fails to understand present conditions and is forced to resort to a crude voluntarism as its basis for political action. It is not my desire, however, to extend this patronizing dismissal of anarchism to cover postanarchism: to the contrary, it is my contention that postanarchists have been too quick to dismiss Marxism.
The lack of attention that has been given to Marxism’s role within postanarchism is troubling for at least two reasons. First, it effaces the extent to which — as I shall argue below — opposition to Marxism is a key component of the postanarchist project. Thus Marxism is not being introduced here as an alien perspective from which postanarchism can be measured, but elicited as a significant but under-discussed element of postanarchism itself. Second, uncritical acceptance of postanarchist assessments of Marxism obscures the fact that Marxism still has much to offer: Marxism, I argue, has been unfairly represented by postanarchism. This challenge to postanarchism’s understanding of Marxism should not be confused with a Marxist critique of postanarchism. There is much to respect in postanarchism, and its attempt to link contemporary post-structuralist theory with radical nineteenth-century currents of thought is admirable: the problem is that postanarchism’s reevaluation of classical anarchism comes at the expense of Marxism. My aim is not to prolong or revive the dispute between anarchists and Marxists that now stretches across three centuries, but rather to stake a claim for the importance of both anarchism and Marxism to contemporary political thought and practice. This is therefore a Marxist engagement with a current of anarchism that is offered in the spirit of reconciliation rather than denunciation. What follows is not meant to be an exhaustive analysis of the relations between postanarchism and Marxism: it is intended to open up an area of study that hitherto seems to have been closed, and is thus offered as a preliminary investigation rather than the final word. Drawing on postanarchism’s own characterization of post-structuralism as a theory that reconceptualizes power and subjectivity, I shall re-examine these concepts as they appear in the work of Marx, challenging postanarchism’s dismissal of Marxism and its reading of post-structuralism. I begin, however, by examining the place of Marxism within postanarchism, delineating three key functions that the critique of Marxism performs for postanarchism.

The Place of Marxism within Postanarchism

Although the number of writers and activists who identify themselves as postanarchists is relatively small, it is a surprisingly varied current of thought. The basic coordinates are clear enough: ‘the central contention of postanarchism is that classical anarchist philosophy must take account of new theoretical directions and cultural phenomena, in particular, postmodernity and poststructuralism.’ (Newman, 2008: 101) According to postanarchists, post-structuralism can be understood as a radicalization of classical anarchism — meaning both that post-structuralism is in the tradition of classical anarchism and that post-structuralism can act as a remedy to the faults and flaws of classical anarchism without betraying its spirit and aims. But this begs two obvious questions: what is meant by ‘post-structuralism’ and what is meant by ‘classical anarchism’? It is not insignificant that the leading representatives of this project have all given it a different name: Saul Newman refers to postanarchism, Todd May to post-structuralist anarchism, and Lewis Call to postmodern anarchism. These different labels in part reflect disagreement about who can be termed a ‘post-structuralist’. To take only one example: Jacques Lacan plays an important part in Newman’s postanarchism, but he is not discussed by May or Call. Similar problems greet attempts to define ‘classical anarchism’, itself a notoriously elusive category. Who were the classical anarchists, and what did they believe? For Newman (2005: 3), Max Stirner is a ‘sort of “proto-poststructuralist”’, whereas Call and May barely mention Stirner.
These disagreements over definitions and personnel are of course not specific to postanarchism: it is difficult to draw the boundaries of any intellectual movement, but particularly ones as fluid as post-structuralism and classical anarchism — difficulties that anyone will face, whether they are a postanarchist or not.  In turn, this fluidity is not a flaw of either post-structuralism or classical anarchism: one of the great strengths of both currents of thought is their variety and depth. Nor do I mean to suggest that the postanarchist project is incoherent from the start, or that postanarchists fail to define their terms adequately: on the whole they are all careful to explain what they mean by post-structuralism and classical anarchism, and themselves draw attention to the difficulties I have outlined. All I wish to argue here is that it is hard to define a movement in reference to intellectual currents as nebulous as post-structuralism and classical anarchism — or, at least, hard to define it only in reference to these. To say that postanarchism is (for instance) classical anarchism filtered through post-structuralism does not actually tell us much about what it is to be a postanarchist. Of course, this missing content is fleshed out in the detailed studies undertaken by the postanarchists — but these detailed studies differ from one postanarchist to the next. If we are to attribute any kind of unity to postanarchism, then we must look to other factors — one of which, I contend, is a common opposition to Marxism.
This, then, is the first function of Marxism within postanarchism, of three roles that I shall identify: it helps provide coherence to the postanarchist project. Though they may draw upon different thinkers and seek to combine anarchism and post-structuralism in varying fashions, the postanarchists are united in their rejection of Marxism. It might even be said that it is the (alleged) failure of Marxism that is the main motivation behind the entire postanarchist project. Marxism, it is claimed, is in terminal decline: the problems of exploitation and oppression that Marxism sought to address, however, have not gone away (and have if anything intensified). Hence there is a need, according to postanarchism, to rediscover and develop alternative avenues for radical thought and practice. The problem with Marxism, according to postanarchism, is not so much that it is no longer able to provide the appropriate critical resources, but that it was never able to do so: it is not that Marxism is outdated or took a wrong turn somewhere, but that from the start Marxism was on the wrong path. In May’s terms, Marxism is a ‘strategic’ rather than a ‘tactical’ philosophy: its analysis focuses on a central problematic and it aims at a single goal. For Marxism, ‘there is a single enemy: capitalism.’ (May, 1994: 26). Like all strategic philosophies, Marxism is reductive: there is one source of oppression (capitalism), only one theory that can accurately understand this oppression (Marxism), and only one possible agent of struggle (the proletariat, guided by a vanguard party). Tactical philosophies, in contrast, recognize that there is no single site of oppression, and that resistance must take the form of specific, local analyses and interventions. Marxism is thus reductive in two senses, postanarchists argue: it reduces the scope of political analysis by focusing only on capitalist economic relations, and it reduces politics to economics, effectively effacing politics altogether. In terms that May borrows from Jacques Rancière, Marxism is a form of ‘metapolitics’: the real truth of politics lies in economic relations, and political institutions and ideologies merely conceal that truth (May, 2008: 44–5).
Postanarchists claim that to an extent classical anarchism shares these problems with Marxism, though in a different way: whereas the reductionism of Marxism manifests itself as an urge to interpret everything in terms of economic relations, anarchism performs a statist rather than an economic reduction, tending to lapse into an analysis that focuses on the state as the primary locus of power. But in anarchism this tendency is in tension with another trend: anarchism wavers between strategic and tactical thought. Although it focuses on the state, classical anarchism recognizes that there are many other sites of power, and advocates diverse and specific small-scale struggles of resistance against power wherever it manifests itself. This ambivalence marks the advantage of classical anarchism over Marxism: despite its flaws, classical anarchism has advanced the analysis of power, making it a more suitable avenue for contemporary politics than Marxism. This leads us to the second role of Marxism within postanarchism that we can identify: the rejection of Marxism offers a link to classical anarchism.
As we have seen, classical anarchism is itself a diverse and fluid current of thought: in many ways it is easier to define it by reference to what it opposes rather than what it advocates. Newman (2005: 33), for example, suggests that anarchists are united ‘by a fundamental critique and rejection of political authority in all its forms.’ It is the rejection of political authority and representation (especially but not exclusively in the form of the state), rather than any positive political programme outlining an alternative vision of society, that is perhaps the key characteristic of classical anarchist thought. This is not to say that anarchists have failed to think about how a stateless society should be organized: to the contrary, they have offered an incredibly diverse range of visions for how stateless societies might be organized. But it is the very diversity of these visions that makes them poor candidates if we are looking for whatunites classical anarchists. The thread that binds anarchists is not a uniform political programme but a common opposition to political authority. Classical anarchism can be defined not only in terms of an opposition to authority, but also in opposition to other political ideologies, in particular Marxism. Anarchists are anarchists, we might even say, because they are not Marxists. This is not to denigrate the originality of anarchist thought — to suggest that it can only ever be a pale shadow of Marxism and defined in terms of the latter — but only to highlight the fact that one way to isolate the identity of anarchist thought is to distinguish it from Marxism. There is much common ground between Marxists and anarchists in the fight for a stateless society free from economic exploitation and political oppression, and historically most anarchists have been communists (with obvious and important exceptions such as Stirner). But anarchists have distanced themselves from Marxism’s organizational and revolutionary strategies: for classical anarchism, Marx is one those ‘doctrinaire revolutionaries’ identified by Bakunin (1990: 137), ‘whose objective is to overthrow existing governments and regimes so as to create their own dictatorships on their ruins’. Classical anarchists have argued that Marxism’s economic reductionism is dangerous in at least two ways. First, because it posits the state as a mere reflection of economic relations, it does not recognize that the state is a source of power in its own right, and so even a so-called ‘workers’ state’ will be oppressive. Second, the identification of the economic realm as the key site of oppression facilitates the emergence of a vanguard party distant from the oppressed masses — a point well made by May in some critical comments on Marxism: ‘If the fundamental site of oppression lies in the economy, it perhaps falls to those who are adept at economic analysis to take up the task of directing the revolution’ (May, 2008: 80).
These classical anarchist objections to Marxism anticipate those formulated by the postanarchists, who in turn have identified the strengths of classical anarchism in explicit contrast to Marxism. Whereas Marxism is supposedly economically reductionist, viewing all power as merely an expression of class domination, postanarchists argue that classical anarchism correctly saw that power must be analysed in its own right: irreducible to the workings of the economy, power relations exist throughout society and need to be analysed in their specificity, without reference to a uniform model of domination. While Marxism (it is claimed) privileges certain political actors — identifying the industrial working class as the sole possible instrument of political transformation, because of its unique place within the only kind of power relations that really matter for Marxism, namely the relation of exploitation between labour and capital — classical anarchism, in contrast, does not limit revolutionary potential to a single class, instead supporting agents dismissed by Marx, such as the peasantry and lumpenproletariat. If Marxism privileges not only a particular revolutionary actor, but also a particular path to revolution, supporting an authoritarian party and proposing a dictatorship of the proletariat, classical anarchism on the other hand consistently opposes all state forms and all hierarchies, including those of the party. To a great extent, therefore, the postanarchist attitude towards Marxism replicates the standard anarchist criticisms of Marxism, centred on its supposedly reductive analysis of the political situation and its authoritarian organizational structures. Rejection of Marxism places postanarchism firmly in the anarchist tradition.
Where postanarchism goes beyond these standard criticisms, it draws its weapons from post-structuralism, which brings us to the third role that Marxism plays within postanarchism: it provides one point of engagement with post-structuralism. The postanarchists see in post-structuralism a model for their own anti-Marxism. Post-anarchism identifies two key characteristics of post-structuralism. First, is anti-humanist: rather than taking the human subject as something that is given, it reveals the textual and material practices that constitute the subject. As May (1994: 75) puts it: ‘If poststructuralist political thought could be summed up in a single prescription, it would be that radical political theory, if it is to achieve anything, must abandon humanism in all its forms.’ Secondly, it is argued that post-structuralism rethinks the concept and analysis of power: the aim is no longer to establish the legitimate boundaries of power, placing limits between the individual and the state, but to demonstrate that power is coextensive with social relations, acting not merely to suppress a pre-existing subject but also and more fundamentally to constitute subjects in the first place. Power and subjectivity are thus intimately linked within post-structuralist thought. This is contrasted by postanarchists with Marxist thought, where power and subjectivity are also linked, but in a very different way: instead of a productive power that is constitutive of subjectivity, Marxism conceives of a repressive power that constrains our essential nature as human subjects.
This view of power and subjectivity, argue postanarchists, is not unique to Marxism: it is shared by many of the philosophies that developed out of the Enlightenment, including classical anarchism. ‘Like Marxism and most other forms of nineteenth-century radical thinking, classical anarchism purports to liberate some kind of authentic human essence which has supposedly been repressed by capitalism and/or the state’ (Call, 2002: 14–15). Although it may broaden the scope of power, classical anarchists still see subjectivity as given and power as oppressive: like Marxism, postanarchists argue, classical anarchism posits a notion of human nature that both acts as a standard by which forms of power can be criticized and explains the existence of resistance to power. In classical anarchism (it is argued), the relation between subject and power is formulated as an opposition between two poles, with the naturality of the human subject within an organic community on one side and the artificial power of the state on the other. According to postanarchists, then, post-structuralism moves beyond both Marxism and classical anarchism. But classical anarchism, because it at least begins to rethink power — broadening the scope of analysis beyond both the state and the economy — retains its contemporary relevance where Marxism does not. A shared ‘anti-authoritarian ethos’ (Newman, 2007: 194) makes classical anarchism and post-structuralism appropriate partners, while Marxism is dismissed as incompatible with post-structuralism. Indeed, it is argued that to a great extent post-structuralism developed against Marxism: ‘thinkers in this tradition — including Foucault, Lyotard and Deleuze — were all deeply influenced by the political experience of May ’68, and they became critical of what they saw as the totalizing and universalizing logic of Marxist theory’ (Newman, 2007: 3). Whereas anarchism still has something to teach us, Marxism ‘is not nearly radical enough to confront adequately the exigencies of the postmodern condition’ (Call, 2002: 6). An opposition to Marxism therefore provides postanarchism with a point of contact with post-structuralism. It is true that this portrayal of post-structuralism as an anti-Marxist theory is often an implicit or undeveloped assumption within postanarchist writings — but this is perhaps because there is little textual support for the claim: as we shall see next, if one actually looks at what the post-structuralists say about Marx then one can see that they are very far from being anti-Marxist.  Read more @ The Anarchist Library

The poststructural anarchist. Todd May interviewed by Richard Marshall @ 3am Magazine - July 12th, 2013

The poststructural anarchist

Todd May interviewed by Richard Marshall @ 3:AM Magazine

Todd May is the poststructuralist anarchist who thinks anarchism is more than just a critique of the state, that there is more than one struggle, that Foucault, Deleuze and Lyotard are important, that postructuralism is elusive, that anarchism is bottom-up and liberalism is top-down, that ‘how might one live?’ is the down and dirty question, that Foucault’s thought will remain standing when the dust is settled, that what it means to be human is a matter of practices, that Ranciere gets him emotionally, that friendship offers a different model from neo-liberalism and that his conception is about resistance not cohesion. High Five!

3:AM: What made you become a philosopher? Were you always aware of a kind of crisis?

Todd May: Many philosophers I talk with seem to get their start in philosophy from a teacher, often a college professor, that turns them on to the subject. For me, it was different. I went to a high school in New York City during the late 1960s and early 1970s, where ideas and crisis were in the air. It was the kind of place where Melville, Faulkner, and Dostoyevsky, along with the Vietnam War, were regular staples of conversation. So early on I became interested in both ideas and political resistance. In college I studied psychology, but was never far from philosophy: I read Being and Time with a philosophy grad student. Another friend of mine, also a grad student in philosophy, gave me Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception as a graduation present. In the few years I took off between college and grad school, I read most of Merleau-Ponty’s work. Eventually I decided I wanted to go to grad school in clinical psychology, but wanted a phenomenologically oriented one, and so chose Duquesne University. But, as it happens, at the end of my first year there I was introduced to the work of Foucault and Deleuze, who raised unsettling questions for me about the entire project of psychotherapy. I pressed these questions in my classes at Duquesne, admittedly with the passion of which a person committed to ideas is capable, and at the end of my second year was informed that my funding was going to be cut off. So I spent a few more years reading and thinking about what is often called “poststructuralism,” and finally applied to Penn State, where I had the chance to study these thinkers more rigorously. A friend of mine who is a radical lawyer once asked me why I wanted to study philosophy if I was so interested in politics. My response, to which he offered me a mocking stare, was that I felt somehow that in order to understand and solve political problems I needed to be able to grasp their ontological underpinnings.

3:AM: You’ve written about and are associated with ‘poststructuralist anarchism.’ I think you see it as coming out of an awareness that political philosophy was in crisis following the fall of the Soviet Union which kind of made it official that Marxism was dead. Can you say something about how you understand this crisis give that for many – and yourself – the Soviet block was hardly a viable model for political change?

TM: For most traditional anarchists like Peter Kropotkin and Emma Goldman, the Soviet Union was a crisis almost from the beginning. They saw it as hierarchical in character, and in that way a continuation of the kinds of domination characteristic of capitalist society. In fact, earlier on, in his dispute with Marx, Mikhail Bakunin predicted that a Marxist takeover of the state would simply reproduce the hierarchical structure of social and political relations. AsThe Who said, “Here comes the new boss, same as the old boss.” This is where anarchism becomes associated with a critique of the state. My own reading of anarchism is, however, that it is much more than a critique of the state. It is a critique of domination in all its forms–political, economic, gender, racial, etc. So while the anarchists were certainly right about theSoviet Union, we should read their work as a more general critique of domination. Granted, this general critique is at times in the background of their work, but it is nevertheless recognizable. In this way, they differ importantly from Marx. For Marx, there is an Archimedean point of social change since there is a central point of domination: the extraction of surplus value from the workers. Therefore, there is really only a single struggle: the struggle for the ownership of means of production.

By contrast, for the anarchists there is no single struggle. As the British anarchist Colin Ward once said, there are always a series of struggles along a variety of fronts. This is where the poststructuralists, and especially Foucault, intersect with anarchism. Foucault traces historically different ways in which people become dominated. He does not reduce them to a single site or single type, but seeks to understand them in their specificity. The disciplinary power he writes about in Discipline and Punish is different from the role of sexuality he describes in the first volume of his history of sexuality, which in turn is different from the neoliberal governmentality he addresses in his lectures  The Birth of Biopolitics.  So while the nineteenth and early twentieth century anarchists were able to resist the reductionism of a Marxist program, later thinkers like Foucault, Deleuze, and Lyotard offer perspectives for theorizing the irreducibility of political relations and political struggle. That allows them to, among other things, take on board the feminist and anti-racist understandings that developed over the course of the twentieth century.

Where does that leave us in thinking about our politics? Broadly with a bottom-up view of political struggle and change. Rather than seeking the Archimedean point of struggle, we must analyze the different and intersecting facets of domination in their particularity, and struggle against them. This does not preclude top-down theorizing altogether, but it offers a framework for political reflection and action that has been neglected in much of political philosophy.

3:AM: So poststructuralist anarchism is to be understood as being framed by French poststructuralist and in particular the works of Foucault, Deleuze and Lyotard. Before coming to this trio and how they seem to offer a viable political philosophy and an alternative to Marxism can you tell us what you understand by ‘post structuralism’ and by ‘anarchism’ in this context?

TM: Poststructuralism is an elusive term. It is a bit chronological, like post-impressionism, and a bit conceptual. As chronological, it refers to the theories that arose in the wake of the heyday of structuralism. We might think of recent French philosophical history in terms of three successive movements, at least up until around the mid-1980s. There is the existentialism of the forties and fifties, which is rejected by the structuralism of the late 1950s and 1960s. And then, later in the 1960s, poststructuralism arises in part as a response to structuralism but not as dismissive of it as structuralism is of existentialism. This chronological view is a bit oversimplified. For instance, the structuralist Lacan was writing well before the 1950s, and Deleuze’s influential book on Nietzsche was published in 1962. But if we think of the prominence of the movements, this chronology offers a rough idea. Conceptually, structuralism rejects the primacy of the subject in existentialism, seeing the subject as constituted more than constituting. But for the structuralists, what constitutes the subject is more or less monolithic. For Lacan, it is the unconscious, for Levi-Strauss the structures of kinship, and for Althusser, at least in the last instance, it is the economy. Poststructuralism rejects these monolithic accounts of the structuring of the subject. For Foucault, the subject is a product of the intersection of particular practices of knowledge and power. For Deleuze, whatever actuality the subject presents carries within it a virtual field of difference that can make it very much other than it is now. Lyotard, in his turn, takes up themes in both Foucault and Deleuze during different points in his career, but in his major work The Differend offers a view of the subject as both constituted and constituting through a variety of different discursive practices. I haven’t mentioned Derrida here, who is often thought of as the central poststructuralist. However, even though he does not figure in my poststructuralist anarchism, he can also be seen as a figure who sees the subject as partially constituted by something that lies outside of it and that cannot be brought into conceptual presence, like Deleuze. Although his view of what it is that does the constituting is diverges from Deleuze’s.

As for anarchism, it is the historical movement that, theoretically at least, is rooted in the work of William Godwin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, articulated most clearly in the work of Bakunin, Kropotkin, Goldman, and others. It is often, as I said, associated with an anti-statist position, but in my view is better defined as a commitment to two positions: a critique of domination in all its forms and an embrace of bottom-up organizing and resistance. Viewing things this way leaves aside another strain of anarchist thought–the individualist anarchism associated with Benjamin Tucker and Max Stirner, and whose modern proponents are libertarians like Robert Nozick. However, the term anarchism is commonly thought to apply to the former more than the latter.

3:AM: Lyotard writes about the postmodern’ rather than the poststructioralist condition. Is this a distinction that matters?

TM: I have never liked the term postmodernism. If poststructuralism is a difficult term to define, then trying to capture postmodernism is like trying to stabilize mercury with your thumb. My understanding is that it was coined around 1979 by Christopher Jencks in regard to architecture. In the arts, it is often seen as a view that there is nothing new to be done, so art must recycle old themes and styles, often although not always in an ironic style. And one can see this in certain artists, like David Salle and Julian Schnabel. People claim this label for David Foster Wallace as well, but if the ironic recycling of old themes and styles is characteristic of literature, then why isn’t Joyce a postmodernist? Moreover, I don’t see any domination of what is called postmodern literature in the 1980s similar to what happened in painting or perhaps in architecture at that time. In philosophy, outside of Lyotard’s work, it is practically nonexistent. For Lyotard, postmodernism was largely what he called the rejection of grand narratives, single overarching stories that explain, say, who we are and how we got here. As a definition of postmodernism, it has resonances with my definition of poststructuralism. However, even here there are complications. For Foucault, for instance, what might be called micropolitics is a way of analyzing our historical situation, whereas for Lyotard it sometimes seems like an alternative political position to be embraced. That is, while for Foucault the move to micropolitics is analytical, for Lyotard it sometimes comes off as normative.

3:AM: What are the advantages of this approach to say Rawlsian ‘difference principle’ approaches to political theory, or Nozick’s or, say, the Critical Theorists of Adorno, Lukacs, and Habermas?

TM: The anarchist angle of approach is quite different from that of liberal theory on the one hand and Critical Theory on the other. At a first go, we might say that if anarchism is a bottom-up approach, liberalism is top-down. That is to say, liberalism starts with a set of principles (different principles for different theorists) that focus on the state, where anarchism starts with the people in the polity and asks what kind of social relations ought to obtain between and among them. This distinction isn’t entirely clean, however. It seems to me that both Rawls and anarchists share some important moral principles about how people should be treated–or if sharing is too strong, then at least there is some important overlap. Rawls, like most liberals, then tries to conceive a state that can meet the demands of those principles. Anarchists are leery of the focus on the state. They are concerned that the state, being an important site of power relationships, is not the proper focus for enacting those principles. So they turn to the people themselves, asking how people can organize themselves into a just polity.

For my own part, I think that liberalism, especially in the hands of people like Rawls and Sen, is often correct at the level of moral principle but often naive about power. This naivete happens at two levels. First, they fail to recognize many of the power games that occur at the level of the state and that preclude meeting the moral principles that they set out. In fact, if you look at many movements for justice, it is often at the level of the people that they begin: the state often does not create justice but responds to demands for justice from its people. Second, they do not recognize what seems to me a central insight of Foucault’s work: that power often works not by restriction but by production. That is, power helps produce who we are. So, for instance, one of the reasons people conform to and even endorse unjust social arrangements is that they have been inculcated into practices of normality that make these social arrangements seem natural. (That is a one-sentence and entirely superficial summary of Discipline and Punish.) This is not to say that there’s a conspiracy involved. Rather, it is to say that power often operates at the level of our daily practices, making us who we are. If this is right, then political resistance also has to focus on those practices, that is, it has to be bottom-up.

That said, unlike many anarchists, I do not oppose the state in principle. I think it is less effective in creating change than liberal theory would allow, but there does seem to me an important place for thinking about the justice of the state. So while there are advantages to the anarchist–or poststructuralist anarchist–approach to political thought, I do not believe that it is a substitute for liberalism.

As far as Critical Theory goes (and let’s keep in mind that the recent work of Habermas is probably more liberal that Critical Theoretical), it has much insight to offer. However, that insight is embedded in a largely Marxist perspective that shares the difficulties of being a single explainer theory of the kind poststructuralism rejects. So the advantage of anarchism to Critical Theory lies in its ability to take on board the insights the latter offers while not reducing political thought to the Marxist framework.

Read full interview @ 3:AM Mag

Dr. May took his Ph.D. from Penn State University in 1989, and has been at Clemson (after a brief stint at Indiana University of Pennsylvania) since 1991. He specializes in Continental philosophy, especially recent French philosophy. He has authored ten philosophical books, focusing on the philosophical work of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière. His book The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism has been influential in recent progressive political thought, and his work on Rancière is among the first in English. May’s writings also seek to bridge the gap between "Anglo-American" and "Continental" styles of philosophy that developed in the early twentieth century. His teaching interests are varied; he has found himself teaching classes as diverse as Anarchism, The Thought of Merleau-Ponty, Resistance and Alterity in Contemporary Culture, Secular Ethics in a Materialist Age, and Postmodernism and Art.