This might be a pretty short blog, but I was on my way to do something else and I was suddenly compelled to kind of get my thoughts out about anarchism. I have a feeling that I will want to use them in the future.
Now your hackles may be up, and I would like to calm you down a little bit. I don’t plan to go into a fiery tirade against anarchism. I want to lay this out mainly as an explanation of the issues I have with anarchism as a theory or teleology (/end goal). That way I can explore this issue more and reference back to something concrete.
The image I have of anarchism is one similar, I think, to the idealized Marxist end goal: a stateless society. The anarchist concept is distinct, I believe, though I don’t know the specifics; most of my reading has been on socialist theory and I have not yet engaged much with anarchist theory. The reason for this is fairly straightforward. While Marxists believe the best society is a stateless society, they are not afraid to work within state structures and to employ the state to their end. Anarchists, in my view, have always opposed this on fundamental theoretical-philosophical grounds.
I bring this up because I actually disagree with the Marxists about the desirability of a stateless society, and for one reason: I think the existence of an advanced society without a state is categorically impossible. That is to say, you must have a state. Any society that we can recognize as a society will have a state; a society without a state would not be able to function in a cohesive manner.
It would be easy to read this as an admission of a kind of necessary oppression in human relations. We need to have something on top of us forcing us to do this and that. But this isn’t what I’m suggesting. In my view, anarchists and Marxists understand the state as a cockroach, or a nest or tribe of cockroaches: a discrete entity separate from all others and which somehow resists all attempts to stamp it out, which seems to survive no matter what, but which can, at some point, be snuffed out.
This is not what the state is. It is not even the same kind of thing. It cannot be thought of as a creature or even, properly, an entity. Let us say that a society is like a house, and different societies are like different houses. We can recognize principles of architecture in each house, principles which each house has to adhere to in order to stay upright and to provide shelter etc., even when these principles are arrived at by entirely different means, with different materials, and so on. The state is like the construction of a house. It is not that a state is imposed upon a society. The state is what we recognize as the functional machinery that allows the state-society to act in a concerted manner.
Seen in this light, the state will never be gotten rid of because any society which permits cooperation can be described as having a state. The notion of a stateless society appears, in the most generous interpretation, to assume a series of ad hoc and relatively temporary associations which will spring spontaneously into being. This, I believe, is nonsense. Such a loose network of associations will at least require some level of base coordination to lay the ground work, some plan for organization, some criteria for coming together. Okay, then. That is the state.
While the state is generally oppressive, perhaps has been uniformly oppressive throughout history, this does not imply that the state must be oppressive. Rather, the state is oppressive because it is wielded by an oppressive class. As I lay out in my theory of the general crisis, the constituents are not all of us; constituency is not the same thing as citizenry. Citizenry is actually a kind of “fake constituency”; it purports to extend constituency to those who have it while not actually doing so. True constituents have historically been aristocrats, military leaders, state officials, and so on. And often, it isn’t the entire class, but only select members of those social classes which can truly be defined as constituents. The state is made up of constituents, and it serves constituents. If that is the case, the mass of people in a society who are not constituents—the subjects—are instead antagonized by the state, which views the subjects as rivals for enjoying/extracting benefit from the society and its resources.
But this is not the only conceivable construction of a society. I believe that a highly horizontal society can be constructed, one in which the vast majority are in fact constituents, and the only ones who are not constituents are those who cannot make decisions for themselves, such as infants and very young children. In such a society where power and influence is actually properly divided and recirculated, the state would cease to be an oppressive construction and would by its nature become the vehicle for cooperation between people and groups.
I have often said that I “caucus with communists”, and this is basically what it boils down to. I believe that communists are more likely to agree with this concept of what the future of society should be than anarchists, because even though communists also profess a stateless society, they are at least open to the idea of the state as a positive influence. Because I see anarchists as fundamentally misguided in their rejection of the state as a concept, I’ve always found it hard to sympathize theoretically with them.
These ideas of mine may change in the future. Writing them down and putting them out is often the first step to a longer-term investigation. What I hope to find is that the difference in this area is largely semantic, and that anarchist thinking about a post-capitalist society will—while eschewing the terminology of “the state”—have valuable insights into creating such a society in a way that will allow it not only to sustain itself but also to thrive against the challenges which capitalism will continue to pose.
So that’s where I am with it. I don’t really have more to say right now. Goodbye.