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Title: The Network of Domination Author: Wolfi Landstreicher Date: 2005 Language: en Topics: alienation, anti-work, atheist, economics, prison, religion, technology
The following essays examine several of the various institutions,
structures, systems and relationships of domination and exploitation
which define our current existence. These essays are not intended to be
comprehensive nor to be final answers, but rather to be part of a
discussion that I hope will go on in anarchist circles aimed at
developing a specifically anarchist theoretical exploration of the
reality we are facing. A great deal of the analysis that currently goes
on in anarchist circles is dependent on marxist or postmodernist
categories and concepts. These may indeed be useful, but to simply
accept them a priori, without examining social reality in terms of our
own specifically anarchist revolutionary project indicates an
intellectual laziness. So I hope we can begin to discuss and examine the
world in terms of our own projects, dreams and desires, certainly
grasping all analyses that we find useful, but in order to create our
own theoretical and practical revolutionary project.
It is not uncommon today, even in anarchist circles, to hear the state
described as a mere servant of the multinationals, the IMF, the World
Bank and other international economic institutions. According to this
perspective, the state is not so much the holder and arbiter of power as
merely a coordinator of the institutions of social control through which
corporate economic rulers maintain their power. From this it is possible
to draw conclusions that are quite detrimental to the development of an
anarchist revolutionary project. If the state is merely a political
structure for maintaining stability that is currently in the service of
the great economic powers rather than a power in its own right with its
own interests maintaining itself through domination and repression, then
it could be reformed democratically made into an institutional
opposition to the power of the multinationals. It would simply be a
matter of “the People” becoming a counter-power and taking control of
the state. Such an idea seems to lie behind the absurd notion of certain
contemporary anti-capitalists that we should support the interests of
nation-states against the international economic institutions. A clearer
understanding of the state is necessary to counteract this trend.
The state could not exist if our capacity to determine the conditions of
our own existence as individuals in free association with each other had
not been taken from us. This dispossession is the fundamental social
alienation which provides the basis for all domination and exploitation.
This alienation can rightly be traced to the rise of property (I say
property as such and not just private property, because from very early
on a great deal of property was institutional — owned by the state).
Property can be defined as the exclusive claim by certain individuals
and institutions over tools, spaces and materials necessary for
existence, making them inaccessible to others. This claim is enforced
through explicit or implicit violence. No longer free to grasp whatever
is necessary for creating their lives, the dispossessed are forced to
conform to conditions determined by the self-proclaimed owners of
property in order to maintain their existence, which thus becomes an
existence in servitude. The state is the institutionalization of this
process which transforms the alienation of the capacity of individuals
to determine the conditions of their own existence into the accumulation
of power into the hands of a few.
It is futile and unnecessary to try to determine whether the
accumulation of power or the accumulation of wealth had priority when
property and the state first arose. Certainly now they are thoroughly
integrated. It does seem likely that the state was the first institution
to accumulate property in order to create a surplus under its control, a
surplus that gave it real power over the social conditions under which
its subjects had to exist. This surplus allowed it to develop the
various institutions through which it enforced its power: military
institutions, religious/ideological institutions, bureaucratic
institutions, police institutions and so on. Thus, the state, from its
origins, can be thought of as a capitalist in its own right, with its
own specific economic interests that serve precisely to maintain its
power over the conditions of social existence.
Like any capitalist, the state provides a specific service at a price.
Or more accurately, the state provides two integrally related services:
protection of property and social peace. It offers protection to private
property through a system of laws that define and limit it and through
the force of arms by which these laws are enforced. In fact, private
property can only be said to truly exist when the institutions of the
state are there to protect it from those who would simply take what they
want — without this institutional protection, there is merely the
conflict of individual interests. This is why Stirner described private
property as a form of social or state property to be held in contempt by
unique ones. The state also provides protection for the “commons” from
external raiders and from that which the state determines to be abuse by
its subjects through law and armed force. As the sole protector of all
property within its borders — a role maintained by the state’s monopoly
on violence — it establishes concrete control over all this property
(relative, of course, to its real capacity for exercising that control).
Thus the cost of this protection consists not only of taxes and various
forms of compulsory service, but also of conformity to roles necessary
to the social apparatus that maintains the state and acceptance of, at
best, a relationship of vassalage to the state, which may claim any
property or enclose any common space “in the common interest” at any
time. The existence of property requires the state for protection and
the existence of the state maintains property, but always ultimately as
state property regardless of how “private” it supposedly is.
The implied violence of law and the explicit violence of the military
and the police through which the state protects property are the same
means by which it maintains social peace. The violence by which people
are dispossessed of their capacity to create life on their own terms is
nothing less than social war which manifests daily in the usually
gradual (but sometimes as quick as a police bullet) slaughter of those
who are exploited, excluded and marginalized by the social order. When
people under attack begin to recognize their enemy, they frequently act
to counter-attack. The state’s task of maintaining social peace is thus
an act of social war on the part of the rulers against the ruled — the
suppression and prevention of any such counter-attack. The violence of
those who rule against those they rule is inherent in social peace. But
a social peace based solely on brute force is always precarious. It is
necessary for the state to implant the idea in people’s heads that they
have a stake in the continued existence of the state and of the social
order it maintains. This may take place as in ancient Egypt where
religious propaganda maintaining the divinity of the Pharaoh justified
the extortion by which he took possession of all the surplus grain
making the populace absolutely dependent on his good will in times of
famine. Or it may take the form of institutions for democratic
participation which create a more subtle form of blackmail in which we
are obliged to participate if we want to complain, but in which we are
equally obliged to accept “the will of the people” if we do participate.
But, behind these forms of blackmail, whether subtle or blatant, the
arms, the prisons, the soldiers and the cops are always there, and this
is the essence of the state and of social peace. The rest is just
veneer.
Though the state can be looked upon as capitalist (in the sense that it
accumulated power by accumulating surplus wealth in a dialectic
process), capitalism as we know it with its “private” economic
institutions is a relatively recent development traceable to the
beginning of the modern era. This development has certainly produced
significant changes in the dynamics of power since a significant portion
of the ruling class are now not directly part of the state apparatus
except as citizens, like all those they exploit. But these changes do
not mean that the state has been subjugated to the various global
economic institutions or that it has become peripheral to the
functioning of power.
If the state is itself a capitalist, with its own economic interests to
pursue and maintain, then the reason that it works to maintain
capitalism is not that it has been subordinated to other capitalist
institutions, but because in order to maintain its power it must
maintain its economic strength as a capitalist among capitalists.
Specific weaker states end up being subjugated to global economic
interests for the same reason that smaller firms are, because they do
not have the strength to maintain their own interests. The great states
play at least as significant a role in determining global economic
policies as the great corporations. It is, in fact, the arms of the
state that will enforce these policies.
The power of the state resides in its legal and institutional monopoly
on violence. This gives the state a very concrete material power upon
which the global economic institutions are dependent. Institutions such
as the World Bank and the IMF do not only include delegates from all the
major state powers in all decision-making processes; they also depend
upon the military force of the most powerful states to impose their
policies, the threat of physical violence that must always stand behind
economic extortion if it is to function. With the real power of violence
in their hands, the great states are hardly going to function as mere
servants to the global economic institutions. Rather in proper
capitalist form, their relationship is one of mutual extortion accepted
for the benefit of the entire ruling class.
In addition to its monopoly on violence, the state also controls many of
the networks and institutions necessary to commerce and production.
Highway systems, railway systems, ports, airports, satellite and fiber
optic systems necessary to communications and information networks are
generally state-run and always subject to state control. Scientific and
technological research necessary to new developments in production is
largely dependent on the facilities of state-run universities and the
military.
Thus corporate power depends upon state power to maintain itself. It is
not a matter of the subjugation of one sort of power to another, but the
development of an integral system of power that manifests itself as the
two-headed hydra of capital and the state, a system that functions as a
whole to maintain domination and exploitation, the conditions imposed by
the ruling class for the maintenance of our existence. Within this
context, institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank are best
understood as means by which the various state and corporate powers
coordinate their activities in order to maintain unity of domination
over the exploited classes in the midst of the competition of economic
and political interests. Thus the state does not serve these
institutions, but rather these institutions serve the interests of the
most powerful states and capitalists.
It is, thus, not possible for those of us who seek the destruction of
the social order to play the nation-state against the capitalists and
gain anything by it. Their greatest interest is the same, to maintain
the current order of things. For our part it is necessary to attack the
state and capitalism with all of our might, recognizing them as the
two-headed hydra of domination and exploitation that we must destroy if
we are ever to take back our capacity to create the conditions of our
existence.
Everything has a price, the measurement of its value as a quantity
determined in terms of a general equivalent. Nothing has value in
itself. All value is determined in relationship to the market — and this
includes the value of our lives, of our selves. Our lives have been
divided into units of measured time that we are compelled to sell in
order to buy back our survival in the form of bits of the stolen lives
of others that production has transformed into commodities for sale.
This is economic reality.
This horrendous alienation has its basis in the intertwining of three of
the most fundamental institutions of this society: property, commodity
exchange and work. The integral relationship between these three creates
the system through which the ruling class extracts the wealth that is
necessary for maintaining their power. I am speaking here of the
economy.
The social order of domination and exploitation has its origins in a
fundamental social alienation, the origins of which are a matter for
intriguing speculation, but the nature of which is quite clear. The vast
multitudes of people have been robbed of their capacity to determine the
conditions of their own existence, to create the lives and relationships
they desire, so that the few at the top can accumulate power and wealth
and turn the totality of social existence to their own benefit. In order
for this to occur, people have to be robbed of the means by which they
were able to fulfill their needs and their desires, their dreams and
aspirations. This could only occur with the enclosing of certain areas
and the hoarding of certain things so that they are no longer accessible
to everyone. But such enclosures and hoards would be meaningless unless
some one had the means to prevent them from being raided — a force to
keep others from taking what they want without asking permission. Thus
with such accumulation it becomes necessary to create an apparatus to
protect it. Once established this system leaves the majority in a
position of dependence on the few who have carried out this
appropriation of wealth and power. To access any of the accumulated
wealth the multitudes are forced to exchange a major portion of the
goods they produce. Thus, part of the activity they originally carried
out for themselves must now be carried out for their rulers, simply in
order to guarantee their survival. As the power of the few increases,
they come to control more and more of the resources and the products of
labor until finally the activity of the exploited is nothing but labor
to create commodities in exchange for a wage which they then spend to
buy back that commodity. Of course, the full development of this process
is slow in part because it is met with resistance at every turn. There
are still parts of the earth and parts of life that have not been
enclosed by the state and the economy, but most of our existence has
been stamped with a price tag, and its cost has been increasing
geometrically for ten thousand years.
So the state and the economy arose together as aspects of the alienation
described above. They constitute a two-headed monster imposing an
impoverished existence upon us, in which our lives are transformed into
a struggle for survival. This is as true in the affluent countries as in
those which have been impoverished by capitalist expropriation. What
defines life as mere survival is neither the dearth of goods available
at a price nor the lack of the means to buy those goods. Rather when one
is forced to sell one’s life away, to give one’s energy to a project
that is not of one’s choosing, but that serves to benefit another who
tells one what to do, for a meager compensation that allows one to buy a
few necessities and pleasures — this is merely surviving, no matter how
many things one may be able to buy. Life is not an accumulation of
things, it is a qualitative relationship to the world.
This coerced selling of one’s life, this wage-slavery, reduces life to a
commodity, an existence divided into measured pieces which are sold for
so much a piece. Of course to the worker, who has been blackmailed into
selling her life in this way the wage will never seem to be enough. How
could it be when what has really been lost is not so much the allotted
units of time as the quality of life itself? In a world where lives are
bought and sold in exchange for survival, where the beings and things
that make up the natural world are simply goods for sale to be exploited
in the production of other goods for sale, the value of things and the
value of life becomes a number, a measurement, and that measurement is
always in dollars or pesos or euros or yen — that is to say in money.
But no amount of money and no amount of the goods money buys can
compensate for the emptiness of such an existence for the fact that this
sort of valuation can only exist by draining the quality, the energy,
the wonder from life.
The struggle against the rule of the economy — which must go hand in
hand with the struggle against the state — must begin with a refusal of
this quantification of existence that can only occur when our lives are
stolen away from us. It is the struggle to destroy the institutions of
property, commodity exchange and work — not in order to make people
dependent on new institutions in which the rule of survival takes a more
charitable face, but so that we may all reappropriate our lives as our
own and pursue our needs, desires, dreams and aspirations in all their
immeasurable singularity.
Class
The social relationships of class and exploitation are not simple.
Workerist conceptions, which are based on the idea of an objectively
revolutionary class that is defined in terms of its relationship to the
means of production, ignore the mass of those world-wide whose lives are
stolen from them by the current social order but who can find no place
within its productive apparatus. Thus these conceptions end up
presenting a narrow and simplistic understanding of exploitation and
revolutionary transformation. In order to carry out a revolutionary
struggle against exploitation, we need to develop an understanding of
class as it actually exists in the world without seeking any guarantees.
At its most basic, class society is one in which there are those who
rule and those who are ruled, those who exploit and those who are
exploited. Such a social order can only arise when people lose their
capacity to determine the conditions of their own existence. Thus, the
essential quality shared by the exploited is their dispossession, their
loss of the capacity to make and carry out the basic decisions about how
they live.
The ruling class is defined in terms of its own project of accumulating
power and wealth. While there are certainly significant conflicts within
the ruling class in terms of specific interests and real competition for
control of resources and territory, this overarching project aimed at
the control of social wealth and power, and thus of the lives and
relationships of every living being, provides this class with a unified
positive project.
The exploited class has no such positive project to define it. Rather it
is defined in terms of what is done to it, what is taken away from it.
Being uprooted from the ways of life that they had known and created
with their peers, the only community that is left to the people who make
up this heterogeneous class is that provided by capital and the state —
the community of work and commodity exchange decorated with whatever
nationalist, religious, ethnic, racial or subcultural ideological
constructions through which the ruling order creates identities into
which to channel individuality and revolt. The concept of a positive
proletarian identity, of a single, unified, positive proletarian
project, has no basis in reality since what defines one as proletarian
is precisely that her life has been stolen from her, that he has been
transformed into a pawn in the projects of the rulers.
The workerist conception of the proletarian project has its origins in
the revolutionary theories of Europe and the United States (particularly
certain marxist and syndicalist theories). By the late 19^(th) century,
both western Europe and the eastern United States were well on their way
to being thoroughly industrialized, and the dominant ideology of
progress equated technological development with social liberation. This
ideology manifested in revolutionary theory as the idea that the
industrial working class was objectively revolutionary because it was in
the position to take over the means of production developed under
capitalism (which, as products of progress, were assumed to be
inherently liberating) and turn them to the service of the human
community. By ignoring most of the world (along with a significant
portion of the exploited in the industrialized areas), revolutionary
theorists were thus able to invent a positive project for the
proletariat, an objective historical mission. That it was founded on the
bourgeois ideology of progress was ignored. In my opinion, the luddites
had a much clearer perspective, recognizing that industrialism was
another one of the masters’ tools for dispossessing them. With good
reason, they attacked the machines of mass production.
The process of dispossession has long since been accomplished in the
West (though of course it is a process that is going on at all times
even here), but in much of the South of the world it is still in its
early stages. Since the process started in the West though, there have
been some significant changes in the functioning of the productive
apparatus. Skilled factory positions have largely disappeared, and what
is needed in a worker is flexibility, the capacity to adapt — in other
words, the capacity to be an interchangeable cog in the machine of
capital. In addition, factories tend to require far fewer workers to
carry on the productive process, both because of developments in
technology and management techniques that have allowed a more
decentralized productive process and because increasingly the type of
work necessary in factories is largely just monitoring and maintaining
machines.
On a practical level this means that we are all, as individuals,
expendable to the production process, because we are all replaceable —
that lovely capitalist egalitarianism in which we are all equal to zero.
In the first world, this has had the effect of pushing increasing
numbers of the exploited into increasingly precarious positions: day
labor, temporary work, service sector jobs, chronic unemployment, the
black market and other forms of illegality, homelessness and prison. The
steady job with its guarantee of a somewhat stable life — even if one’s
life is not one’s own — is giving way to a lack of guarantees where the
illusions provided by a moderately comfortable consumerism can no longer
hide that life under capitalism is always lived on the edge of
catastrophe.
In the third world, people who have been able to create their own
existence, if sometimes a difficult one, are finding their land and
their other means for doing so being pulled out from under them as the
machines of capital quite literally invade their homes and eat away any
possibility to continue living directly off their own activity. Torn
from their lives and lands, they are forced to move to the cities where
there is little employment for them. Shantytowns develop around the
cities, often with populations higher than the city proper. Without any
possibility of steady employment, the inhabitants of these shantytowns
are compelled to form a black market economy to survive, but this also
still serves the interests of capital. Others, in desperation, choose
immigration, risking imprisonment in refugee camps and centers for
undocumented foreigners in the hope of improving their condition.
So, along with dispossession, precariousness and expendability are
increasingly the shared traits of those who make up the exploited class
worldwide. If, on the one hand, this means that this commodity
civilization is creating in its midst a class of barbarians who truly
have nothing to lose in bringing it down (and not in the ways imagined
by the old workerist ideologues), on the other hand, these traits do not
in themselves provide any basis for a positive project of the
transformation of life. The rage provoked by the miserable conditions of
life that this society imposes can easily be channeled into projects
that serve the ruling order or at least the specific interest of one or
another of the rulers. The examples of situations in the past few
decades in which the rage of the exploited has been harnessed to fuel
nationalist, racialist or religious projects that serve only to
reinforce domination are too many to count. The possibility of the end
of the current social order is as great as it ever was, but the faith in
its inevitability can no longer pretend to have an objective basis.
But in order to truly understand the revolutionary project and begin the
project of figuring out how to carry it out (and to developing an
analysis of how the ruling class manages to deflect the rage of those it
exploits into its own projects), it is necessary to realize that
exploitation does not merely occur in terms of the production of wealth,
but also in terms of the reproduction of social relationships.
Regardless of the position of any particular proletarian in the
productive apparatus, it is in the interests of the ruling class that
everyone would have a role, a social identity, that serves in the
reproduction of social relationships. Race, gender, ethnicity, religion,
sexual preference, subculture — all of these things may, indeed, reflect
very real and significant differences, but all are social constructions
for channeling these differences into roles useful for the maintenance
of the current social order. In the most advanced areas of the current
society where the market defines most relationships, identities largely
come to be defined in terms of the commodities that symbolize them, and
interchangeability becomes the order of the day in social reproduction,
just as it is in economic production. And it is precisely because
identity is a social construction and increasingly a saleable commodity
that it must be dealt with seriously by revolutionaries, analyzed
carefully in its complexity with the precise aim of moving beyond these
categories to the point that our differences (including those that this
society would define in terms of race, gender, ethnicity, etc.) are the
reflection of each of us as singular individuals.
Because there is no common positive project to be found in our condition
as proletarians — as the exploited and dispossessed — our project must
be the struggle to destroy our proletarian condition, to put an end to
our dispossession. The essence of what we have lost is not control over
the means of production or of material wealth; it is our lives
themselves, our capacity to create our existence in terms of our own
needs and desires. Thus, our struggle finds its terrain everywhere, at
all times. Our aim is to destroy everything that keeps our lives from
us: capital, the state, the industrial and post-industrial technological
apparatus, work, sacrifice, ideology, every organization that tries to
usurp our struggle, in short, all systems of control.
In the very process of carrying out this struggle in the only way that
we can carry it out — outside of and against all formality and
institutionalization — we begin to develop new ways of relating based on
self-organization, a commonality based on the unique differences that
define each of us as individuals whose freedom expands with the freedom
of the other. It is here in revolt against our proletarian condition
that we find that shared positive project that is different for each one
of us: the collective struggle for individual realization.
“What is the bombing of a judge, the kidnapping of an industrialist,
the hanging of a politician, the shooting of a cop,
the looting of a supermarket, the burning of a commissioner’s office,
the stoning of a journalist,
the heckling of an intellectual, the thrashing of an artist,
in the face of the deadly alienation of our existence,
the much too early sound of the alarm clock,
the traffic jam on the expressway,
the goods for sale lined up on the shelves?”
The alarm clock disrupts your sleep again — as always, much too early.
You drag yourself from the warmth of your bed to the bathroom for a
shower, a shave and a shit, then run down to the kitchen where you wash
down a pastry or, if you have the time, some toast and eggs with a cup
of coffee. Then you rush out the door to battle traffic jams or crowds
in the subway until you arrive... at work, where your day is spent in
tasks not of your choosing, in compulsory association with others
involved in related tasks, the primary aim of which is the continued
reproduction of the social relationships that constrain you to survive
in this manner.
But this is not all. In compensation, you receive a wage, a sum of money
that (after paying rent and bills) you must take out to shopping centers
to buy food, clothes, various necessities and entertainment. Though this
is considered your “free time” as opposed to “work time”, it too is
compulsory activity that only secondarily guarantees your survival, its
primary purpose again being to reproduce the current social order. And
for most people, moments free of these constraints are fewer and fewer.
According to the ruling ideology of this society, this existence is the
result of a social contract between equals — equals before the law that
is. The worker, it is said, contracts to sell her labor to the boss for
a mutually agreed upon wage. But can a contract be considered free and
equal when one side holds all the power?
If we look at this contract more closely, it becomes clear that it is no
contract at all, but the most extreme and violent extortion. This is
currently exposed most blatantly at the margins of capitalist society
where people who have lived for centuries (or, in some cases, millennia)
on their own terms find their capacity to determine the conditions of
their existence ripped away by the bulldozers, chainsaws, mining
equipment and so on of the world’s rulers. But it is a process that has
been going on for centuries, a process involving blatant, large-scale
theft of land and life sanctioned and carried out by the ruling class.
Bereft of the means for determining the conditions of their own
existence, the exploited cannot be said, in honesty, to be contracting
freely and equally with their exploiters. It is clearly a case of
blackmail.
And what are the terms of this blackmail? The exploited are forced to
sell the time of their life to their exploiters in exchange for
survival. And this is the real tragedy of work. The social order of work
is based on the imposed opposition between life and survival. The
question of how one will get by suppresses that of how one wants to
live, and in time this all seems natural and one narrows one’s dreams
and desires to the things that money can buy.
However, the conditions of the world of work do not just apply to those
with jobs. One can easily see how the unemployed searching for a job
from fear of homelessness and hunger is caught up in the world of work.
But the same holds for the recipient of state aid whose survival depends
on the existence of the assistance bureaucracy... and even for those for
whom the avoidance of getting a job has become such a priority that
one’s decisions come to center around scams, shoplifting, dumpster
diving — all the various ways to get by without a job. In other words,
activities that could be fine means for supporting a life project become
ends in themselves, making mere survival one’s life project. How,
really, does his differ from a job?
But what is the real basis of the power behind this extortion that is
the world of work? Of course, there are laws and courts, police and
military forces, fines and prisons, the fear of hunger and homelessness
— all very real and significant aspects of domination. But even the
state’s force of arms can only succeed in carrying out its task because
people submit. And here is the real basis of all domination — the
submission of the slaves, their decision to accept the security of known
misery and servitude rather than risk the unknown of freedom, their
willingness to accept a guaranteed but colorless survival in exchange
for the possibility of truly living that offers no guarantees.
So in order to put an end to one’s slavery, to move beyond the limits of
merely getting by, it is necessary to make a decision to refuse to
submit; it is necessary to begin to reappropriate one’s life here and
now. Such a project inevitably places one in conflict with the entire
social order of work; so the project of reappropriating one’s existence
must also be the project of destroying work. To clarify, when I say
“work”, I do not mean the activity by which one creates the means of
one’s existence (which ideally would never be separate from simply
living) but rather a social relationship that transforms this activity
into a sphere separate from one’s life and places it in the service of
the ruling order so that the activity, in fact, ceases to have any
direct relationship to the creation of one’s existence, but rather only
maintains it in the realm of mere survival (at whatever level of
consumption) through a series of mediations of which property, money and
commodity exchange are among the most significant. This is the world we
must destroy in the process of taking back our lives, and the necessity
of this destruction makes the project of the reappropriation of our
lives one with the projects of insurrection and social revolution.
“Criticizing technology [...] means considering its general framework,
seeing it not simply is an assemblage of machinery, but as a social
relationship, a system; it means understanding that a technological
instrument reflects the society that produces it, and that its
introduction changes relations between individuals. Criticizing
technology means refusing to subordinate human activity to profit.”
(from At Daggers Drawn)
Technology does not develop in a vacuum, independently of the social
relationships of the order in which it develops. It is the product of a
context, and so inevitably reflects that context. Thus, the claim that
technology is neutral has no basis. It could not possibly be any more
neutral that the other systems developed to guarantee the reproduction
of the current social order — government, commodity exchange, marriage
and the family, private property, ... Thus a serious revolutionary
analysis necessarily needs to include a critical assessment of
technology.
By technology, I do not mean simply tools, machines or even “an
assemblage of machinery” as individual entities, but rather and
integrated system of techniques, machinery, people and materials
designed to reproduce the social relationships that prolong and advance
its existence. In order to be clear from the start, I am not saying that
technology produces social relationships, but rather that it is designed
to reproduce them in accordance with the needs of the ruling system.
Before capitalism came to dominate social relationships, tools,
techniques and even a number of machines had been created and applied to
specific tasks. There were even some systematic applications of
techniques and machinery that could be considered technological in the
fullest sense of the word. It is interesting to note that these latter
were applied most fully precisely where power required strict order — in
monasteries, in the torture chambers of the inquisition, in galleys, in
the creation of monuments to power, in the bureaucratic, military and
police structures of powerful empires like dynastic China. But they
remained largely peripheral to the daily life of the vast majority of
people who tended to use tools and techniques that they created
themselves as individuals or within their small community.
With the rise of capitalism, the necessity for the large-scale
extraction and development of resources led to the bloody and ruthless
expropriation of all that had been shared communally by the newly
developing capitalist ruling class (a process that was extended
internationally through the building of colonial empires) and the
development of an increasingly integrated technological system that
allowed the maximum efficiency in the use of resources including labor
power. The aims of this system were increased efficiency in the
extraction and development of resources and increased control over the
exploited.
The earliest applications of industrial techniques occurred on board
mercantile and naval ships and on the plantation. The latter was in fact
a new system of large-scale farming for profit that could develop at the
time due to the dispossession of peasants in Europe — especially Britain
— providing a quantity of indentured servants and criminals sentenced to
hard labor and the development of the African slave-trade that tore
people from their homes and forced them into servitude. The former was
also largely based on the dispossession of the exploited classes — many
of whom found themselves kidnapped and forced into labor on the ships.
The industrial system imposed in these contexts did not so much have a
basis in an assemblage of manufactured machines as in the method of work
coordination in which the workers were the gears of the machine and if
one failed to do his part it would put the entire structure of work at
risk.
But there were specific aspects of this system that threatened it. The
plantation system, by bringing together various dispossessed groups with
differing knowledge and experiences, allowed interactions that could
provide a basis for illegal association and shared revolt. Sailors who
lived in slave-like conditions on the ships also provided a means of
communication between different places creating a kind of
internationalism of the dispossessed. The records of illegal
associations and insurrections around the north Atlantic seaboard in the
1600’s an 1700’s involving all races of the dispossessed with little
evidence of racism are inspiring, but it also forced capitalism to
develop its techniques further. A combination of racial ideology and a
division of labor was used to form rifts between black slaves and the
indentured servants of European ancestry. In addition, though capital
would never be able to do without the transportation of goods and
resources, for economic as well as social reasons it began to shift
emphasis to the manufacturing of resources into goods for sale on a
large scale.
The reliance on small-scale artisans to manufacture goods was dangerous
to capital in several ways. Economically, it was slow and inefficient
and did not place enough of the profit into the hands of the ruling
class. But more significantly the relative independence of the artisans
made them difficult to control. They determined their own hours, their
own work speed and so on. Thus, the factory system that had already
proven fairly efficient on ships and plantations was applied as well to
the manufacturing of goods.
So the industrial system was not simply (or even primarily) developed
because it was a more efficient way for manufacturing goods. Capitalists
are not particularly interested in the manufacturing of goods as such.
Rather they manufacture goods simply as a necessary part of the process
of expanding capital, creating profit and maintaining their control over
wealth and power. Thus, the factory system — this integration of
techniques, machines, tools, people and resources that is technology as
we know it — was developed as a means for controlling the most volatile
part of the production process — the human worker. The factory is in
fact set up like a huge machine with each part — including the human
parts — integrally interconnected with each other part. Although the
perfecting of this process took place over time as class struggle showed
the weaknesses in the system, this central aim was inherent in
industrial technology from the beginning, because it was the reason
behind it. The Luddites recognized as much and this was the source of
their struggle.
If we recognize that the technology developed under capitalism was
developed precisely to maintain and increase the control of the
capitalist ruling class over our lives, there is nothing surprising
about the fact that those technical advances that weren’t specific
responses to class struggle at the work place have occurred most often
in the area of military and policing techniques. Cybernetics and
electronics provide means of gathering and storing information on levels
never known before, allowing for far greater surveillance over an
increasingly impoverished and potentially rebellious world population.
They also allow the decentralization of power without any loss of
control to the rulers — the control resides precisely in the
technological systems developed. Of course, this stretching of the web
of control over the entire social sphere also means that it is very
fragile. Weak links are everywhere, and creative rebels find them. But
the necessity for control that is as total as possible moves the rulers
of this order to accept these risks, hoping that they will be able to
fix the weak links quickly enough.
So technology as we know it, this industrial system of integrated
techniques, machinery, people and resources, is not neutral. It is a
specific tool, created in the interests of the ruling class, that was
never intended to serve to meet our needs and desires, but rather to
maintain and extend the control of the ruling order. Most anarchists
recognize that the state, private property, the commodity system, the
patriarchal family and organized religion are inherently dominating
institutions and systems that need to be destroyed if we are to create a
world in which we are all free to determine our lives as we see fit.
Thus, it is strange that the same understanding is not applied to the
industrial technological system. Even in this age when factories provide
no space for any sort of individual initiative, when communications are
dominated by huge systems and networks accessible to every police agency
and which determine how one can use them, when the technological system
as a whole requires humans as little more than hands and eyes,
maintenance workers and quality control inspectors, there are still
anarchists who call for “taking over the means of production”. But the
technological system that we know is itself part of the structures of
domination. It was created to more efficiently control those exploited
by capital. Like the state, like capital itself, this technological
system will need to be destroyed in order for us to take back our lives.
What this means with regards to specific tools and techniques will be
determined in the course of our struggle against the world of
domination. But precisely in order to open the way to possibilities for
creating what we desire in freedom, the machinery of control will have
to be destroyed.
Among the many great lies that maintains the rule of capital is the idea
that property is freedom. The rising bourgeoisie made this claim as they
partitioned the earth with fences of all sorts — physical fences, legal
fences, moral fences, social fences, military fences... whatever they
found necessary to enclose the murdered wealth of the earth and to
exclude the multitudes who were undesirable except as labor power.
Like so many lies of power, this one manages to deceive through
sleight-of-hand. The multitudes “unchained” from their land were free to
choose between starving or selling the time of their lives to whatever
master would buy them. “Free laborers” their masters called them, since
unlike chattel slaves, the masters had no need to take responsibility
for their lives. It was merely their labor power that the masters
bought. Their lives were their own, they were told, though in fact these
had been stolen away when the capitalist masters enclosed the land and
drove these “free laborers” off to search for survival. This process of
expropriation, which allowed capitalism to develop, continues at its
margins today, but another sleight-of-hand maintains the bourgeois
illusion at the center.
Property, we are told, is a thing and we purchase it with money. Thus,
according to the lie, freedom resides in the things that we can buy and
increases with their accumulation. In pursuit of this freedom that is
never quite attained, people chain themselves to activities not of their
choosing, giving up every vestige of real choice, in order to earn the
money that is supposed to buy them freedom. And as their lives are
consumed in the service of projects that have never been their own, they
spend their wages on toys and entertainment, on therapy and drugs, these
anesthetics that guarantee they won’t see through the lie.
Property, in fact, is not the thing that is owned. It is the fences —
the fences that keep us in, the fences that keep us out, all the
enclosures through which our lives are stolen from us. Thus, property
is, above all, a restriction, a limit of such magnitude that it
guarantees that no individual will be able to realize herself completely
for as long as it exists.
To fully understand this, we must look at property as a social
relationship between things and people mediated by the state and the
market. The institution of property could not exist without the state
that concentrates power into institutions of domination. Without the
laws, the arms, the cops and the courts, property would have no real
basis, no force to support it.
In fact, it could be said that the state is itself the instituting of
property. What is the state if not a network of institutions through
which control over a particular territory and its resources is asserted
and maintained by force of arms? All property is ultimately state
property since it exists only by permission and under the protection of
the state. Dependent on the levels of real power, this permission and
protection can be revoked at any time for any reason, and the property
will revert back to the state. This is not to say the state is more
powerful than capital, but rather that the two are so thoroughly
entwined as to constitute a single social order of domination and
exploitation. And property is the institution through which this order
asserts its power in our daily lives, compelling us to work and pay in
order to reproduce it.
So property is actually the razor wire, the “No Trespassing” sign, the
price tag, the cop and the security camera. The message that these all
carry is the same: one cannot use or enjoy anything without permission,
and permission must be granted by the state and paid for in money
somewhere along the line.
It comes as no surprise then that the world of property, ruled by the
market and the state, is an impoverished world where lack, not
satisfaction, permeates existence. The pursuit of individual
realization, blocked at every turn by yet another fence, is replaced by
the homogenizing, atomizing competition to accumulate more things,
because in this world the “individual” is measured only in terms of the
things that he owns. And the inhuman community of the price tag strives
to bury singularity beneath identities found in shop windows.
Attacking the things owned by the rulers of this world — smashing bank
windows, burning police cars, blowing up the employment office or
breaking machinery — certainly has its worth. If nothing else, one may
get a bit of pleasure, and some actions of this sort may even hinder
specific projects of the ruling order. But ultimately we must attack the
institution of property, every physical, legal, moral or social fence.
This attack begins from the desire we each have to take back our life
and determine it on our own terms. Every moment and every space we steal
back from this society of production and consumption provides us with a
weapon for expanding this struggle. But, as one comrade wrote: “...this
struggle is widespread or it is nothing. Only when looting becomes a
large-scale practice, when the gift arms itself against exchange value,
when relationships are no longer mediated by commodities and individuals
give their own value to things, only then does the destruction of the
market and of money — that’s all one with the demolition of the state
and every hierarchy — become a real possibility”, and with it the
destruction of property. The individual revolt against the world of
property must expand into a social revolution that will break down every
fence and open every possibility for individual realization.
It is likely that human beings have always had encounters with the world
around them and flights of their own imaginations that have evoked an
expansive sense of wonder, an experience of the marvelous. Making love
to the ocean, devouring the icy, spearmint moon, leaping toward the
stars in a mad, delightful dance — such are the wicked imaginings that
make the mechanistic conceptions of the world appear so dreary. But
sadly in this age the blight of industrialism with its shallow
mechanistic logic that springs from the bookkeepers’ worldview of
capital has damaged many minds, draining reason of passion and passion
of the capacity to create its own reasons and find its own meanings in
the experience and creation of the marvelous. So many turn to the sacred
in search of the sense of joy and wonder, forgetting that the sacred
itself is the prison of the marvelous.
The history of religion is really the history of property and of the
state. These institutions are all founded on expropriations that
together make up social alienation, the alienation of individuals from
their capacity for creating their lives on their own terms. Property
expropriates access to the material abundance of the world from
individuals, placing it into the hands of a few who fence it in and
place a price upon it. The state expropriates capacity of individuals to
create their lives and relationships on their own terms, placing it into
the hands of a few in the form of power to control the lives of others,
transforming their activity into the labor power necessary to reproduce
the social order. In the same way, religion (and its current parallels,
ideology and psychiatry) is the institution that expropriates the
capacity of individuals to interpret their interactions with the worlds
around and within them, placing into the hands of a few specialists who
create interpretations that serve the interests of power. The processes
through which these expropriations are carried out are not really
separated, but are rather thoroughly interconnected, forming an
integrated network of domination, but I think, in this age when many
anarchists seem to take interest in the sacred, it is useful to examine
religion as a specific institution of domination.
If currently, at least in the Western-style democracies, the connection
between religion and the state seems relatively tenuous, residing in the
dogmatic outbursts of an Ashcroft or the occasional blessing from the
pope, originally the state and religion were two faces of a single
entity. When the rulers were not gods or high priests themselves, they
were still ordained by a god through the high priest, specially
consecrated to represent god on earth as ruling in his or her name.
Thus, the laws of the rulers were the laws of god; their words were
god’s words. It is true that eventually religions developed that
distinguished the laws of god from those of the state. Generally these
religions developed among people undergoing persecution and, thus,
feeling the need to appeal to a higher power than that of the state.
Thus, these religions supported the concept of rulership, of a law that
ruled over individuals as well as over earthly states. So if the ancient
Hebrews could distinguish “godly” from “ungodly” rulers, and if the
early Christians could say, “We should obey god rather than men”, such
statements were not calls for rebellion, but for obedience to a higher
authority. The Christian bible makes this explicit when it says, “Render
to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” and “Submit yourselves to the
powers that be, for they are ordained of god.” If selective readings of
parts of the Judeo-Christian scriptures could inspire revolt, it is
unlikely to be the revolt of individuals against all that steals their
lives away. Rather it would be a revolt against a particular state with
the aim of replacing it with a state based on the “laws of god.”
But religion is far more than just the Judeo-Christian tradition. It is
therefore necessary to examine the concept of the sacred itself, the
idea that seems to be at the heart of religion. Frequently, these days I
hear people lamenting the loss of the sacred. I can’t help but laugh. In
this world where borders, boundaries, fences, razor-wire, laws and
restrictions of all kinds abound, what is there that is not sacred; what
is there that we can touch, interact with and enjoy freely? But, of
course, I misunderstand. People are actually lamenting the loss of
wonder, of joy, of that expansive feeling of consuming and being
consumed by a vibrant living universe. But if this is what they are
lamenting, then why speak of the loss of the sacred, when the concept of
the sacred is itself the thing that separated wonder and joy from the
world and placed in a separate realm?
The sacred has never actually meant that which is wonderful,
awe-inspiring or joyful. It has meant that which is consecrated.
Consecration is precisely the process of separating something from
normal life, from free and equal availability to everyone to use as they
see fit, in order to set it aside for a specialized task. This process
begins with the rise of specialists in interpreting the meaning of
reality. These specialists are themselves consecrated, separated from
the tasks of normal life and fed by the sacrifices and offerings of
those for whom they interpret reality. Of course, the concept that there
can be those with a special connection to the meaning of reality implies
that there is only one meaning that is universal and that thus requires
special attention and capacities to be understood. So, first as shamans
and later as priests, these sacred persons expropriate the individual’s
capacity to create their own meaning. One’s poetic encounters with the
world become insignificant, and the places, things and beings that are
special to an individual are reduced to mere whims with no social
significance. They are replaced by the sacred places, things and
institutions determined by the priest, which are then kept away from
profane laymen and women, presented only through the proper mediation of
ritual to guarantee that the minds of the flock remain clouded so that
they don’t see the actual banality of the sacred.
It is precisely the nature of the sacred as separation that gives birth
to the gods. On close examination, what is a god if not the symbol of
the misplaced human capacity to will, to act for oneself, to create life
and meaning on one’s own terms? And religion, in creating gods, in fact
serves the ruling class in a most essential way. It blinds the exploited
to the real reason why they are separated from their capacity to
determine their own existence. It is not a question of expropriation and
social alienation, but of a separation that is inherent in the nature of
things. All power resides in the gods, and we can only accept their
will, striving to please them as best we can. Anything else is hubris.
Thus, the actual expropriation of people’s capacities to create their
own lives disappears behind a divinely determined fate that cannot be
fought. And since the state represents the will of god on earth, it too
cannot be fought, but must merely be endured. The only link that can be
made with this sacred power is that offered by the mediation of
religious ritual, a “link” that, in fact, guarantees the continuation of
the separation on any practical level. The end of this separation would
be the end of the sacred and of religion.
Once we recognize that it is consecration — that is to say, separation —
that defines the sacred, it becomes clear why authority, property and
all of the institutions of domination are sacred. They are all the
social form of separation, the consecration of capacities and wealth
that were once accessible to all of us to a specialized use so that now
we cannot access except through the proper rituals which maintain the
separation. So there it is completely accurate in the literal sense to
speak of property as sacred and of commodities as fetishes. Capitalism
is profoundly religious.
The history of Western religion has not been one of simple acceptance of
the sacred and of god (I don’t have enough knowledge to speak of
non-Western religions in this regard). Throughout the Middle Ages and
beyond there were heretical movements that went so far as to question
the very existence of god and of the sacred. Expressed in the language
of their time, these movements — the Free Spirits, the Adamites, the
Ranters and many others — denied the separation that defined sacredness,
claimed divinity as their own and thus reappropriated their will and
capacity to act on their own terms, to create their own lives. This, of
course placed them at odds with the society around them, the society of
the state, economy and religion.
As capitalism began to arise in the Western world and to spread itself
through colonial imperialism, a movement of revolt against this process
also arose. Far from being a movement for a return to an imagined
idyllic past, it carried within itself the seeds of anarchy and true
communism. This revolutionary seed was most likely sparked by the
interactions of people from several different cultural backgrounds who
were being dispossessed in different ways — the poor of Europe whose
lands were “enclosed” (shall we say consecrated, which seems strangely
synonymous with stolen?), forcing them onto the roads and the seas,
African stolen from their homelands, separated from their families and
cultures and forced into slavery and indigenous people already in the
lands being colonized, finding themselves dispossessed and often
slaughtered. Uprisings along the Atlantic seaboard (in Europe, Africa
and America) were not infrequent in the 1600’s and early 1700’s, and
usually involved egalitarian cooperation between the all of these groups
of the dispossessed and exploited.
But to my mind, one of the main weaknesses of this movement of revolt is
that it never seemed to completely free itself from the religious
perception of the world. While the capitalist class expropriated more
and more aspects of the world and of life from the hands of individuals,
setting them aside for its in uses and making them accessible only
through the appropriate mediation of the rituals of wage labor and
commodity exchange, the rebels, for the most part, could not make the
final step of rebelling absolutely against the sacred. So they merely
opposed one conception of the sacred against another, one morality
against another, thus leaving in place social alienation. This is what
made it possible to recuperate this revolt for democracy and
humanitarian capitalism or socialism, in which “the people”, “society”
or “the human race” play the role of god.
Religion, property, the state and all the other institutions of
domination are based on the fundamental separations that cause social
alienation. As such, they constitute the sacred. If we are to again be
able to grasp the marvelous as our own, to experience wonder and joy
directly on our own terms, to make love with oceans or dance with stars
with no gods or priests intervening to tell us what it must mean, or, to
put it more simply, if we are to grasp our lives as our own, creating
them as we will, then we must attack the sacred in all its forms. We
must desecrate the sacredness of property and authority, of ideologies
and institutions, of all the gods, temples and fetishes whatever their
basis. Only in this way can we experience all of the inner and outer
worlds as our own, on the basis of the only equality that can interest
us, the equal recognition of what is wonderful in the singularity of
each one of us. Only in this way can we experience and create the
marvelous in all of its beauty and wonder.
In the struggle to take back our lives, it is necessary to call every
institution into question, even those that reach into the most intimate
aspects of our lives. In fact, it is particularly important to challenge
these institutions, because their closeness to us, their intimacy, can
make them appear not to be institutions at all, but rather the most
natural of relationships. And then they can work their insidious ploys
and make domination itself appear natural.
Family relationships are taken for granted, even by most anarchists. It
is precisely the intimacy of these relationships that makes them appear
so natural. And yet the family as we know it — the nuclear family, that
ideal unit for commodity consumption — is just a little more than a half
a century old, and is already in a state of disintegration. And earlier
forms of family relationships seem to reflect the requirements of
economic necessity or social cohesion rather than any natural
inclination.
The institution of the family goes hand in hand with the institution of
marriage. If in non-state societies marriage has tended to be a very
loose bond which was aimed primarily at maintaining certain sorts of
kinship relationships, with the rise of the state and of property, it
became a much tighter relationship, in fact a relationship of ownership.
More specifically, marriage became that institution in which the father,
recognized as the owner of his family, gave his daughter to another man
who then, as her husband, became her new owner. Thus, the family is the
seat of the domination of women that spreads from there to all of
society.
Within the family, though, there is a further hierarchy. The central
purpose of the family is the reproduction of society, and this requires
the reproduction of human beings. Thus, the wife is expected to bear
children, and the children, though still ultimately owned by the man,
are under the direct authority of their mother. This is why many of us
who grow up in families in which the so-called “traditional” gender
roles were accepted, in fact, experienced our mothers as the first
authority to dominate us. Dad was a distant figure, working his 60 to 70
hours a week (despite the supposed labor victory of the 40-hour work
week) to provide his family with all the things that this society claims
are necessary for the good life. Mom scolded us, spanked us, set our
limits, strove to define our lives — like the manager at the workplace,
who is the daily face of the boss, while the owner remains mostly
invisible.
So the real social purpose of the family is the reproduction of human
beings. This does not merely mean giving birth to children, but also
transforming this human raw material into a being useful to society — a
loyal subject, a good citizen, an industrious worker, an avid consumer.
So from the moment of birth, it is necessary that mother and father
begin to train the child. It is on this level that we can understand the
immediate exclamation: “It’s a boy!” “It’s a girl!” Gender is the one
social role that can be assessed from biology at birth, and so it is the
first to be imposed through a variety of symbols — colors of nursery
walls and blankets, clothing styles, toys offered for play, the kinds of
games encouraged, and so on.
But this happens in conjunction with an emphasis on childishness as
well. Rather than encouraging independence, self-reliance and the
capacity to make their own decisions and act on them, children are
encouraged to act naĂŻve, inept, lacking the capacity to reason and act
sensibly. This is all considered “cute” and “cuteness” is supposed to be
the primary trait of children. Although most children, in fact, use
“cuteness” quite cleverly as a way to get around the demands of adults,
the social reinforcement of this trait, nonetheless, supports and
extends helplessness and dependence long enough for social conditioning
to take hold, for servility to become a habit. At this point, “cuteness”
begins to be discouraged and mocked as childishness.
Since the normal relationship between a parent and their child is one of
ownership and thus of domination and submission on the most intimate
level, the wiles through which children survive this end up becoming the
habitual methods they use to interact with the world, a network of
defense mechanisms that Wilhelm Reich has referred to as character
armoring. This may, indeed, be the most horrifying aspect of the family
— it’s conditioning and our attempts to defend ourselves against it can
scar us for life.
In fact, the fears, phobias and defenses instilled in us by the
authority of the family tend to enforce the reproduction of the family
structure. The ways in which parents reinforce and extend the incapacity
of children guarantee that their desires remain beyond their own reach
and under the parents’ — that is, authority’s — control. This is true
even of parents who “spoil” their children, since such spoiling
generally takes the form of channeling the child’s desires toward
commodity consumption. Unable to realize their own desires, children
quickly learn to expect lack and to kiss ass in the hope of gaining a
little of what they want. Thus, the economic ideology of work and
commodity consumption is engrained into us by the relationships forced
upon us in childhood. When we reach adolescence and our sexual urges
become more focused, the lack we have been taught to expect causes us to
be easily led into economized conceptions of love and sex. When we get
into a relationship, we will tend to see it as one of ownership, often
reinforced with some symbolic token. Those who don’t economize their
sexual urges adequately are stigmatized, particularly if they are girls.
We cling to relationships with a desperation that reflects the very real
scarcity of love and pleasure in this world. And those who have been
taught so well that they are incapable of truly realizing their own
desires finally accept that if they cannot own, or even truly recognize,
their own desires, at least they can define the limits of another’s
desires, who in turn defines the limits of theirs. It is safe. It is
secure. And it is miserable. It is the couple, the precursor of the
family.
The desperate fear of the scarcity of love, thus, reproduces the
conditions that maintain this scarcity. The attempt to explore and
experiment with ways of loving that escape the institutionalization of
love and desire in the couple, in the family, in marriage perpetually
runs up against economized love. This should come as no surprise since
certainly this is the appropriate form for love to take in a society
dominated by the economy.
Yet the economic usefulness of the family also exposes its poverty. In
pre-industrial societies (and to some extent in industrial societies
previous to the rise of consumerism), the economic reality of the family
resided largely in the usefulness of each family member in carrying out
essential tasks for the survival of the family. Thus, the unity of the
family served a purpose relating to basic needs and tended to be
extended beyond the nuclear family unit. But in the West, with the rise
of consumerism after World War II, the economic role of the family
changed. Its purpose was now to reproduce consumers representing various
target markets. Thus, the family became the factory for producing
housewives, teenagers, school kids, all beings whose capacities to
realize their desire has been destroyed so that it can be channeled into
commodity consumption. The family remains necessary as the means for
reproducing these roles within individual human beings, but since the
family itself is no longer the defining limit of impoverished desire —
that role now played by the commodity — there is no real basis left for
family cohesion. Thus, we see the current horror of the breakdown of the
family without its destruction. And few people are able to conceive of a
full life involving intimacy and love without it.
If we are to truly take back our lives in their totality, if we are to
truly liberate our desires from the chains of fear and of the commodity,
we must strive to understand all that has chained as, and we must take
action to attack and destroy it all. Thus, in attacking the institutions
that enslave us, we cannot forget to attack that most intimate source of
our slavery, the family.
There is a place in this society where one is perpetually under
surveillance, where every movement is monitored and controlled, where
everyone is under suspicion except the police and their bosses, where
all are assumed to be criminals. I am speaking, of course, of prison...
But at an ever-quickening pace, this description is coming to fit more
and more public spaces. Shopping malls and the business districts of
major cities are under video surveillance. Armed guards patrol schools,
libraries, hospitals and museums. One is subject to search at airports
and bus stations. Police helicopters fly over cities and even forests in
search of crime. The methodology of imprisonment, which is one with the
methodology of the police, is gradually being imposed over the entire
social landscape.
This process is being imposed through fear, and the authorities justify
it to us in terms of our need for protection — from criminals, from
terrorists, from drugs and violence. But who are these criminals and
terrorists, who are these monsters that threaten us every moment of our
fear-filled lives? A moment’s careful consideration is enough to answer
this question. In the eyes of the rulers of this world, we are the
criminals and terrorists, we are the monsters — at least potentially.
After all, we are the ones they are policing and monitoring. We are the
ones who are watched on the video-cameras and searched at the bus
stations. One can only wonder if it is the fact that this is so
glaringly obvious that makes people blind to it.
The rule of fear is such that the social order even solicits our aid in
our own policing. Parents register their toddlers’ fingerprints with
police agencies connected with the FBI. A Florida-based company called
Applied Digital Solutions (ADS) has created the “Veri-Chip” (aka the
“Digital Angel”) that can hold personal, medical and other information
and is intended to be implanted under the skin. Their idea is to promote
its voluntary use by people, of course, for their own protection. It may
soon be connected to the network of the Global Positioning System (GPS)
Satellite so that anyone with the implant could be monitored
constantly.[1] In addition there are dozens of programs that encourage
snitching — a factor that is also reminiscent of prisons where the
authorities seek out and reward snitches. Of course other prisoners have
a rather different attitude toward these scum.
But all of this is purely descriptive, a picture of the social prison
that is being built around us. A real understanding of this situation
that we can use to fight against this process requires a deeper
analysis. In fact, prison and policing rest on the idea that there are
crimes, and this idea rests on the law. Law is portrayed as an objective
reality by which the actions of the citizens of a state can be judged.
Law, in fact, creates a kind of equality. Anatole France expressed this
ironically by pointing out that before the law, beggars and kings alike
were forbidden from stealing bread and sleeping under bridges. From
this, it is clear that before the law we all become equal, simply
because we all become ciphers, non-entities without individual feelings,
relationships, desires and needs.
The objective of law is to regulate society. The necessity for the
regulation of a society implies that it is not meeting the needs or
fulfilling the desires of everyone within it. It rather exists as an
imposition on a greater part of those who make it up. Of course, such a
situation could only come to exist where inequality of the most
significant kind exists — the inequality of access to the means for
creating one’s life on one’s own terms. For those with the upper hand,
this state of social inequality has the dual name of property and power.
For those on the bottom, its name is poverty and subjection. Law is the
lie that transforms this inequality into an equality that serves the
masters of society.
In a situation in which everyone had full and equal access to all that
they need to fulfill themselves and create their lives on their own
terms, a wealth of individual differences would flourish. A vast array
of dreams and desires would express themselves creating an apparently
infinite spectrum of passions, loves and hatreds, conflicts and
affinities. This equality in which neither property nor power would
exist would thus express the frightening and beautiful non-hierarchical
inequality of individuality.
Contrarily, where the inequality of access to the means for creating
one’s life exists — i.e., where the vast majority of people have been
dispossessed of their own lives — everyone becomes equal, because
everyone becomes nothing. This is true even of those with property and
power, because their status in society is not based one who they are,
but on what they have. The property and the power (which always resides
in a role and not in an individual) are all that have worth in this
society. Equality before the law serves the rulers, precisely because
its aim is to preserve the order in which they rule. Equality before the
law disguises social inequality precisely behind that which maintains
it.
But, of course, law does not maintain the social order as words. The
word of the law would be meaningless without physical force behind it.
And that physical force exists in the systems of enforcement and
punishment: the police, judicial and prison systems. Equality before the
law is, in fact, a very thin veneer for hiding the inequality of access
to the conditions of existence, the means for creating our lives on our
terms. Reality breaks through this veneer constantly, and its control
can only be maintained by force and through fear.
From the perspective of the rulers of this world, we are, indeed, all
criminals (at least potentially), all monsters threatening their
tranquil sleep, because we are all potentially capable of seeing through
the veil of the law and choosing to ignore it and take back the moments
of our lives whenever we can on our own terms. Thus, law, itself, (and
the social order of property and power which require it) makes us equal
precisely by criminalizing us. It is, therefore, the logical outcome of
law and the social order that produces it that imprisonment and policing
would become universal, hand in hand with the development of the global
supermarket.
In this light, it should be clear that there is no use in making laws
more just. There is no use in seeking to monitor the police. There is no
use in trying to reform this system, because every reform will
inevitably play back into the system, increasing the number of laws,
increasing the level of monitoring and policing, making the world even
more like a prison. There is only one way to respond to this situation,
if we would have our lives as our own. To attack this society in order
to destroy it.
I assume that all anarchists would agree that we want to put an end to
every institution, structure and system of domination and exploitation.
The rejection of these things is, after all, the basic meaning of
anarchism. Most would also agree that among these institutions,
structures and systems are the state, private property, religion, law,
the patriarchal family, class rule...
In recent years, some anarchists have begun to talk in what appears to
be broader terms of the need to destroy civilization. This has, of
course, led to a reaction in defense of civilization. Unfortunately,
this debate has been mainly acrimonious, consisting of name-calling,
mutual misrepresentation and territorial disputes over the ownership of
the label “anarchist”, rather than real argumentation. One of the
problems (though probably not the most significant one) behind this
incapacity to really debate the question is that very few individual on
either side of it have tried to explain precisely what they mean by
“civilization”. Instead, it remains a nebulous term that represents all
that is bad for one side and all that is good for the other.
In order to develop a more precise definition of civilization, it is
worthwhile to examine when and where civilization is said to have arisen
and what differences actually exist between societies currently defined
as civilized and those not considered. Such an examination shows that
the existence of animal husbandry, agriculture, a sedentary way of life,
a refinement of arts, crafts and techniques or even the simply forms of
metal smelting are not enough to define a society as civilized (though
they do comprise the necessary material basis for the rise of
civilization). Rather what arose about ten thousand years ago in the
“cradle of civilization” and what is shared by all civilized societies
but lacking in all those that are defined as “uncivilized” is a network
of institutions, structures and systems that impose social relationships
of domination and exploitation. In other words, a civilized society is
one comprised of the state, property, religion (or in modern societies,
ideology), law, the patriarchal family, commodity exchange, class rule —
everything we, as anarchists, oppose.
To put it another way, what all civilized societies have in common is
the systematic expropriation of the lives of those who live within them.
The critique of domestication (with any moral underpinnings removed)
provides a useful tool for understanding this. What is domestication, if
not the expropriation of the life of a being by another who then
exploits that life for her or his own purposes? Civilization is thus the
systematic and institutionalized domestication of the vast majority of
people in a society by the few who are served by the network of
domination.
Thus the revolutionary process of reappropriating our lives is a process
of decivilizing ourselves, of throwing off our domestication. This does
not mean becoming passive slaves to our instincts (if such even exist)
or dissolving ourselves in the alleged oneness of Nature. It means
becoming uncontrollable individuals capable of making and carrying out
the decisions that affect our lives in free association with others.
It should be obvious from this that I reject any models for an ideal
world (and distrust any vision that is too perfect — I suspect that
there, the individual has disappeared). Since the essence of a
revolutionary struggle fitting with anarchist ideals is the
reappropriation of life by individuals who have been exploited,
dispossessed and dominated, it would be in the process of this struggle
that people would decide how they want to create their lives, what in
this world they feel they can appropriate to increase their freedom,
open possibilities and add to their enjoyment, and what would only be a
burden stealing from the joy of life and undermining possibilities for
expanding freedom. I don’t see how such a process could possibly create
any single, universal social model. Rather, innumerable experiments
varying drastically from place to place and changing over time would
reflect the singular needs, desires, dreams and aspirations of each and
every individual.
So, indeed, let’s destroy civilization, this network of domination, but
not in the name of any model, of an ascetic morality of sacrifice or of
a mystical disintegration into a supposedly unalienated oneness with
Nature, but rather because the reappropriation of our lives, the
collective re-creation of ourselves as uncontrollable and unique
individuals is the destruction of civilization — of this ten thousand
year old network of domination that has spread itself over the globe —
and the initiation of a marvelous and frightening journey into the
unknown that is freedom.
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[1] There is a technology device currently in widespread use that can
also help police in tracking someone down. I am speaking of the cellular
phone. Although it apparently cannot lead the police directly to an
individual, with the right technology they can discover someone’s
general vicinity. This helped cops make an arrest in St. Louis last
November.