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Title: Only Change is Permanent Author: Eric Laursen Date: 2021, Summer Language: en Topics: the State, marxism, critical theory, anarchist analysis Source: Fifth Estate #409, Summer, 2021. Accessed Juy 27, 2022 at https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/409-summer-2021/only-change-is-permanent/
Critical theory is a bit like pornography, as a Supreme Court justice
once said when asked to define the latter: “I know it when I see it.”
Critical theory can be defined pretty loosely as well. It’s the
multitude of intellectual spin-offs from Marx that began to take flight
roughly a hundred years ago, at about the time that Lenin and his
acolytes thought they have codified what Orthodox Marxism was, forever.
Starting with Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci, and the thinkers who made
up the Frankfurt School in pre-Nazi Germany, the loosely-described
tradition of critical theorists have tried to figure out what comes next
when history stops behaving the way it was supposed to in the 19th
century.
New categories of struggle vie for attention, the State becomes ever
more violent and dominating, and capitalism keeps on adapting. Along the
way, many critical theorists have strayed far from what Marx had in
mind, although they still insist on quarrying the master’s work for
indications that he was moving in the same direction.
Stubbornly, they also resist admitting that the road they’ve taken was
already paved for them and already has a name: anarchism. You can find
any number of thinkers in the Marxist tradition citing texts by Hakim
Bey, the Invisible Committee, Todd May, and others, and invoking
concepts like autonomy and leaderlessness, without acknowledging that
they belong to a distinct anarchist tradition and instead using them as
a grab-bag from which they can pick and choose to bolster their own
theoretical case.
That doesn’t mean anarchists should ignore critical theory. These
writers are grappling with many of the same social and political
problems, and they’ve informed anarchist thinking as much as anarchists
have affected theirs. Theorists like Benjamin, Marcuse, Deleuze,
Foucault, Hardt and Negri, and Said have influenced anarchist thinking
on power, counterrevolution, and cultural domination, just as anarchists
have pushed them more in the direction of decentralization, autonomy,
and leaderlessness.
Anarchists have also made a somewhat parallel journey from their points
of origin. Like Marx, classical 19th century anarchists were imbued with
faith in science and convinced that society was moving toward an ideal
condition of freedom that it would certainly reach if only the world
read or heard its most cogent spokespeople, and acted accordingly.
Now, we’re not so sure. Is any ideal condition conceivable? Isn’t human
history a continuing process of struggle and change, and shouldn’t our
political thinking evolve with it? Don’t the earth and its non-human
inhabitants have their own history that follows its own path?
Critical theory began with a desire to answer some of these questions,
which Marx didn’t do in any easily discernible way. These theorists
wanted not just to understand and explain society, but to figure out how
to change it. What keeps people from doing the logical thing and
overthrowing capitalism and the State? How can we push back against the
power of cultural straitjackets like religion, ideology, racism and
gender oppression?
“The political condition is an endless struggle that does not terminate
in a perfect situation or a utopian state,” writes Bernard E. Harcourt
in a recent book updating critical theory, Critique & Praxis: A Critical
Philosophy of Illusions, Values, and Action, “but goes on forever so
that in the end, the political struggle has to be itself part of the
utopian vision and of what critical theory embraces.”
Recognizing this is just as essential to keeping anarchism practical and
relevant because it keeps us focused on understanding and addressing the
current condition of society, instead of reaching some utopian endpoint
that may no longer make sense by the time we get there. Context, in
other words, is everything. It’s important to remember that anarchism is
supposed to facilitate a larger struggle that keeps shifting as
political and economic conditions change. And we have to make sure we
don’t adopt strategies that replicate the patterns of power we’re trying
to overcome.
Critical theorists today address the same concerns. It is necessary to
move away from the old categories of revolution and instead focus our
energies on insurrectional practices: uprisings, revolts, insurgencies,
resistances, insubordinations, desertions. The difference is that
revolutions—even the most successful, like those that liberated the
colonized world after World War II—generally seek to replace one regime
or one version of the State with another.
We don’t take down capitalism and the State by storming the Capitol and
installing ourselves there the right is perfectly good at that, too—but
by attacking them in a thousand places and in a thousand different ways.
In other words, by creating a social revolution through our activism, as
the Zapatistas, the farmers in India’s Punjab, and the Movement for
Black Lives are all doing. Once we do this, it won’t be so hard to
topple what’s left of the State.
Critical theorists have always emphasized another valuable principle: to
avoid the pitfall of truth-seeking. Claims of truth are always
contingent, in part because the quest for truth is always soaked in the
relationships of power that course through a society defined by
capitalism and the State. Asserting or imposing a truth is a way of
canceling out politics, of masking relations of power in order to
declare victory in the fight for liberation that is never-ending. In
reality, there is no truth, only the struggle for it. Every time a power
regime—like capitalism or colonialism—is overthrown, there is a risk of
establishing a new truth in its place, which in turn has to be
criticized, resisted, and overturned.
In his book, Harcourt argues that critical theory got off track roughly
40 years ago when it became too tied to academic settings, stopped
focusing on how to change society rather than just understand it and
started to produce its own set of supposedly universal truths. But
nothing about anarchism makes it immune to such traps either.
What kinds of truths do we need to avoid? One is the ideal of
liberalism, which a lot of critical theory is devoted to dissecting and
tearing down. Liberalism is built on the myth that a society of laws and
constitutions can leave everyone free to pursue their own ideals without
getting in anyone else’s way. The contention is that there’s no reason,
for example, that NRA members can’t indulge their gun fetish while
African Americans attend church in safety, because the law regulates
their interactions. Do we really believe this?
At the same time, liberals deplore violence—but define the term so
narrowly that it becomes an excuse to avoid acting. Thinkers from
Benjamin to Marcuse have argued that violence is everywhere, from the
violent taking of Indigenous people’s lands to urban policing to slum
clearance to the poisoning of Flint, Michigan’s water supply. We’re just
not allowed to call it that. But actually, political change always
inflicts violence on someone in some form, whether it comes from the
right or the left. Once people understand the nature and impact of
particular forms of violence, it’s a lot harder to convince them that
burning a patrol car, for example, is as heinous as evicting a
low-income family from their home.
Critical theory also raises some thorny issues that anarchists need to
confront. Much of anarchist organizing revolves around a pursuit of
consensus as a basis for action. But consensus relies on people’s
reasonableness or rationality, as Harcourt points out, on the existence
of some kind of rational truth that we can all subscribe to. Consensus,
on the surface, appears to be the least oppressive form of
decision-making. But what if it can produce its own form of oppression:
another way to cancel or deny the fact that politics has always been
about struggle and conflict, and always will be?
Power is another sticky problem. Anarchism is about minimizing or
eliminating the exercise of power by one individual or group over
another, and maximizing cooperation. Critical theorists like Foucault
looked at power in a completely different way; it’s everywhere, in the
air we breathe, circulating all through our social relationships. We
can’t eliminate it, only work with it. The theorists may be wrong, but
it’s up to us to address their point.
Anarchists and critical theorists probably never will find themselves in
complete harmony—particularly on the pivotal matter of the relationship
between the State and capitalism. But we can keep learning from each
other, and sharpening our thinking in the areas where we disagree. What
we share is a desire to make theory something practical, a tool for
sustaining a real and effective opposition to the ever-more enveloping
system of the State and capitalism, not a self-reflexive exercise.
Before we can be effective either as revolutionaries, or
insurrectionists, or autonomists, we need to learn how to be in a world
that makes struggle and emancipation essentially synonymous.
Eric Laursen is a writer and activist and the author of The Operating
System: An Anarchist Theory of the State (AK Press, 2021).