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Title: Defying Power Author: Peter Gelderloos Date: May 5th, 2018 (Part I) and June 28th, 2018 (Part II) Language: en Topics: the state, democracy, c4ss Source: Retrieved on July 2, 2018 from https://c4ss.org/content/50774 and https://c4ss.org/content/50991
Since its publication, I have come across two reviews of Worshiping
Power that I would like to respond to, not to bat a discursive ball back
and forth, but to engage with the flow of conversations that form an
integral part of our interaction with the world around us. One is
William Gillis’ “The Tangled Paths of State Formation and Resistance,”
and the other is Kristian Williams’ “Mystifying: An Anarchist View of
Early State Formation.”
Much of Gillis’ review focuses on a very interesting question that I
want to save for last. First, there are a couple more technical matters.
To begin with, I would disagree with the characterization that “The
fight between authoritarianism and anti-authoritarianism is ultimately a
fight over values far more than it is a fight over particular conditions
or tools.” Later, this same affirmation resurfaces in regard to markets,
when Gillis praises the book for its accuracy about “markets not
obliging inequality, hierarchy or states”
There is a constant interplay between values, institutions, and social
organization. Agency and the strategies of specific groups play a major
role in this process, but structural inertia is also capable of carrying
the day. What’s more, there is a crucial difference between tools and
machines. Machines produce social realities, whereas tools merely
amplify agency. I’m not sure whether Gillis would say there is nothing
deterministic about technology (understood as an entire social complex
of machines and practices), but I would not.
As far as markets are concerned, Gillis’ second characterization is
accurate. Markets do not deterministically create hierarchy or states.
However, markets are without a doubt dangerous to freedom and
interesting to states.
As far as I can tell, those societies that practiced market institutions
over long periods of time, without developing strong hierarchies or
states as a result, kept a large part of social life outside of the
market and had practices that enabled the self-defense of their economic
autonomy. The quantitative logic of markets is potentially damaging to
life. It is a virus that if unleashed is capable of destroying
everything (even the market itself, if we are to follow Braudel’s
assertion that capitalism superseded and consumed market dynamics).
For markets to be made innocuous, a society needs unimpeded,
non-monetized access to their basic means of survival. Land, as well as
people’s vital activity, must be inalienable, which means they cannot be
bought or sold. In a society where the basis of existence is a healthy
commons, I believe that people can safely experiment with a wide range
of mechanisms for distributing all the other goods and services that
round out our lives. But collective mechanisms of self-defense against
accumulation, enclosure, and quantification are vital.
James C. Scott expresses the view that markets were actually troublesome
to early states. The work of merchants was harder for rulers to track
and tax, so they discouraged it at times in favor of a model of
accumulation based on landed laborers. I don’t dispute that this was a
characteristic of the land-based states of southeast Asia Scott focuses
on, at least in certain moments in their development.
But the archipelagos of the Mediterranean and the Java and Banda seas
give us quite a different model. While states in those areas did not
create commerce and markets, they did not hesitate to pursue them, to
redesign them, and then to harness them to extract unprecedented amounts
of value that led to an exponential expansion of the technologies of
social control and warfare that continues to this day.
On a more trivial level, Gillis claims I made a factual error in dating
the appearance of agriculture and plant domestication to 10,500
(actually I give a range of dates), rather than 23,000 years ago. This
comes down to a minor confusion regarding the difference between
cultivation and domestication. Cultivation, which certainly happened in
Palestine 23,000 years ago, and probably in many other places and even
earlier, is simply the sowing and harvesting of plant foods, typically
wild cereals. Contrary to the prevailing stereotypes regarding
non-civilized peoples, any hunter-gatherer community is capable of doing
this, but in most conditions, it would be a waste of their effort.
Domestication, on the other hand, requires far more dedication over a
much longer period of time, as it implies the production of new species
intentionally selected for human consumption. This is the process that
only began about 11,000 years ago.
Another observation Gillis makes regards the “hostility” I evince
towards academics. It’s a contradiction I am unable to resolve:
admiration for those whose studies have expanded my horizons or
challenged my beliefs; hatred for the institutions they work for; scorn
for those who make their paycheck fine-tuning this system. But we don’t
have to stop at the contradiction of the radical academic. Why not
include the radical writer, making a name for himself by talking about
revolution?
A certain professor, asked to write a blurb for the book, politely asked
me, “Are you sure you want me to?” At first I was surprised, until I
realized that in the book I had just written, the hatred and the scorn
for academia far outweighed the admiration.
I thank Gillis for highlighting that hostility and also the
contradictions that surround it, especially when those lead one to take
a utilitarian view of knowledge, as I do, ambiguously, by suggesting
that the pursuit of knowledge must be justified. Gillis is right to
spurn the idea that “we must interrogate every flight of investigation
and demand to know its pragmatic utility for the social order” (their
characterization). But I would argue that their interpretation misses
out on the ambiguity in my statement. I wrote, “Learning is only
worthwhile if it helps us fight, to live healthy, to live free.” They
respond:
What a terribly impoverished notion of “living free”! Surely inquiry and
creativity are themselves part and parcel of freedom, not merely
servants or tools. Is freedom just some passive state of being we’re
trying to retreat to? Or is it an active, striving, reaching sort of
thing, that necessarily includes learning for its own sake, exploring
for its own sake, dreaming for its own sake?
Actually, I haven’t provided any notion, impoverished or otherwise, of
“living free.” I leave that to the reader. And if a reader such as
Gillis requires unbridled curiosity and independent inquiry to live
free, so be it.
Gillis’ warning about a utilitarian view of learning stands. I share
those concerns. But let me add a warning about science “unleashed,” a
notion that receives praise from the dominant moralists of the day.
Museum basements across North America and Europe are filled with bones
stolen from indigenous burial grounds across the world. This was done by
trained scientists as part of their unbridled search for knowledge. And
peace-loving Albert Einstein was indispensable to the invention of the
nuclear bomb. To anyone with common sense, this would have been
predictable — the military always gets first dibs. But sometimes, highly
intelligent people can be really, really stupid.
Then there’s the recent revelation that some of Chomsky’s linguistics
works had military applications, and that the Pentagon made use of MIT
and other universities by giving scientists there the feeling that they
had absolute freedom in their work, they were simply funding free
inquiry that would benefit “humanity.”
Okay: utilitarianism is a straight-jacket for knowledge. But curiosity
is never neutral. How do we continue to practice free inquiry in the
middle of a battlefield? I don’t trust those who claim not to be on any
side, because I can see who signs their paycheck, even if they don’t
notice.
Gillis’ argument about authoritarianism below the state threshold is the
one that interests me the most, but I want to save it for last, to end
on a good note.
First, I want to quickly respond to the other review, written by a
decidedly grumpy Kristian Williams. Williams’ disapproval lies on two
foundations: that I offer no clear thesis regarding the causes of state
formation; and that I give tautological explanations for state
formation.
From the beginning, Williams uses the snarky tone that is more
fashionable among writers trying to build their career profile than
those engaged in the solidaristic project of trying to foster stronger
collective struggles. One of the many problems with such a tone is that
it looks much worse when you get your facts wrong, as all of us will
inevitably do at some point, and as Williams does repeatedly throughout
his short text. Embarrassingly for Williams, he has missed the last
fifty-odd years of anarchist research into state formation, which is a
pretty bad omission for someone writing a review on the subject.
It seems that Williams doesn’t recognize the validity of non-academic
formats. He complains that “it is not until the final chapter that we
encounter anything as definite as a thesis statement.” He says “the
approach is opaque” and lacks “any clear direction”. The thesis he
identifies, quoted from my last chapter, is that “state formation is a
multilineal process and not a teleological, progressive evolution.”
Williams is not above telling a white lie to make his point. He claims I
have no thesis until the last chapter, and while I reject his assumption
that all critical writing must follow the style of the academic paper, I
recognize that his university education might have made him a bit
small-minded. But don’t they teach kids not to deliberately misrepresent
a source?
Here’s a quote from the introduction. In fact, it’s the last paragraph
of the introduction, just the place where they teach those who paid tens
of thousands of dollars to certify their brains to look for and find a
thesis statement. (Hey Gillis, there’s that hostility again. What should
I do about it?)
It is now undeniable that there are multiple pathways in the evolution
of states. I will not offer a single cause nor a single evolutionary
model. There are several models we could consider, building off the work
of a great many specialists. However, within each model, I find more
particularities than similarities. As such, throughout the following
chapters, which are divided thematically, I highlight the basic models
when they appear, but place the weight of the narrative on the
particularities of each case. This may not be the best format for rapid
summarizing, but its advantage is in avoiding potentially dogmatic
simplifications.
Hmmm. That looks pretty damn similar to the thesis that Williams claims
I don’t express until the last chapter of the book. It also looks like I
explain what my approach will be, and what direction I’ll be going in.
Williams might have been comforted by a chronological organization to
the book, instead of my “wandering” thematic approach, but I explained
that too in the introduction. Putting all the emphasis on the original
states props up the “Pandora’s Box” fallacy of state superiority, and a
progressive telling of history tends towards white supremacist
mythologizing backed by the fallacy of a unilineal history.
History unfolds in loops and spirals, full of backtracking or sudden
changes in trajectory, far more often than in a progressive series of
A-B-C… It also unfolds simultaneously on all continents. A truly
chronological telling is impossible. Many historians have created such a
narrative by ignoring non-European populations until the West invaded
and conquered them. These historians’ perspective follows the hegemonic
center and ignores the margins, to the point of completely dismembering
history and making it impossible to perceive relations of influence and
evolution. I could have been more explicit on this last point, but I
guess I wasn’t expecting such bad faith readings, and from an anarchist
no less.
What about the other shortcoming Williams picks up on? His perceived
tautology is as follows:
Gelderloos slides toward a kind of cultural determinism, and
disastrously pushes the notion to the point of outright tautology:
“Placed in the same adverse situation, a society with
anti-authoritarian, cooperative, and reciprocal values will find an
anti-authoritarian solution, while a society that values hierarchy may
likely form a state.” On that same page, he puts it more strongly, adds
in primitive accumulation, and reverses the cause and effect: “economic
accumulation is inconceivable without the hierarchical structures and
spiritual values that states and proto-states create.
Both of my statements are in line with Clastres’ groundbreaking studies
in the sixties and seventies and reconfirmed in detail by James C.
Scott’s current work. Williams is looking for a materialist explanation
for the State, but he has arrived half a century too late. I recommend
Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, which
was discredited ages ago. The materialists offered a mechanical
explanation for state formation, which is appealing to the scientific
mind. But their hypothesis is simply not born out by the historical
record. It gives us a theoretically useful lens for studying certain
moments of state formation, but it fails to take into full account the
political and spiritual production of that which is considered material
and natural.
Williams’ bemoans my failure to provide explanations for how a
state-forming culture might emerge. Sadly, he missed that too. Every
single chapter contains historical examples of how state-forming
cultures were strengthened, sometimes as a product of social evolution,
sometimes as the result of strategic decisions by would-be elites.
Every. Single. Chapter.
Perhaps Williams is looking for a single, tidy, deterministic cause that
brought state-forming cultures out of a smooth, egalitarian,
prelapsarian past. Maybe, the temperature and rainfall levels at which
such a culture forms, or the specific components and fuel source of the
authoritarian culture machine. But state formation is not that simple,
nor was there ever an innocent human past free of power dynamics.
For those who like it simple, I suggest the following exercise. Spend a
day with your housemates, trying to come up with all the ways that you
could make the street you live on more prestigious than the next street
over, and also ways that it might become more prestigious by chance,
without you lifting a finger. Now imagine you had years, generations, to
do this. If you think, at the end of the exercise, that there would be a
common thread linking all of your devious plans, or one external factor
that would determine their success or failure, then you are inferior
specimens of human creativity. Such nefarious creativity is hard to
contain within a tidy theoretical model.
Anyone can have a bad day and write a stupid article. Lord knows I have.
I just hope that’s the case with Kristian, and that his future writing
is as good as Our Enemies in Blue.
The most interesting question, I have saved for last, but it will have
to wait until the next installment: William Gillis’ question about
hierarchies that thrive below the state threshold. In Part II: how to
confront the kind of authoritarianism that could exist in non-state
societies, post-state societies, and even our own countercultures…
In Part I of this article, I responded to William Gillis’ review of
Worshiping Power: An Anarchist Vision of Early State Formation. I wanted
to give special attention to what I found to be his most interesting
critique.
Gillis takes me to task for focusing too much on the anthropological
definition of the state, analyzing how societies cross the threshold
from having hierarchies that don’t constitute a state to having stronger
hierarchies that do.
This focus on a very specific subsection of power structures is
interesting but it leads to a conclusion a little far afield from
anarchism’s concerns. What’s the most critical element to starting
multi-tier coercive administrations? The creation of values that enable
universal centralization. This is certainly true as far as it goes, but
the more interesting and anarchist question is what leads to domination
at all, in any flavor or organizational structure?
It’s a good point. And one that led me to imagine adding another chapter
to the book, one which I’ll outline here:
Defying Power: An Anarchist Vision of Active Statelessness
I could start by voicing an enthusiastic, “What he said,” regarding
James C. Scott’s research (The Weapons of the Weak, The Art of Not Being
Governed…) into the characteristics of populations in resistance to
state authority in Southeast Asia, particularly as regards food
production, kinship, geography, and heterodox religion. However, I would
like to add to some of these areas, discuss a couple others, and also
open the field to consider hierarchy below the state threshold both in
our movements today and in a hypothetical post-state future.
It might help to start by specifying what we mean by hierarchy. At an
analytical level, hierarchy is not any situation of inequality or
ranking. It is a ranking system capable of reproducing itself, in which
what is ranked is access to power. Curiously, the term’s original
meaning is “rule by a high priest.”
What is the opposite of hierarchy? Liberal concepts of freedom have
little to offer, as they are based in a mythical social contract, the
guarantee of rights that have little to do with quality of life and
access to power, and the achievement of an ill defined equality. No
human group enjoys anything approaching perfect equality, which makes
sense, as the latter is a mathematical concept that maps poorly onto
social relations. The tension between sameness and difference defines
human communities, and those that have rejected hierarchy do so not by
eliminating difference but by making impossible the unification and
centralization of power, such that difference simply cannot fuel a
hierarchical social relation.
If we understand that power is everywhere, then a social practice of
non-hierarchical power would require the non-alienation of power. Power
would always reside within the human activities that create it, rather
than being controlled and redistributed by self-reproducing
institutions. The power of the gardener would remain in her hands, and
if she ever did decide to form part of an association of gardeners for
the coordination of work and the sharing of materials, she might blend
her power with others, but would not lose legitimate recourse to that
power, as in the case of a guild that holds a monopoly over a certain
kind of productive activity and which is governed by an internal group
of leaders with privileged access to the product.
Another property of non-hierarchical power is that it is not
commutative. One kind of power cannot be swapped with another kind.
There is no fixed exchange rate between the power of the gardener and
the power of the healer or the storyteller. Their powers never flow
together to a central point of legitimation and control. Thus, not only
is power dispersed in such a society, it could never be centralized
because on a metaphysical level it has not been unified. We can speak of
many powers in such a society, not one power. Arriving at such a
practice requires us to entirely break with politics, the reification of
the poleis, which was the point of legitimation and centralization for a
patriarchal, contractual, and proprietary notion of power in the
militaristic slave economies of ancient Greek city-states.
Anarchist involvement in the 15M movement in Barcelona in 2011 revolved
largely around the attempt to break up unified power. This manifested as
a tension between direct democracy, which quickly evolved into an
authoritarian and bureaucratic process, and decentralized organizing and
decision-making.
Linked to the necessity of decentralization and disunity is the need for
complex as opposed to simple status. Any society in which people can be
ranked in a linear fashion is one that is prone to hierarchy, and one
that has probably undergone a severe cultural process of erasing or
belittling many of the criteria by which people can be evaluated. There
is no truly egalitarian group free of status, but it is a particular
group that only recognizes one kind of status value. Historically, this
has often involved valuing culturally masculine traits at the expense of
culturally feminine traits.
By valuing people according to an unending list of abilities and
qualities (a good singer, a good cook, a good hunter, a good mechanic, a
good mediator, a good connector, a good healer, a good fighter, a good
midwife, a good translator…), we can live a fuller life with more paths
to self-actualization, and we prevent any one kind of power from having
undue influence over the others. We could formalize many of these roles,
or not, but it requires constant effort to prevent the emergence of a
calcified value hierarchy that would heap disproportionate rewards on
some kinds of status and forget about others. And constant effort, over
multiple generations, usually means ritualization and inclusion within a
society’s mythos.
This brings us to the question of spirituality. Every society has a
spirituality. Ways of framing knowledge, explaining one’s relationship
with the world, and telling origin stories always surpass empirical fact
and rely on culturally subjective constructions. From an anarchist
standpoint, the most dangerous spirituality is the one that is
reproduced by a professional institution, without popular participation.
Perhaps the most dangerous subset of this type is the spirituality that
claims to be unquestionable, such as monotheism, or even worse, that
claims not even to be a spirituality, such as scientific rationalism.
Therefore, the kinds of spirituality with the most anarchistic
possibility are consciously metaphoric, flexible, and reliant on
non-professional, diffuse participation in their creation and
regeneration. Beyond the mode, the content should probably include an
emphasis on cycles of renewal, revolt, ecocentrism, freedom, community,
and reciprocity. Because spirituality is ultimately storytelling, it
also gives us a unique opportunity for remembering our history of
struggle, free from the stultifying effects of institutional
history-keepers. The folks at Otherworlds Review clearly have this in
mind.
The spirituality, as well as the ways of sharing reproductive tasks and
the kinship patterns, should be non-patriarchal. This is vital.
Patriarchy seems to be the most resilient form of hierarchy in human
history, as well as a necessary precondition for state formation. Many
cultures surviving colonization have traditional, non-patriarchal forms
of gender organization, and as part of a revolutionary process we can
develop (and are developing) social forms with no gender categories
whatsoever.
The sky is also the limit for different possible family structures.
However, there have been enough bad experiences with alternative
families within our radical movements to show how the Western notion of
freedom as “no attachments” leaves its mark and leaves, often, the most
exploited member of the failed experimental family holding the check. Or
the baby, as the case may be. This suggests that it may in fact be
necessary to have culturally inscribed expectations of responsibility
for care. (Sometimes, just sometimes, we’re not actually smarter than a
million years of human experimentation). But by no means do such
expectations need to fall solely on the biological mother or on a
heteronormative mother and father figure, as in the nuclear family
model.
The experiences of anti-authoritarian societies suggest the advantages
of multilateral kinship models. The multilateral part means that we
trace family in as many directions as possible, so that ideally,
everyone is related to everyone else. Most European languages have an
infinitesimal kinship vocabulary that shows the poverty of nuclear
families. The fact that we have only one word for “cousin,” any
horizontal relation further removed than sibling, makes us something of
a joke on the world stage. But we can build a new richness by
recognizing more forms of consanguinity and also non-sanguine family
relations (referring to whether or not someone is said to be related “by
blood”). For the latter, Christianity gives us the “god-parent,” but
such an adoptive familial relationship is by no means a Christian
invention.
In fact, different forms of adoption should have an important role in
any anti-authoritarian family model. Adoption—the explicit choice of
taking on the long-term responsibilities of the family bond—enshrines a
kinship logic based on solidarity rather than involuntary association.
Adoption allows the family to be a tool of resistance in situations of
repression and migration, taking in those who are orphaned by conflict
or by the prison system, as well as those who have to flee state effects
(like environmental destruction, war, and poverty). Adoption also
negates the Western rationalist assumption that an ethnicity is a
genetic community and therefore an essentialist and separate human
group. The normalization of widespread adoption, not just of children
but of anyone, shows that an ethnicity is the affirmation of a shared
cultural practice. And the habit of many anti-authoritarian societies to
claim belonging to multiple ethnic groups, as an extension of the
multilateral kinship logic, breaks the power of ethnicity to serve as a
motor for borders and ideas of racial superiority.
The biggest obstacle to reconstructing family through the proliferation
of more horizontal, elective, and multilateral kinship bonds is that
consumerism has made us forget how to make a commitment. People from
Generation X can’t even assemble an impoverished nuclear family, while
those who were raised on Facebook don’t properly know what a relation
is. The family bond, that had already degraded to the superficial level
of a consumer choice, is now constantly one click away from being
unfriended. Social network technologies are by nature an addiction, a
dependency-fostering medium, and addiction substitutes the family bond.
This mass-produced destruction of meaningful, solid relationships in our
society, and the celebrated immaturity that accompanies it, may be one
of the most pernicious forces for protecting hierarchies and domination
within our movements for liberation. Much of this has to do with
conflict resolution. Dependency on police and judges, as well as the
alienation and insolidarity that arise from antisocial crime or
conflicts between neighbors, make it easy for the state to rule us.
Monopolizing and institutionalizing conflict resolution and harm
reduction (usually through law codes and the logic of crime and
punishment) was an important task for early states.
Many anti-authoritarian societies traditionally had specialists in
conflict resolution and mediation, usually older people who could claim
neutrality by being equally related to all people involved (imagine that
a grandparent has an equal familial relation to all their grandchildren,
in the case of a conflict between cousins). And mediation is both a
calling, dependent on a certain sensibility, and a skill that requires a
great deal of practice. In anti-authoritarian societies, one of the most
important elements seems to be that the mediators have no specialized
enforcers. They are not allowed to own the conflict the way a judge
does, nor force their verdict on anyone. People in the conflict choose
to accept their intervention (suggesting the need for many different
mediators, so there is an actual choice), and the resolutions they
propose have to win community support.
In other words, people never surrender their autonomy or their own
judgment, not those directly involved in the conflict or harmful
situation, and not those around them. Curiously, the conflict resolution
and accountability strategies that most anarchists have opted for never
disassemble the logic of the prison system. Rather than denying the
authoritarian logic that someone has an absolute claim to the truth,
they simply change who is allowed to exercise that power.
Unsurprisingly, the power gets abused.
Another important element in this kind of conflict mediation is the lack
of a written law code. People’s actual needs take precedence. The needs
of the person harmed, the needs of the person who harmed, the needs of
disputing parties unable to solve a conflict on their own, the needs of
the rest of the community who allowed harm to take place, who are being
affected by the conflict. A law code replaces respect for people’s needs
with obedience to authority, and it allows a small group—those who have
the most power in the process, of writing it—to shape their society’s
morals. Without a written code, everyone can be constantly involved in
shaping and challenging the common ethos. If it’s an unending debate,
everyone is empowered to participate. The moment the debate ends, people
trick themselves into thinking they’ve discovered final solutions and
have no more need for personal or collective growth, and they have
created the specter of obedience.
Then there’s the question of punishment and response. I believe that
punishment is an authoritarian practice that institutionalizes community
power to do harm and seeks to justify, a priori, doing harm to those who
do not have community support. Subsequently, the community has no
ethical arguments against doing harm, no moral superiority over those it
punishes, and therefore it locks itself into a dynamic of “might makes
right,” a judicial arms race. What’s more, punishment dehumanizes the
person who is punished, and in the case that they have actually harmed
anyone and not just broken some written law, punishment prevents them
from the growth and healing they need to go through not to harm other
people. It’s been pretty well demonstrated by now that prison systems
and other punishment regimes reproduce the harms they supposedly are
meant to stop. This makes perfect sense for a state, because states
thrive off of interpersonal violence. But how does it make sense for
anarchists, feminists, and other radicals? I think people who posture as
wanting to go really hard against those who cause harm within our
circles should be unmasked as merely reproducing the harm that they get
power from opposing. We should instead be valuing the long, thankless,
and difficult process of accompanying those who have been harmed and
those who have caused harm as they go through their healing process.
These processes are very different. The former requires loving support
and regaining power over one’s life, and the latter requires strong
criticism and an emphasis on learning empathy. But both are necessary
for restoring a healthy community.
At this point, though, I would make a distinction between punishment and
vengeance. Vengeance, such an ugly word in statist society, is
retribution that is not sanctioned by the broader community or society.
It’s not punishment, because it doesn’t make higher claims to objective
justice. At most, it seeks to satisfy a fully individualized justice. I
think Bash Back! showed how vengeance can be a vital form of healing, in
case Frantz Fanon hadn’t already made that clear. Vengeance is an
important way of ensuring that we never surrender our freedom of action
to the community, and it also makes sure that those who harm the least
powerful—those who are excluded by majority morality—or those with a
talent for winning over mediators and public opinion, can still face
consequences for their actions. Some societies combine mediation and
accountability mechanisms with semi- or fully normalized practices of
vengeance. A combination of compassion, collective healing, and direct
action is probably a good idea: when the vengeance tradition becomes
more powerful than any mechanism for mediation, then you have systematic
feuding, which can get pretty gnarly and isn’t terribly conducive to
personal or collective growth. So it’s not a technique without its
dangers.
Perhaps the most dangerous power of accountability mechanisms is the
power to ostracize. Ostracism—fully excluding someone from their social
group—is basically social murder. And it seems that stateless societies
around the world traditionally recognized this. They reserved ostracism
as an absolute last resort, only for the most extreme and incorrigible
cases. In a communal society, ostracism is rightly seen as being just as
bad as killing someone.
But in our internet society, ostracism is a first resort. It’s common
practice. If someone rubs you the wrong way, you troll them, you drag
them, you get them excluded, and then you block them. This practice has
extended to social movements. Anyone who treats ostracism lightly is
fighting against any possibility of liberation in our lifetimes.
On the other hand, practices of critique and ridicule—especially against
those with more power and status—are very common in traditional
anti-authoritarian societies. Those can have a place in our own
movements, but only if our bonds of solidarity are stronger. The ideal
conclusion to ridicule is that the object of the critique blushes, they
shut up for a while, maybe they storm off and pout, but eventually they
come back to again share their gifts with us, and we welcome them back
warmly. The purpose is to give those in the peanut gallery the power to
intervene, not to permanently silence anyone or to break the social
bond. Of course, this means that practices of critique and ridicule need
to be accompanied by intense practices of caring.
Ridicule without caring is dangerous because it can lead to
stigmatization, the horizontal creation of a value hierarchy in which
some members of the group are permanently scorned or belittled. Such a
practice can serve as a motor for the production of ever worse kinds of
hierarchy.
In fact, so much comes down to questions of emotional maturity or
manipulation, that it seems vital to encourage a culture of personal and
collective growth, and the best possible practices of education and
child-rearing, in which children are given both autonomy and
encouragement to learn, along with every possibility to self-actualize.
I would also strongly favor combative over idyllic child-rearing
strategies. Children shouldn’t grow up in a perfect, peaceful world.
They should learn the absolute necessity of self-defense. There will be
no utopia. Humans will always have the capacity to treat one another
poorly, and children need to learn how to protect themselves and assert
their limits as a part of growing up.
There’s also the question of the relationship between society and the
youth. Rather than the boy scout model of harnessing children into a
patriotic corps that mindlessly supports the community project,
over-structuring childhood so that the young have an easy time of
finding “their place,” children should be left in an antagonistic
position with respect to their community. This means to a certain extent
that they need their own space, a space partially outside the community.
If they have autonomy, are given respect, and are taught the basics of
self-defense (which also means parents defending themselves against
their children when they enter the little dictator phase), they will not
fail to see the forms of complacency and hypocrisy creeping into their
society, and fight against them.
I’ll end talking by about alienation, land, and relationships. A society
that doesn’t want to go down the road of the authoritarian apocalypse
should never treat the land or other aspects of nature as things that
can just be bought and sold. Relationships of domination with nature
prefigure relationships of domination in human society, and they also
provide the possibility for regimes of exploitation and accumulation
that permit a nascent elite to construct the weapons and fund the war
against all the rest of us. And the more degraded our natural
environment is, the harder it is to turn to it as a refuge when we
attempt to escape state power, a guerrilla base when we attempt to
destroy state power, and a shrine when we realize the need to develop an
anti-authoritarian, ecocentric spirituality.
If we understand that we are a part of nature, then it is easier to see
how social relationships are just an extension of natural relationships.
Because it’s vital to find a balance between social mobility and the
sanctity of relationships. It’s easier to deal with stress and conflict
if we’re able to move around and find our place—or find the patterns of
nomadism that suit us—rather than being stuck within a society. However,
mobility should not mean alienation and rootlessness, as it does under
capitalism. We live through our relationships. They should be
inalienable.