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Title: Power Author: Anark Date: December 2020 Language: en Topics: power, intersectionality, dual power, Breadtube, the state, hierarchy Source: Author’s submission; published as a video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/HZeQrwKhJRQ.
The following is the script of the video I published on my channel
Anark. If you would like to watch that video, it is here:
.
Minor edits have been made to the script to instead refer to itself as
an essay instead of a video. Other than this, the content has remained
the same and may be seen as a copy of the video, in text form, that can
be distributed wholly in place of the video.
Solidarity forever in opposition to the mega-machine. Refuse defeat
until death.
In the book Walden, Henry David Thoreau famously wrote that “there are a
thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the
root.” [1] And this is no accident. The structure of society, far from
being easily interpretable, is purposely made opaque to us. Many veils
are laid over the complex foundations of tyranny, many justifications
which go unnoticed are marshalled to great success in confusing and
distracting the people.
Philosophical ideas are the mental scaffolding that hold entire orders
in place. The detours into philosophical analysis seen throughout
political theory are not idle meanderings; they are the natural
procession of political questions taken to their extent. This is why,
early on in his Manifesto for a Democratic Civilization, Abdullah Ocalan
says that “mighty social struggles are fought beneath the surface.” [2]
Enduring systems of thought and meaning silently underlie society’s
functioning, giving it justification, forming its basic assumptions, and
organizing the lives of the people that populate it under a paradigm.
This essay will discuss a great behemoth that lays just underneath the
surface, often glimpsed, but rarely inspected in depth. It is what we
actually discuss every time our conversations wander to the topics of
suppression and revolt, conformity and autonomy, anarchism and
authority. In these we are summarizing a much deeper structure, skirting
an issue which subsumes all these common ideas. Let us lay out a theory
of power.
“Every power is animated by the wish to be the only power, because in
the nature of its being it deems itself absolute and consequently
opposes any bar which reminds it of the limits of its influence. Power
is active consciousness of authority. Like God, it cannot endure any
other God beside it. This is the reason why a struggle for hegemony
immediately breaks out as soon as different power groups appear together
or have to keep inside of territories adjacent to one another. Once a
state has attained the strength which permits it to make decisive use of
its power it will not rest satisfied until it has achieved dominance
over all neighbouring states and has subjected them to its will. While
not yet strong enough for this it is willing to compromise, but as soon
as it feels itself powerful it will not hesitate to use any means to
extend its rule, for the will to power follows its own laws, which it
may mask but can never deny…” [3] — Rudolf Rocker
When this word is spoken, power, we conjure countless mental images.
When I ask: — what is power — do you think of the king atop his throne?
Do you think of the parent scolding their child? Do you imagine
militaries and men with firearms? Mythical beings struggling against
their foes? If we are to have a discussion about power, it is contingent
upon us to define what is meant by the word. Many scholars tend to use a
definition of “power” that takes for granted its function as a tool for
social coercion. Rocker can be seen using a definition of this sort in
the quote from just a few moments ago. Similarly, the definition used by
Bichler and Nitzan, who will be discussed later in this essay is that
power is “confidence in obedience.” But I ask that you loosen this
constraint as we continue, as we will discern these terms more closely
in the coming essay. If this terminology does not serve you, understand
that the statements in a great many works referencing “power” can be
understood interchangeably with what we say in this essay about
“hierarchical power” or “authoritarian power.”
In the theory of power I will set out in this essay, power is defined
as: “the ability to successfully enact one’s will.”
With this definition in mind, there are many types of power because
there are many ways of bringing one’s will into existence. To which end
is one’s will inclined? Through which methods might they achieve that
end? These are the questions that must be answered in this framework.
And to do so, it will be necessary that we come to understand power in a
more fundamental fashion, its modes and its ends, its desires and
limitations.
So what does it mean to be powerful then in this framework? Well,
clearly it is not a universal matter. Power is contextual in its means
and ends. Take for example, the prisoner who becomes very strong lifting
weights. Though their strength may serve them well within the prison,
such a physical might will never allow them to escape their captivity,
to burst down the walls and evade being re-captured, it will never allow
them to find a life as a farmer, or attend Cornell University, or eat
caviar upon a great yacht, or publish a great work of philosophy. Power
is contingent upon means and ends. The prisoner is imbued with a
powerful means in achieving the end of lifting some great weight or of
pummeling some other imprisoned threat, but that is a narrow power by
comparison to the great potentiality that lies in existence.
A being is not powerful simply because of one particular strength, they
are powerful to the degree that, when they will something to take place,
it is materialized in the faithful image of their intention. Inversely
then, their power is lacking insofar as what they will to take place
mismatches intention. Therefore, when we say someone is powerful, we
mean that they can reify a broad-ranging, generalized will; one in which
the vast majority of onlookers can recognize their own goals as
achievable. In understanding these means and ends in the full scope of
potentiality, we also grasp the nature of a power. Some powers have
limited ends, but very potent means, while others have a very broad
range of achievable ends and very constrained means. A being is most
powerful when they have the most effective means and the most
diversified possible ends. That is to say, a person is most powerful
when they simultaneously achieve whatever they will and can will the
widest array of possible things.
This is why, in this framework, we split with the terminology of these
scholars. This definition allows us to understand power on a continuum,
not constrained to the social sphere alone, but also containing the
ability to understand how power functions within both human and
non-human populations. For example, while it is absolutely true that the
ability to create mass submission of human minds has been the primary
method by which the rulers have historically become powerful, in this
framework, one of the earliest methods by which humans gained power was
actually in the domestication of plants and non-human animals. Through
these relations, humans were able to achieve a greater embodiment of
their will and with less exertion. However, this power was contingent on
humanity’s ability to recognize ecological bounds. To derive power
within this system, humanity had to respect its environment and pay
close attention to the accumulated evolutionary wisdom within the biome
around them. The power granted in attention to this ecological wisdom
allowed the species to achieve harmony within their environment, luxury
enough to learn and play, said simply, to actualize their desires.
And, although this paradigm comprises the vast majority of human
existence, it would not last. In time, a great beast arose in the form
of organized, centralized power. This structure, this ideological and
material engine which was formed in the early monarchies, is the
earliest example of what Mumford calls the “social mega-machine.” And,
as he says:
“from the beginning [...] the weight of the mega-machine itself was the
chief burden of civilization: not merely did it turn daily work into a
grievous penalty, but it diminished the psychal rewards that compensate
the hunters, farmers, and herdsmen for their sometimes exhausting
labors. Never was this burden heavier than at the beginning, when the
greatest public activity in Egypt was mainly directed to supporting the
claim of the Pharaoh to divinity and immortality.” [4]
When there are those who wish to have their will enacted more fully, to
have lives of even greater luxury and command, and given that the only
means available to achieve such ends is the labor of human bodies, it
then becomes only a question, for the ruler, of how they might subvert
the wills of those humans to meet their chosen ends. Humans are
extraordinary organisms, able in their utmost adaptability, to be set to
either creative or machine-like tasks; this is why it has been overall
more advantageous to the rulers to bridle us than it has been to bridle
the oxen. Indeed, as they have demonstrated, better still is to bridle
both.
The power of the king relies on the fact that: as he commands, other
beings act. A word commands armies, a word changes laws, a word pardons
the man on the gallows. If it has been said before that “power is the
ability to make others do as they would not otherwise do,” [5] if all
these great scholars have been content to study only the social
dimension of power, this is why. No hierarchical power structure
operating within these millennia could be as powerful as it has been if
it did not have the ability to compel or inhibit the actions of humans.
The power of the oxen to plow the field or transport grain could never
have been sufficient to support the excesses of pharaohs and kings lest
they also bridled the masters of those beasts. And, while humanity may
one day bridle automated robotics to meet our ends, in lieu of such
specialized tools and their unlikely and complete separation from human
operation, whatever rulers remain will inevitably turn humans into
servants. Indeed, by its measure of service to power, the human mind is
reduced increasingly into nothing more than a tool.
In this way, all power in human history has been contingent on a system
of control over the behavior of others and the reconfiguration of the
natural world to meet the needs of the holder. The more power one has,
the more obediently that some other person will act and the less gap
between their resistance and their obedience will exist. The larger
number of people whose behavior can be controlled and the more
thoroughly that their behavior can be controlled, the more powerful the
controller is. If the desires of humans inhibit the ability to carry out
one’s will, after all, they lack power by measure to that. Power does
not then lie in potential, power lies in action and materialization.
Just as two explosive chemicals may contain a great potential before
combination, they are not powerful until they are actively combined and
their proper mixture materialized in reality. In order to illustrate
this concept in context, let us inspect two thought experiments: the
idle king and the idle worker.
In the occasion of the idle king, we can imagine the drunken lay-about,
a son of some previous king perhaps, who has no desire to fill the role
of the ruler. And yet, if this king desired, at a whim, they could have
their opponents executed, could have any person contorted to meet their
demands, have any will submitted to their own. Is this king not
powerful, even if he chooses for a lifetime not to enact such
machinations? They are powerful because the structures are in place that
actively reduce the gap between the willed desire of the king and the
fully realized outcome of that will. Whether the king acts upon them or
not, the structures to reify his will are ready and waiting.
By contrast, let us conceive of the idle worker. The idle worker,
whether they choose to act in the interest of their will or not, whether
they summon the desire to command or whether they toil for the duration
of their life, short of building an actual structure of dual power, it
makes no difference. Atomized, they must put in extraordinary effort and
sacrifice to enact their will. Conceived in isolation from a broader
cooperative structure, the individual has to accumulate terroristic
knowledge to enforce their will. This is because structures are not in
place to reduce the gap between their will and their desired outcomes
and thus they must resort to crude and ineffective means.
In this way, we can see that the idle masses start at a competitive
disadvantage from those in positions of privilege and authority. What I
was laying out in the essay Constructing the Revolution, was a method to
make the masses powerful. To organize prefigurative structures is to
develop a method that reduces the gap between the will of the masses and
outcomes. This is, in fact, a necessary precondition to revolutionary
change.
There are some, however, who claim that this state of affairs is
authoritarian. And such an infantile claim would be unworthy of
addressing were it not the sober-minded conclusion of some important
theorists in the last century, most notably that of Frederick Engels in
his essay “On Authority.” [6] So let us untangle this old confusion.
In this argument, it is said that, to make the masses powerful is to
create a new authority because they necessarily demand that the previous
ruling class submit itself to the rule of the masses. But authority is
not just one group holding power over another. If that were the case, we
would be forced to conclude that the slave who strikes down their master
is only seeking to “become a new authority.” The exact opposite is, of
course, the truth. Authority is the demand that there be a narrow grip
on the reins and that is precisely what the slave seeks to end when he
abolishes his debt of servitude. A power is more authoritarian to the
degree that it monopolizes power for fewer and fewer people. To undergo
a revolution of the masses is precisely to abolish such a hierarchical
power and to revolt against suppression; thus revolution is to abolish
authoritarian power; it is the elimination of narrow monopoly and the
distribution of power to the masses.
This is not to say, of course, that we should not trust in the knowledge
of experts, for example. Such an implied authority extends no further
than the recognition that the expert’s knowledge is genuinely beyond our
own. Whatever rewards or marks of academic honor have been bestowed upon
them are not what imbue them with the right to be respected. Also, such
a respect does not suggest a desire to perpetuate a monopoly on that
expertise. Quite the opposite, the anarchist wishes to create a society
in which expertise is distributed freely and fairly instead of gatekept
in the ivory tower.
So, instead of saying that the masses, seeking to liberate themselves
from a systemic slavery are “seeking to become a new authority,” it is
more accurate to say that the masses organized together and holding now
the strength to emancipate themselves, are a new kind of “power
structure.” Power structures are social and material relations which
vest beings within them with power above and beyond their individual
means. For this reason, a horizontal confederation of councils is a
power structure, an affinity group is a power structure, even an anarchy
would likely contain some sort of power structure. Each of these
arrangements, after all, vest individuals within them with power beyond
their simple individual wills. But they seek to achieve such an affair
with flat, decentralized, diffused power structures relying on social
compact, agreement, and communal enforcement. So while it is not the
case that the anarchist rejects all power in this framework, they do
firmly reject hierarchical, centralized, or authoritarian power.
It must be said, however, that, using this conception, power cannot ever
really be destroyed. After all, persuasion is power, science is power,
consensus is communal power, even the usage of tools, as we have said,
is power. In absence of a complete extinction of the species, human
power can only ever be redistributed or diminished. But that is
precisely the motivation of building a power structure which is held
together by the people and diffused among them. Concentrated power is
akin to a sort of cancer, having arisen inside its host from the
malfunction of a necessary system. And, like cancer, whether benign or
malignant, it is a tumor which must be destroyed or cut out from the
body. Absolute power, predicated on the absolute contortion of other
human beings, must be dissolved and systems of resistance to its
re-emergence must be robustly developed. But in order for us to succeed
at that task, we must know its modes and behaviors. So let us now
discuss the mechanics of this great cancer.
Sometimes, when referring to concentrated power structures, there is a
sort of common tendency to call them ‘the machine’ or ‘the system.’
However, usually the usage of this metaphor comes along with some mild
condescension. Its wording has become attached with a sort of rebellious
naivete, maybe the result of its prevalent usage in the hippy and
student movement of the 60s. We see the metaphor, for example in the
famous words of Mario Savio:
“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious,
makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part. You can’t even
passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears
and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve
got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run
it, to the people who own it — that unless you’re free, the machine will
be prevented from working at all!”
And to conceive of hierarchical, centralized power structures as
machines is more than some reductive metaphor. Although it is true that
hierarchical power structures are only embodied through the means of
conscious beings and that actions carried out by that power structure
are actually the result of accumulated individual actions within it, in
the creation of an internal discipline, the people actually are made
closer and closer to constituent parts of a machine. Their individuality
is gradually subsumed hierarchical needs and their actions increasingly
carried out as a regimented response, not as an individual act of
choosing, as it is, in fact, precisely the act of choosing which
hierarchical power structures will have a tendency to want to eliminate.
Individual choice means unpredictability and unpredictability is
antithetical to a reliable mechanization. Lewis Mumford, an American
scholar in the middle of the 20^(th) century, wrote a book on this very
subject called The Myth of the Machine. In it he says:
“...to call these collective entities machines is no idle play on words.
If a machine be defined [...] as a combination of resistant parts, each
specialized in function, operating under human control, to utilize
energy and to perform work, then the great labor machine was in every
aspect a genuine machine: all the more because its components, though
made of human bone, nerve, and muscle, were reduced to their bare
mechanical elements and rigidly standardized for the performance of
their limited tasks.”
We do not mean to say, of course, that the power structure itself has
consciousness nor that those who are in control of the machine do not
drive it to some significant degree, but instead that the machine is
built toward an end and insofar as it has successfully subverted the
will of the majority of individuals within it and turned them into
operational components, it will function as per the smooth dictates of
the logic of that machine. This is discussed from time to time by Marx
as well, notably in Capital where he points out that, having consciously
reduced themselves into nothing more than conduits for the flow and
accumulation of capital, capitalists become “capital personified and
endowed with consciousness and a will.”
Actors within regimented, hierarchical systems do not act outside the
dictates of that system, including the many managers and technicians
which form the functioning of its administration. If they did, they
would no longer be allowed to operate within the system. The system
would either discipline them through punishment and social sanction or
prioritize some other human that is willing to contort themselves into
the shape needed by the social mega-machine. In this way, even the
holders of power are contorted into the mold of the machine. This is
what Rudolf Rocker meant in Nationalism and Culture when he said:
“It is the secret curse of every power that it becomes fatal, not only
to its victims but to its possessors. The bare thought that one must
live for the achievement of an end which is opposed to all sound human
feeling and is incomprehensible in itself, gradually makes the possessor
of power himself into a dead machine, after he has forced all coming
under the dominance of his power to a mechanical obedience to his will.
There is something puppetlike in the nature of every power, arising from
its own illusions, which coerces everything coming into contact with it
into fixed form. And all these forms continue to live in tradition even
after the last spark of life has died in them, and lie like an incubus
on the spirit which submits to their influence.”
As Marx describes in his theory of alienation, humanity has a
Gattungswesen, a “species essence.” [7] Marx conceives of that species
essence as one which desires to produce of its own volition and that,
under constraint, unable to control the act of production, we are
alienated from that essence. And it is true, humanity desires to control
the conditions of its own production, but it is greater than that.
Humans, fundamentally defined through their adaptability and mentally
able to conceive of a boundless future, are not meant to be rigidly
disciplinized. As Lewis Mumford says in the second part of his Myth of
the Machine “[...] it is part of the essential nature of man to
transcend the limits of his own biological nature, and to be ready if
necessary to die in order to make such transcendence possible.” To be
disciplined by power is to be limited, to be made subservient is to be
turned into a component, a thing with a purpose but no meaning. Humanity
does not wish to be made into a slave justified by race, a soldier
justified by contract, a wage laborer or an automaton told it is human
but experiencing nothing of what it is to be a human. Humanity
inherently desires to be boundless. Humanity naturally desires freedom.
Indeed, Marx, the ideological paramore of many who now so eagerly reject
freedom as a principle of struggle, said “no man combats freedom, he
combats at most the freedom of others.”
Hierarchical power only exists because it is imposed, because once
concentrated power exists, it accumulates until collapse or heat death.
It is the enemy of human freedom, turning conscious beings into
thoughtless instruments, an engine for suffering, a thing slaked in
blood and wielding the whip and the chain, coffins proceeding to its
left and obedient automatons, once called humans, to its right.
Because hierarchical power demands the mass sacrifice of human lives, it
cannot be anything but a death-oriented entity and it is necessarily
surrounded by those who worship it, a death cult. This can be seen in
the Pyramid Texts where long passages are written about the God-Kings in
the afterlife. In these passages, we see the true visage of the
Mesopotamian mega-machine, a description whose metaphors have changed
and whose veil has been modified, but which fundamentally captures the
blood sacrificial nature of hierarchical power.
“He it is that eateth men; that liveth on Gods, that possesseth the
carriers and despatcheth messages.... The Runner-with-all-Knives ... he
that strangleth them for him; he draweth out for him their entrails, he
the messenger whom he sends death to.... He it is that eateth their
magic and swalloweth their lordliness. Their great ones are for his
morning meal, their middle-sized ones for his evening meal, and their
little ones for his night meal.... He hath broken up the backbones and
the spinal marrow, he hath taken away the hearts of the Gods, he hath
eaten the Red Crown, he hath swallowed the Green One. He feedeth on the
lungs of the Wise Ones: he is satisfied with living on hearts and their
magic.”
That is the fundamental nature of the mega-machine; a cannibal zealot,
now veiled by a vast Skinner box, but its inbuilt purpose unchanged.
This hierarchical apparatus is a parasite built to consume for eternity,
fueled by human misery and abject slavery. So what drives the death
cult? Why do the masses contort themselves to its needs? Said otherwise:
why do we not rebel?
“The one lasting contribution of the mega-machine was the myth of the
machine itself: the notion that this machine was, by its very nature,
absolutely irresistible-and yet, provided one did not oppose it,
ultimately beneficent. That magical spell still enthralls both the
controllers and the mass victims of the mega-machine today.” -Lewis
Mumford
Throughout the modern history of leftist ideology, the philosophical
disease of economic reductionism has permeated and undermined our
movements, long masquerading as “materialism.” To know society, they
insist, is simply to work out its economic relations, external to human
ideas. The ideas are but a superstructural mask on the real driving
contradiction taking place in the economic base.
But this is an oafish oversimplification. The driving force is power and
power is not just the structurally embodied mechanisms of production and
distribution. Power is also a function of perception and expectation.
The belief that some power structure might bring about the existing or
potential leverage available to them, for example, is a primary
component in the real exertion of power in the world. A slave who
believes they are bound to slavery and can never escape has been
successfully controlled by their master. The master has used their own
power to discourage the slave from seeking liberation. Power is also
exerted by convincing subjects that they should want to carry out the
will of a power structure. These are often the most pernicious and
lasting of all such mental attitudes. Once a people can be convinced
that their suffering at the hands of the machine is both necessary and
good, they can compel themselves well beyond reason. They then actively
take part in their becoming a component of the vast machine and in
dehumanizing themselves.
Lewis Mumford called this vast, combined mythology of the power system
the “myth of the machine.” We will instead consider many interlocking
and mutually reinforcing ideas, which we will call philosophies of
justification. One might say that Mumford’s myth of the machine was the
accumulated canon of all philosophies of justification. These mental
attitudes, which have been so unscientifically separated from material
reality through a false dichotomy of “idealism” and “materialism,” are
of paramount importance in the continued operation of great tyrannies.
For example; many scholars have noted that the feudal age maintained
order largely through threat and use of violence. The way that bonds
were formed between the lords and the monarch was through the agreement
to organize and enact violence, a stated willingness to martial and
distribute troops for the needs of the monarch. But what is said less
often is that the masses were not only made into servants by fear of
violence, they were made to feel that they were part of a divine order.
This is why, during the time that monarchs still reigned, liberals and
leftists alike recognized the danger of religious doctrines. One of the
most primary philosophies of justification in the feudal order, was the
conception that the hierarchy of society was organized and re-organized
by godly will. So then came conceptions of “just wars” of religious
conquest and interpretation of the Bible which emphasized meekness of
the masses and boldness of the rulers. Napoleon, before his rise to
power a staunch anti-theist said, upon coming into power:
“Society cannot exist without inequality of property and inequality not
without religion. A man who is dying of hunger, next to one who has too
much, could not possibly reconcile himself to it if it were not for a
power which says to him: ‘It is the will of God that here on Earth there
must be rich and poor, but yonder, in eternity, it will be different.”
He was mistaken in thinking a specifically religious notion was required
to do such a task, but he was, in his crass pursuit of authority,
stumbling upon the great importance of the myth of the machine in the
churning of every hierarchical system of power. Indeed, the philosophy
of justification for liberalism, representationalism, was already
present in its embryonic form within feudalism.
Hobbes, for example, conceived of the necessity of an absolute sovereign
that he called the Leviathan, because he imagined that it was necessary
to prevent the “war of all against all.” Hobbes believed that humanity
without rule was inherently contentious and thus thought that humans in
the state of nature were atomized. He said, then, that the sovereign was
a sort of representation of the social need for order, in opposition to
humanity without rule, which was separate and squabbling. The Leviathan
is not a cruel despot, it is a necessary evil to countervail the
inherent nastiness and selfishness of humans. The Leviathan is a sort of
stand-in for God on Earth, though one need not conceive of Godliness to
justify him.
The representationalist mythology of the state remains one of the key
philosophies of justification in the liberal republic, because it
legitimizes the state through a metaphysical equivalence between
subjects and rulers, such that the subjects are made to believe that
they deserve to be ruled because their rulers “represent” them. It by no
means functions alone, however. The logic of capitalism transfigures
everything within modern society and thus a complex of philosophies of
justification hold up its order: bootstrap ideology, the Protestant work
ethic, economic meritocracy, rugged individualism, and many more.
Through its reductive conception of the world, capitalism produces the
deification of the commodity, it splinters communities into competitive,
individualistic silos, and all the while, this perverse distortion of
human social conditions empowers the most exploitative actors within the
existing power structures. Fostering economic class consciousness in the
workers is therefore a process by which the cogs of the machine are made
aware of how they have been constrained and disciplined for the needs of
the economic elites.
However, one must not stop there. The hierarchy of economic class is a
result of the holistic needs of the mega-machine to systematize the
lives of its human components and accumulate a more supreme and
unassailable power, not of a narrow economic striving. Economics is
merely one system in feedback, although an integral component in the
great engine, churning on the blood and sweat of the masses.
In the United States, for example, White supremacy is a very central
philosophy of justification because, by using the mental framework of
racist ideology, power structures can exert coercion and manufacture
obedience both in the duped white followers and oppressed non-white
populations, by convincing the duped white followers to enforce the
privilege they have been given and by convincing the oppressed
populations that their struggle is futile. Through the construct of
whiteness, the white population is made to feel it is the default, the
uncorrupted, original copy, and that all diversity is deviance
therefrom. In this way, and many more, non-white lives are gradually
worn down through mental degradation and the further the pallor of their
skin differs from the normalcy of whiteness, the more deviant they are
considered.
So too is patriarchy a fundamental component of the modern machine,
reformed as it has been by generation after generation of hierarchical
machines. Through this mythology, the man is made the superior of woman;
he is associated with the features of the dominator and groomed to
embody them. Gender roles are held in stasis and gender expressions are
viciously policed creating an unnatural binary that helps stabilize a
vast system of exploitation: the man an empty automaton to be
sacrificed, to be worked, to never complain; the woman a subservient, a
meek supplicant to be rewarded from the table scraps. Even as women
slowly regain some measure of agency in their lives, a reactionary
movement rears its head, demanding they return to a time previous to
social leveling. Transgender identity, a reality observed since ancient
societies, is then naturally seen as an existential threat; a wrecking
ball to the staunch systematization of gender roles in society.
I give these examples not to provide an exhaustive overview but instead
to echo the observations of the intersectional feminists: these
philosophies of justification are not disconnected, they are complex and
overlapping, having produced unique hierarchies of privilege and
justification to bolster each. By recognizing the diverse range of human
struggle and in embracing both the uniqueness of each intersection of
oppression, while at the same time recognizing the grand unifying
features of all these experiences, we find a revolutionary vector.
As Rudolf Rocker says in Nationalism and Culture:
“The desire to bring everything under one rule, to unite mechanically
and to subject to its will every social activity, is fundamental in
every power. It does not matter whether we are dealing with the person
of the absolute monarch of former times, the national unity of a
constitutionally elected representative government, or the centralistic
aims of a party which has made the conquest of power its slogan. The
fundamental principle of basing every social activity upon a definite
norm which is not subject to change is the indispensable preliminary
assumption of every will to power.“
Generation after generation of exploiter has innovated to create more
and more effective means to bring about social subservience. The
resulting inventions of psychological warfare, embodied together in this
great myth of the machine, have now been sharpened into powerful tools
of memetic self-obedience. Indeed, the reinforcement of these
philosophies of justification does not take place merely upon an
interpersonal level; it is the software of a vast social hardware.
In their work, Capital as Power, Bichler and Nitzan present a concept
they call “creorder.” This concept is the novel combination of the words
“creation” and “order.” This is no contradiction, it is the recognition
of a dynamic process of reinforcement and evolution taking place in all
systems. Read holistically, it is a recognition that both the material
forces of social power structures along with their accordant
philosophies of justification, attempt to bring the pieces of that
greater society into static obedience to a systemic will. However, in
the structure’s need to meet the burdens of a changing world, it must
also reorient itself constantly, re-ordering its constituent parts to
accommodate an eternally new environment. Or, as Bichler and Nitzan say:
“Historical society is [...] both Parmenidean and Heraclitean: a state
in process, a construct reconstructed, a form transformed.”
This mirrors much of what was said in the video essay Change and
Revolution. There I put forth a theory of social change predicated on
nested feedback cycles. But the analysis does not end with the cycles I
inspected there. The systems of human power are in mass, dynamic
feedback and Bichler and Nitzan’s “creorder” can be seen as an umbrella
to describe the accumulation of these cycles.
The feedback cycle that this essay has laid out is both primal and
ancient, occurring between the structural programming of the system in
the form of its supply lines, infrastructure, and distribution and the
ideological programming of its constituent actors by way of interlocking
philosophies of justification. These forces do not function in
isolation. They feed into one another, reordering society constantly,
shifting their relation as one or another is countervailed. As Bichler
and Nitzan say:
“Power means the ability to impose order, and imposition presupposes
resistance – resistance from those on whom order is imposed and from
others who wish to impose their own. This ever-present tension between
force and counter-force makes a power creorder inherently unstable.
Slack on one side unleashes pressure from another, a greater force in
one direction trumps over a weaker force in the other. And since to
overcome resistance is to create a new order, the very presence of power
spells a built-in pressure for change.”
Creordering is an act of dynamic regimentation, the social and economic
world is turned into something which can be predicted because it has
been transfigured into the form that power has preconceived. And in
becoming something predictable, the capitalist comes to believe that
their ideology is a science when, in fact, they have cursed the
constituents of society with a rigid uniformity which they then
condescendingly observes as confirmation of their supremacy, just as the
slavemaster looked over the plantation fields and told himself he
observed an eternal order. Bichler and Nitzan continue:
“To rule means to see the world from a singular viewpoint, to be locked
into a unitary logic, to be subservient to your own architecture of
power. Dominant capital cannot deviate from the boundaries of this
architecture, even if it wants to. Its individual members are forced to
accept the very logic they impose on the rest of humanity. And the more
effective they are in imposing that logic, the more predictable they
themselves become.”
When the world fails to meet the predictions of the arrogant machine,
the only options available to that machine are to re-discipline its
components, to deny the reality of its disconfirmation, to reorganize
itself into a new predictable system, or to convey a new philosophy of
justification. What it cannot do is accept its frivolity. To do such a
thing would be to undermine its foundational principle of accumulation.
With all of these pieces together, it can be seen that hierarchical
power structures are massive, constantly self-perpetuating social
machines which rely on material logistics, forms of economic extraction,
and systematized coercion, but each gear within them only turns if the
human components are disciplined, standardized, and made inhuman by
ideologies of justification. Every hierarchical power structure will
have a tendency to operationalize the lives of the individuals within it
such that all their individual wills are subverted and controlled. And
to whose ends are the individuals’ wills subverted? While it is true to
answer “the individuals in the highest seats of power,” (indeed,
hierarchical systems are built with that express, parasitical purpose)
it is even more appropriate to say “the logic of the machine.”
These machines are then built out in both a structural and ideological
sense based upon the subjugation of human beings. And, as a result, the
unified design of the system’s supply chains, infrastructural projects,
and operating ideas, is a dominator’s logic and the fundamental
configuration of these embodiments of power represents a sort of
territorial expansion for the mega-machine. Said otherwise: the longer
this machine is allowed to materially and ideologically configure itself
in the real world and to build out its metropolises and extract the
resources of our planet, the more thoroughly that the enemy system is
allowed to solidify its power and establish a real physical territory
for its ideology.
But if a hierarchical power structure is a machine, then we may inspect
it through comparison with other machines. How do we take apart a
non-human machine, for example? In the most absolute way, if one wishes
to end the functioning of a machine forever, they must demolish it
completely. However, the larger and more complex the machine, the more
challenging such a pursuit will be. The current social mega-machine is
quite possibly the most intricate and embedded to have ever existed,
composed of many parts, compartmentalized and competing in intricate
ways, now dominating an entire planet. In the collapse of any one major
systemic component of this mega-machine, other components will likely
just gain power. And this is not even broaching the topic that the most
fundamental components of the machine are the very human beings we wish
to bring into a liberatory future and thus complete demolition is
self-defeating.
One could, then, choose in the opposite direction. We can stop far short
of complete destruction of a machine, after all, and still stop its
functioning. The very word “saboteur” roots from labor history, in which
workers would place their shoes, “sabots,” into the machines, in order
to jam them up and prevent them from working. Ideally, in a radical
labor dispute, the parallel is that we would place the shoe within the
machine long enough to extract our needs from its owner then, having
left the machine largely intact, seize it from the owner and remove the
sabot. But this does not stop the functioning of the machine itself; it
merely changes owners. In fact, this method is the one modeled by
statist revolutions. Quite the contrary of their repeated desire to
“smash the bourgeois state completely,” in practice they carry out
something much more like putting a shoe in the gears, then resuming the
functioning of that machine under new ownership.
The alternative is to begin building a new horizontal society in the
here and now, so that, if we can exact enough damage upon the existing
social mega-machine that it is stopped from functioning, we can
completely replace those components of value which it once provided. In
this way, the process of revolution is less some linear procession of
mechanically inevitable stages or a single moment of rupture and more
akin to a protracted war between systems: one system the hierarchical,
imperial machine and the other a horizontal humane society in its belly.
If such a horizontal replacement system is not prepared and social
rupture approaches before it is built, the result will not likely be the
revolution of the masses, but instead the crowning of a new despot. What
we build now is thus a preparation for what may come later.
And so, the revolutionary strategy informed by these perspectives is
neither accelerationist nor gradualist. Such notions are too narrow. The
revolution must move at the speed at which the masses build the
prefigured, horizontal systems that can replace the tyrannical system
they are subjected to. If the masses build quickly, they should
accelerate tensions with the system of power quickly as well. But if
they build slowly, they should exert their energy carefully; because if
they do not succeed in bringing the moment of rupture, they are likely
to be crushed by a tyrannous response. And if they have nothing built,
yet succeed in their complete abolition of the reigning power structure,
they will likely only be doomed to fighting with reactionaries in the
aftermath.
A successful left in the modern era must necessarily approach the
process of revolution with a lens that is equal parts strategist and
technician, conceiving of territories and battlefronts, of supply
networks and infrastructure. Where some strength is found in the
mega-machine, we must understand how to sabotage it when the time arises
and how we will prepare a horizontal response to its failure when that
time comes.
Crucially, in forming these responses, we must avoid reproducing the
very forms of organization used by our enemies as those are precisely
the forms of the mega-machine we wish to abolish. When we mirror the
structures of our enemy, we help build out the territory of the
tyrannous mega-machine. Thus this new project will require that we seek
a cooperative place for humanity within the ecosystem of Earth, not as a
parasite, but as a symbiotic entity, both internally and externally. It
will require that we reject the stale uniformity of authority so that we
might rediscover a conception of humanity rife with meaning and beauty.
We must build a thing which is teeming with life and dignity, capable of
negating the power of the despot, and preventing the cancer of
hierarchical power from once again metastasizing.
We must strike at the roots of the old paradigm and therefore create a
new philosophy of justification much more complex than the cold,
mechanical turning of economic wheels, instead based on a harmonious
convergence of the needs of the multitudes. Such a revolutionary
philosophy of justification can only be achieved by fully dismantling
the mythology of the oppressors and building a new ecological
counter-balance that will interrupt the cyclic re-establishment of power
hierarchy and systemic privilege. We must only choose it. Or, as Lewis
Mumford says in the last words of The Myth of the Machine
“[...] for those of us who have thrown off the myth of the machine, the
next move is ours: for the gates of the technocratic prison will open
automatically, despite their rusty ancient hinges, as soon as we choose
to walk out.” [8]
Come now and let us build this new future together. Everything that is
good in this world depends on it.
[1] Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”
(https://www.gutenberg.org/files/205/205-h/205-h.htm)
[2] Abdullah Ocalan, “Manifesto for a Democratic Civlization: The Age of
Masked Gods and Disguised Kings (vol. 1)”
(https://libcom.org/files/ManifestoforaDemocraticCivilizationvol1.pdf)
[3] Rudolf Rocker, “Nationalism and Culture”
(https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/rudolf-rocker-nationalism-and-culture)
[4] Lewis Mumford, “The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human
Development (vol. 1)”
(http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=26696CC625515AFDDA2116BF43233916)
[5] Bichler and Nitzan, “Capital as Power”
(http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/259/2/20090522_nb_casp_full_indexed.pdf)
[6] Friedrick Engels, “On Authority”
(https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm)
[7] Karl Marx, “Capital”
(https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/)
[8] Lewis Mumford, “The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power (vol.
2)”
(http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=ACD9DC15E5826E741CC52888B1BF8404)