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Title: A Modern Anarchism: Anarchist Analysis
Author: Anark
Date: January 9th, 2022
Language: en
Topics: anarchism, modernity, modernism, structural analysis, critique, kyriarchy, hierarchy, realism, libertarian socialism
Source: Retrieved on 2/5/22 from https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BB_EY2LVanaBVZB9CPYIOGxw0WrWJaWzrk8MKa2GI_k
Notes: Video essay version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ag9EcQsqP_8

Anark

A Modern Anarchism: Anarchist Analysis

We stand now at a turning point, wherein many roads sprawl out in front

of us. With unprecedented access to information, the atlas seems to lie

within our hands. But, at this crossroads, the popularizers of these

many paths shout over one another to persuade new travelers, only to

find that most travelers now choose tourism rather than migration;

exploration rather than arrival. It is hard to blame them. Having seen

many return from a path leading to a dead-end, or worse, having lost

those they know to a terrible bramble from which they will never escape,

these weary travelers are paralyzed by choice. Confused and discouraged,

many simply return home where a tormentor awaits, but wherein there is

no longer the stress of uncertainty.

I would like to tell you of a new path: its extent not yet fully

explored, but peering through the forestation beyond, a great light

emanates forth. Before we proceed, I would like to pose a question: why

has this society accumulated so much power, yet somehow fails to meet

the most basic needs of humanity? Why has this hierarchical structure

changed hands between so many rulers, yet the peace they have promised

never lasts? Their hands bloody, their adherents marching behind, a new

society of domination always follows in time. Why? Those intent on

creating their own societies of domination will offer all manner of

empty excuses. But the true answers lie within an ideology which has

been suppressed by the power hoarders: anarchism.

This work is not meant to be a brief introduction to the topic. There

are plenty of those already in existence. Instead, I want to offer a

modern synthesis of anarchist ideas. So, whereas many other books and

essays endeavor to give a broad, non-committal overview, here I want to

ground you in a particular location within the body of anarchist

thought. In doing this, we will not wander down every trail, but we will

stop to look at the scenery from time to time. And, for this reason, one

might see this work as motivated by the impulse described by Voline in

his work On Synthesis:

“The anarchist conception must be synthetic: it must seek to become the

great living synthesis of the different elements of life, established by

scientific analysis and rendered fruitful by the synthesis of our ideas,

our aspirations and the bits of truth that we have succeeded in

discovering; it must do it if it wishes to be that precursor of truth,

that true and undistorted factor, not bankrupting of human liberation

and progress, which the dozens of sullen, narrow and fossilized ‘isms’

obviously cannot become.”

Such a process is, of course, a lofty goal for any one person to carry

out. To do this, I will go beyond the standard list of European thinkers

that one is typically introduced to when they begin an inspection of

this subject. These names will certainly feature in our narrative, as

they were very important figures in the development of anarchism as a

revolutionary movement. But the ideas of the anarchists are not only

important to some specific geographic region. Now, more than ever

before, anarchism has achieved a state of critical insight, especially

as it has been informed by the work of Black, queer, indigenous,

feminist, decolonial, and other anarchist thinkers.

All those people who strive to be free of oppression will find their

common struggle within its basis. After all, many of these realizations

root to the earliest stages of humanity and will likely be at play in

any possible human society. Many other anarchist works have failed to

take into account these new developments of anarchist theory, to

understand where the original struggles have fallen short, and then

cooperate alongside this new coalition of thinkers in bringing anarchist

principles to their highest culmination.

So let us begin part 1 of this series on a Modern Anarchism...

First Principles

Before we set off on this journey to form what I have called a “modern

anarchism,” we seem obliged to answer a much simpler question: what is

anarchism? Unfortunately, more than any other subject, one is forced to

confront the many propaganda campaigns that have been carried out

against it. And this is no mistake. As Lorenzo Kom’Boa Ervin has said in

Anarchism and the Black Revolution:

“All who strive to oppress and exploit the working class, and gain power

for themselves, whether they come from the right or the left, will

always be threatened by Anarchism [...] because Anarchists hold that all

authority and coercion must be struggled against.”

Threatened by its liberatory ideas, the many enemies of anarchism have

all spread their own falsehoods. They each have an interest in muddying

the waters to obscure its true meaning and to dissuade their followers

from considering it. As a result, the layman’s understanding of

anarchism is that it represents the rejection of all rules and

organization, leading many to envision chaos or power vacuum, to be

quickly filled with a new tyrant or a wilderness fought over by atomized

humans. But, behind the spectacles of destruction and revolt which the

reigning power structures have distributed in deceptively cut video

clips and convenient political narratives, there is an entire body of

theory and revolutionary history that is hidden.

And within this body of theory, there have been a number of different

ways of defining anarchism, each with its own merit. Before I give my

definition, I would like to inspect a few passages from notable thinkers

in the field, so that we can see what facets reoccur within the

discussion. In the introduction to Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and

Practice, for example, Rudolf Rocker says that:

“Anarchism is a definite intellectual current in the life of our times,

whose adherents advocate the abolition of economic monopolies and of all

political and social coercive institutions within society.”

Errico Malatesta states his definition of anarchism quite clearly in a

response he wrote to Kropotkin’s Science and Anarchy, saying that:

“Anarchism is the method of reaching anarchy, through freedom, [...]

without those authoritarian institutions that impose their will on

others by force, even if it happens to be in a good cause.”

(https://www.marxists.org/archive/malatesta/1925/note-on-hz-article.html)

It is also commonly said, by thinkers such as Peter Kropotkin or Lorenzo

Kom’Boa Ervin, that anarchism is “the no government system of

socialism.” Many other variations can be found throughout the

literature. But what we will explore in the following series of essays

is how each of these actually describe different aspects of a cohesive

theoretical whole. After all, there are many aspects to the body of

anarchism that one might wish to include in their definition. In both

Rocker and Malatesta’s versions, for example, we see a shared

understanding of anarchism as being the method through which a new form

of society is reached. In Rocker’s, additionally, we get an

understanding of anarchism as a body of political theory, an

“intellectual current” as he says. And, lastly, In Ervin and

Kropotkin’s, we get a description of its orientation within the body of

socialist theory as an anti-state philosophy. Here I will offer the

following definition:

Anarchism is the opposition to all hierarchical power structures, the

framework for locating and understanding them, and the method by which

we might dismantle and replace those hierarchical power structures with

a horizontal society of free association, controlled together by the

people, which we call anarchy.

This definition then references three distinct aspects of anarchism: a

mode of analysis, a method of struggle, and a socio-political goal. This

part in our series will primarily focus on the first of these; the

anarchist mode of analysis, saving the anarchist method and theory of

anarchy for later parts. But, although it will not be the subject of

this video, just understand that this usage of “anarchy” does not mean

chaos or lack of organization, as you have likely been told. Anarchy is

both individual and collective freedom to develop our full creative

capacities, constituted through equality of structural power and the

eternal principle of human solidarity. Such a society is not then a

state of unrest, but the condition of existence in which humanity can

determine for themselves what sort of future they wish to inhabit, free

of direction by some dominator class, instead carried forth by their own

motivated wills. If this society has been explained to you as a state of

chaos, understand only that your rulers wish you to think of a society

without domination, a society in which you are in control, as chaos.

However, before we return to that topic in much greater depth in the

later parts of this series, we will need to lay out an understanding of

the society in which we currently exist. To do this, I will state what I

think are the three primary principles that underlie all anarchist

analysis:

1. Means cannot be disentangled from ends

2. Hierarchical power begets monopoly and domination

3. Power structures seek to perpetuate themselves

Though much else is said within the vast breadth of anarchist

literature, I contend that it is these three principles which span the

gamut. Indeed, they are of such importance, I will essentially spend the

rest of this work explaining how they are justified and developing a

structure of understanding based on their consequences. But, before we

set out on that journey, let us take a few moments to discuss what is

meant by “power” in these principles.

When I say power I mean, quite simply, “the ability to successfully

enact one’s will.” This is sometimes called a theory of “power to” as

opposed to “power over.” The “power to” do a thing does not come along

with a default value judgment. In order to derive whether some power is

good or bad, we must develop a theory of how power functions and how

different powers connect to human needs. If you can acquire food, for

example, and if your body is in normal functioning order, you have the

“power to” eat. If you can operate a vehicle and you have the ability to

provide it with fuel, you have the “power to” travel. Neither of these

are, in themselves bad powers for one to have; we would then be required

to ask: food by what means? A vehicle that does what?

The statement of how powerful some entity is, the measure of that

entity’s ability to enact its will, is then also a statement about that

entity’s ability to transform the universe around them. And such powers,

grounded as they are in reality, are limited by natural bounds. For this

reason, powers are never purely creative nor purely destructive. In

deriving any power, a being must balance its creative and destructive

aspects. In the production of a painting, materials are exhausted. In

the performance of a play, sweat and tears are shed, fat is burned, time

is used up. It is a great strength of the firearm that it spends only

the bullet it fires, yet it can kill so easily. It is a great service to

the master that the servant is obedient, so that they expend little

effort in disciplining them. And it is a benefit to the writer that

their work exhausts only graphite or ink or reorients the switches on a

hard drive, yet has the ability to create entire worlds. Powers are

complex, multi-faceted, and contextual.

However, in the coming dialogue, you may see a few authors use the word

power in a different way than I have just explained. They are using the

“power over” usage I mentioned a few moments ago. The power “over” a

thing may be seen as the power to dominate that thing; to use it or

dispose of it as one pleases. From the perspective of the power to do

something, power over other people might be seen as the “power to

extract the obedience of others” which, as we will explore, has led to

prolific suffering and destruction. However, I will be using this more

holistic conception, as it has been developed in my work Power, which

serves as a companion piece for those who are interested in the subject.

With this understanding in hand, the problem is not that every

individual has power in anarchism. Power, after all, is something that

every individual has and which, depending on their context and desires,

will differ considerably. In order for us to specify the real subject of

our conversation, we must discuss what is called a power structure. A

power structure is a material and conceptual system embodied through

social, technological, and environmental relations that then determine

how the collective powers of some group of conscious beings are

directed. Any place wherein people orient their social arrangements,

implement their technologies, or interact with their environment in a

way where they redirect the total of their powers toward a coordinated

end, they will have created a power structure. Like power, a power

structure is not inherently bad. The agreement between two people to

divide their labor as to pertain to their strengths is a very simple

mutualistic power structure. But a vast system of domination, where

there are those who sit above in cushioned seats and command the masses

to carry out their will, would also be a power structure; although a

very different kind.

It must then be said that the object of critique in anarchism is what is

called a hierarchical power structure. A hierarchical power structure is

a system organized to give one group of people both greater power than

another group and power over that other group. And this is not an

arbitrary construction. As we shall set out to demonstrate in this

essay, as a material fact of how such hierarchical power structures are

constructed, they will always have a very particular kind of relation to

their society, technology, and ecology; the relations which we call

authoritarianism and domination. Here and elsewhere, I use these words

in a precise way:

Authoritarianism - The degree to which a power structure monopolizes

control over the total social implementation of some power.

Domination - The degree to which some power structure utilizes coercion,

violence, and/or deception to achieve its ends.

I have separated these two terms because, although the phenomena they

describe nearly always occur together, they can and do occur apart at

the scale of individuals. However, where it is allowed to perpetuate,

authoritarianism almost always demands domination of some sort in order

to maintain its monopoly, whether it is threat of physical or social

violence, grievous bodily harm, or a propaganda system through which it

can manufacture consent. And a system of domination will almost always

demand the establishment of authoritarian relations, wherein the

subjugator class can keep such control of coercion, violence, and

deception to themselves. Domination and authoritarianism might then be

said to be the methods used by hierarchical powers to solidify and

perpetuate themselves.

But the anarchist does not then tell us to just sit back and watch as

these systems of domination expand and despoil the Earth. Hierarchical

power structures are not inevitably constituted by the organic

capacities of human beings, they are imposed upon human society by a

ruthless process. The mistaken axiom at the core of all hierarchical

ideology is that, because there are differences in individual powers,

that this both necessitates and justifies hierarchical power structures.

Yet, just because the person who can construct a house is more powerful

in the means of creating shelter than those who cannot, does this mean

that they are also better than others as a chef or as a scientist or as

an artist? The one who can compose a work of musical beauty is not

better or worse than the analyst or the technician. The spectrum of

human powers find their fullest expression in a society where all others

are practiced. We are all reliant on one another.

Seeking to bring out these better aspects of humanity, the anarchist

posits the creation of horizontal power structures, wherein power is

distributed more equitably among all people and all decisions are made

by those who are affected. These are then best represented in opposite

tendencies to those of authoritarianism and domination. These are:

Libertarianism: The degree to which decisions about the implementation

of total social power are socially distributed.

Mutuality: The degree to which a power structure utilizes impulses of

cooperation, self-defense, and free thought to achieve its ends.

In these, we see how the most productive strengths of humans lie within

their better capacities, not conceiving of difference as necessitating

hierarchy, but embracing a unity in diversity. And it is the contention

of the anarchists that, so long as these better impulses are not

embraced and brought to bear in organizing society, humanity will suffer

under a perpetual subjugation.

But up until this point, I have stated a great deal and provided little

justification. In the following sections I would like to explain to you

why power structures function as they do and give you an understanding

of what dynamics are at play that lead to these issues. In order to do

this I think it is best that we start from the beginning.

Kyriarchal Power

Before all other considerations, there is the physical world. The

universe, existing prior to consciousness, also then existed prior to

power. After all, power is reliant on the existence of a will and there

is no will in the procession of particles nor their assemblies until

they have been constructed together into the form of a conscious being.

Before the conceptions and intentions of conscious beings, there are

only flows of energy, information, embodied in relations and structure.

The universe is configured and reconfigured by these flows between its

internal components, driven by differences from one part to the next. A

cascade of events takes place at scales beyond all human reckoning every

single fraction of every single second. With or without humans these

churning processes would still proceed.

But we are holistically embedded within that universe. And, by this

measure, every power that we have necessarily derives from those

interactions with the real flows of physical reality which surround us.

However, we have become separated from this fact. We forget where all

things have come from and where all things will one day return. The

world has ceased to be, as many organic societies considered it, the

vital substrate of all existence, but instead a thing to be tamed,

exploited, conquered, and extracted from. We have come to forget our

place within this vast ecological balance and have sought to separate

ourselves from its inherent movements. Worse than this, due to our

mistaken belief in a separation, we have lost an understanding of how

many of those flows even function. We can never grasp the full scope of

nature, not just at the scale of the cosmos, but at the scale of our own

planet, of our own continent, of our own communities.

Where the universe knows only what is, we have imposed upon it arbitrary

relations such as private ownership, status, domination, obedience, and

so on. Yet none of these can cover up our origins within the ecology,

nor can they remake what the universe is. Every single process we carry

out is foundationally predicated on the utilization of ecological

growth, the long processes of natural chemistry, and our coincidentally

hospitable place within the solar system. After all, there would be no

human power to speak of if any of these were not so. What minerals and

organic materials would human labor extract to build its tools? What

animals would it consume? What landscape would it settle within? Our

very physiology is an agglomeration of gradual improvements arising from

millions of years of adaptation. As Murray Bookchin has said:

“We are part of nature, a product of a long evolutionary journey. To

some degree, we carry the ancient oceans in our blood. [...] Our brains

and nervous systems did not suddenly spring into existence without long

antecedents in natural history. That which we most prize as integral to

our humanity – our extraordinary capacity to think on complex conceptual

levels – can be traced back to the nerve network of primitive

invertebrates, the ganglia of a mollusk, the spinal cord of a fish, the

brain of an amphibian, and the cerebral cortex of a primate.”

Yet, despite these facts, we have come to see the universe as nothing

more than a stage, the ecology a distant, niche concern, obscuring the

manner in which we are holistically embedded within it. Layers and

layers of the ecosphere are built up, all of them reliant on one

another, all of them variegated by the diverse flows of energy within

the universe. Together, these living materials represent a most robust

transformation of physical matter, providing a biotic scaffolding that

allows all other things to exist. And in this fact, the coordination of

living material has been a crucial mechanism for the derivation of human

power. We cannot hope to describe the countless, subtle ways in which

humans were connected with the flora and fauna of their areas. Life was

once inextricably oriented within the local ecology: the cycles of

nature given meaning and purpose, their rhythm fostering an intimate

knowledge of the patterns of the natural environment, as well as its

pitfalls.

However, the truest catalyst for human power was the coordination with

other human beings. In the expansion and redirection of these creative

and destructive powers, the widest potentiality was discovered. Society

was no convenience, it was a necessity both for survival and in

providing the best life for those early peoples. Society was a thing

arising from humanity’s natural capacities for empathy and

socialization, put to work in ensuring communal safety within the

environment. Humans are equipped with a brain that is wired for

sociality. Our very physiology pushes us toward a consideration of how

the needs of others are equal to our own. In A General Theory of Love,

professors of psychiatry Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon

expound at length about how this human sociality is constructed, noting:

"[...] because human physiology is (at least in part) an open-loop

arrangement, an individual does not direct all of his own functions. A

second person transmits regulatory information that can alter hormone

levels, cardiovascular function, sleep rhythms, immune function, and

more—inside the body of the first. The reciprocal process occurs

simultaneously: the first person regulates the physiology of the second,

even as he himself is regulated. Neither is a functioning whole on his

own; each has open loops that only somebody else can complete. Together

they create a stable, properly balanced pair of organisms. And the two

trade their complementary data through the open channel their limbic

connection provides. [...] That open-loop design means that in some

important ways, people cannot be stable on their own—not should or

shouldn't be, but can't be. [...] Total self-sufficiency turns out to be

a daydream whose bubble is burst by the sharp edge of the limbic brain.

Stability means finding people who regulate you well and staying near

them.”

Because the human is a being in eternal process, an open loop.

Continually, the human is confronted with new stimuli, each imprinting

themselves upon them in different ways, leading to internal changes to

their psyche. And, in order to act effectively, they must attempt to

coordinate their actions with their expectations, such that the feedback

from their actions will form an end in coordination with their goals.

Upon every step, seeing the results of what they have done, the human

must choose whether they will adjust their expectations or adjust their

actions. And this is no obscure philosophical fact. Human actions

transform the world, changing its content and provoking responses from

those other entities which exist.

All of these loops open, each human being and their entire environment

then vies over how their actions and expectations will be formed. This

alteration of expectations and intentions, then coordinated with

actions, I will call “conditioning,” as it is named in psychological

literature. Conditioning is not always nefarious, of course. We are

conditioned, especially at the beginning of our lives, to avoid actions

which will genuinely harm us. It is good that we learn to withdraw our

hand from the stove top. Pavlov’s Dog is not being taught to do anything

harmful when he begins to salivate at the sound of the bell, any more

than some humans have begun to salivate and proceed home at the sound of

the dinner bell. Given this flexibility of conscious beings and taking

seriously the need of humans to bond deeply with one another, it would

seem that we are encouraged to produce a society of reconciliation with

others, consideration of conscious needs, and mutuality with the

environment.

But hierarchical power is predicated on the negation of these impulses.

Hierarchical powers wish to bring those that they control into obedience

to the seat of command, because obedience guarantees service to the

goals of that structural leadership and the perpetuation of their

direction of the powers of others. In order to achieve this, power

structures are driven to utilize reward and punishment; what is called

“operant conditioning” in the psychological literature. And by this

measure, hierarchical society can be seen as something like psychologist

B.F. Skinner’s “operant conditioning chambers.” In these operant

conditioning chambers, the animal is given the option to either do some

desired task and therefore receive a reward (typically food) or not do

some desired task and therefore receive a punishment (some form of

pain). These chambers then program the animals that are inside them to

do the desired task, quite reliably as well. Hierarchical society then

functions as an elaborate operant conditioning chamber, such that it may

contort us into misery, yet still extract our compliance.

As the scholar Lewis Mumford reminds us in his theory of the

mega-machine, hierarchical power is mechanistic. And in a machine, the

relation between components must be specified very closely. After all,

if these relations are not fine-tuned, then small changes in the input

of one component may lead to run-on effects. Indeed, every time that

information is conveyed from one juncture to the next, the worse that

that information is conveyed, the more distorted the signal will be at

the next step, like we see in a game of telephone. And hierarchical

power, seeking to reduce all variance between its commands and the

actions of its subjects, seeks for its power to be conveyed smoothly

through us. Therefore, as we are the means by which this machine conveys

its power, the invariant conveyance of power means the reduction of

human lives, with all their creative energies, into dead components.

In this, we hear the echoes of Rudolf Rocker’s thesis In Nationalism and

Culture that, the more hierarchical the power resting over some society

is, the more that the culture of that people is strangled. Culture,

after all, is the creative social product of a people, the result of

their accumulated creativity unconstrained and turned onto the universe.

Hierarchical structures, by contrast, relying upon the existence of a

latent decentral power outside of themselves that they may then redirect

to their whims, are necessarily sterilizing. As Rudolf Rocker says:

“Culture is not created by command. It creates itself, arising

spontaneously from the necessities of men and their social cooperative

activity. No ruler could ever command men to fashion the first tools,

first use fire, invent the telescope and the steam engine, or compose

the Iliad. Cultural values do not arise by direction of higher

authorities. They cannot be compelled by dictates nor called into life

by the resolution of legislative assemblies.”

Hierarchical power is then reliant on the persistence of an organic

society that it is alien to, which it exploits but cannot recreate.

Because, though it is this ability of their human subjects to think of

things outside precedent, to devise new talents, and to overcome complex

obstacles which unlocks the power within many other things, these are

the very same impulses that hierarchy must seek to suffocate so that it

may ensure obedience. This is why power hierarchy drives toward the same

end in all circumstances, even though its manifestations may differ; its

eternal method is unquestioning conformity and thus the mechanization of

the human subject.

This is one of the primary insights which has driven the anarchist

analysis throughout history. And it has provided anarchist theorists

with a powerful lens by which to understand and predict the actions of

hierarchical structures. Indeed, this is why, even though anarchists

have sometimes fallen victim to economic reductionism, it has never been

a totalizing impulse within the movement. In an essay written by Deric

Shannon and J Rogue called “Refusing to Wait,” they summarize some of

these early theoretical developments:

“Early anarchists were writing about issues such as prostitution and sex

trafficking (Goldman), forced sterilizations (Kropotkin), and marriage

(de Cleyre) to widen the anarchist critique of hierarchy to give

critical concern to women’s issues in their own right, while also

articulating a socialist vision of a future cooperative and classless

society.”

But there was a tendency of historical anarchists to see some of these

social issues as fundamentally unalterable until the conditions of

capitalism and state domination were overturned. This is not because

these issues were seen as unimportant, as we have already pointed out.

It is instead that classical anarchists have often viewed capitalism and

the state as the foundational mechanisms through which all other

hierarchies are maintained. Consequently, these groups have sometimes

been told that their liberation ultimately had to wait until after the

revolution to be resolved, and asked to struggle instead toward

emancipation from capital and the state first. This is precisely why the

title of Shannon and Rogue’s piece on this subject is “Refusing to

Wait.” Here they argue for an anarchist intersectionality with very good

reason, pointing out that anarchists cannot put off the struggles of

oppressed people in hopes that, one day, a rupture will eliminate

capitalism and the state.

These struggles against hierarchy are not separate and we cannot

procrastinate in their elimination until some rosy future after the

revolution. They function right here and now to maintain all other

hierarchies of power. In absorbing intersectionality, it must become a

tool that is complementary to the anarchist framework, which requires

that we expand it past a simple liberal analysis of identity and instead

relate that identity to structure and vise versa. This is why J. Rogue

and Abbey Volcano say the following in their piece about anarchist

intersectionality titled Insurrections at the Intersections:

"Our interest lies with how institutions function and how institutions

are reproduced through our daily lives and patterns of social relations.

How can we trace our ‘individual experiences’ back to the systems that

(re)produce them (and vice versa)? How can we trace the ways that these

systems (re)produce one another? How can we smash them and create new

social relations that foster freedom?"

This echoes the words of the more radical tradition within

intersectional feminism. Heard again from bell hooks in one of her

interviews:

“I began to use the phrase, in my work, white supremacist capitalist

patriarchy, because I wanted to have some language that would actually

remind us continually of the interlocking systems of domination that

define our reality and not just to have one thing be like...gender is

the important issue, race is the important issue. [...] ‘all of these

things actually are functioning simultaneously at all times in our

lives.’”

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUpY8PZlgV8)

In this, we hear the common conclusion of intersectionality and our own

power analysis: each hierarchy is fundamentally involved in the

maintenance of the complete structure of domination and cannot be

disentangled. Whether these powers derive from extraction, exploitation,

degradation, deception, or subjugation simply does not matter to a

hierarchical system. What matters to the hierarch is only what they may

achieve through their means.

This is what has motivated the development within intersectional theory

of what Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza calls the “kyriarchy.” In her book

Transforming Vision, she describes the kyriarchy as “a complex pyramidal

system of relations of domination that works through the violence of

economic exploitation and lived subordination.”

Here we see a very close overlap with Mumford’s conception of the

mega-machine, but with an emphasis upon the ways that this system is

carried out through its relations. What Fiorenza and the rest of the

intersectional theorists want us to recognize is that it is not one

singular hierarchy which transfigures any given society, but a web of

domination systems, wherein one may be privileged within one hierarchy

and not within another, in extreme danger within one environment and

completely safe in another.

These contexts are not mere attitudes, upon each juncture they have been

built into the structures of our cities, protected or discriminated

against by law, externalized into systems of automation and bureaucracy;

said in our own parlance, used as means to expand and protect power

monopoly. Each location in the global mega-machine merely utilizes

different aspects of the kyriarchy in order to maintain rulership,

ordering and reordering these to establish a more supreme dominance.

This is not to say that specific hierarchies do not function as the

major ordering ethos within certain spheres; different hierarchies

clearly have cultural and systemic dominance within their contexts,

capitalism and the state perhaps most notable among them. But it cannot

be said that domination is ever so simple that it can be boiled down to

only the reign of capital or the state or patriarchy or white supremacy

or any other single manifestation of kyriarchy, because each of these

rely upon one another within their context in order to maintain

hierarchical control.

All of these systems of discrimination and bigotry form part of the

integral functioning of the factories and the roadways and the

commodities that the kyriarchy produces and the effects can be seen in

how these very things have been systematizatized within reality. This is

why the separation between base and superstructure or a

software-hardware metaphor still fails to understand the situation at

hand; the truest goal for hierarchical power is to warp reality such

that their will can be carried out. All means that achieve their goals

lay upon the table waiting for use. Because, in this reduction of all

things into power accumulation, the momentum of the mega-machine is

toward a world where everything is unified within it and thus everything

is reproductive of its complete control. This process of social

reproduction is what Bichler and Nitzan call creorder. The creorder of

any society is the dynamic process by which it continually adjusts and

maintains itself to create a new ordered state. As they say:

“A creorder can be hierarchical as in dictatorship or tight bureaucracy,

horizontal as in direct democracy, or something in between. Its pace of

change can be imperceptibly slow – as it was in many ancient tyrannies –

yielding the impression of complete stability; or it can be so fast as

to undermine any semblance of structure, as it often is in capitalism.

Its transformative pattern can be continuous or discrete, uniform or

erratic, singular or multifaceted. But whatever its particular

properties, it is always a paradoxical duality – a dynamic creation of a

static order.”

This process plays out then at every level, in the development of our

creative and destructive capacities, through the formation of our

expectations, in the development of our intentions, in the domination of

our will, and all else. Through creorder, all of these aspects of

ourselves and the world are disfigured into the shape that is needed by

the machine and the range of possibilities we might achieve is sullied

to meet demands of the rulers.

Because, though hierarchical power views itself as a form of godhood

whose extent is infinite and limitations always temporary, the

mega-machine is actually nothing more than a parasite by nature. Its

power is derived solely in the fact that, standing at the juncture where

decisions are made, those that stand above in the hierarchy act as

gatekeepers to the total social flow of power. And, though this

gatekeeping of command creates the illusion of facilitation, the work of

hierarchy is actually to sabotage the free coordination of powers by

splitting what already exists within the world, into an infinite

procession of thresholds, staffed by middle men who each extract their

toll.

This process is one of the driving factors to why hierarchical power

actually serves to reduce complexity. This is spoken about at length by

James C. Scott, in his book Seeing Like a State:

“Officials of the modern state are, of necessity, at least one step— and

often several steps— removed from the society they are charged with

governing. They assess the life of their society by a series of

typifications that are always some distance from the full reality these

abstractions are meant to capture. [...] State simplifications [...]

represent techniques for grasping a large and complex reality; in order

for officials to be able to comprehend aspects of the ensemble, that

complex reality must be reduced to schematic categories. The only way to

accomplish this is to reduce an infinite array of detail to a set of

categories that will facilitate summary descriptions, comparisons, and

aggregation.”

But this is not only a problem seen in the state. Hierarchical powers,

in general, will have similar interactions with their society. As a

matter of principle, the narrower the bottleneck of power, the further

information will be simplified by removal from the origin. And this is

hardly an ambitious claim. We can see that they know these very

limitations in the way they organize their own systems of power,

demanding that the world be reduced into a scale they can understand,

what Scott calls “legibility.”

“Certain forms of knowledge and control require a narrowing of vision.

The great advantage of such tunnel vision is that it brings into sharp

focus certain limited aspects of an otherwise far more complex and

unwieldy reality. This very simplification, in turn, makes the

phenomenon at the center of the field of vision more legible and hence

more susceptible to careful measurement and calculation.”

Such a striving for legibility can be quite useful in the physical

sciences, but human lives are not particles in a box. Seeing society

from on high, humans become like ants, the details of the local

landscape are obscured to those who make all decisions. The higher up

one stands on the structure, the more that they see a summary map, and

one lacking all of the nuances of ecological, economic, and social

complexity. As a result, the flows of social life, containing all of

their infinite suffering and happiness and all that lies in between

become statistics, the great aggregation of labor power becomes a number

by which they chart the disastrous course of the machine.

Whereas complexity requires a system of agents who are allowed to have

variable action and association, enabling them to combine in new and

unique ways, hierarchy demands that complexity reduce itself to the

limits of the machine. Because, hierarchical power does not gather its

data out of sheer curiosity. It is not like the scientist who measures

much and interacts as little as possible. The information that

centralized bodies endeavor to gather is gathered in order to then act

upon the world; that is to say, to dominate society and to therefore

reproduce their central authority.

And so, to any hierarchical machine, alterations can be made, but only

within a certain range. These forces of simplification and legibility

are not mistakes, they are the inborn dynamics of hierarchical power and

they will arise anywhere it is imposed. Where the kyriarchal machine

acts, it acts to sheer off any rough edges that stray too far from its

prototypes, to externalize the importance of pertinent organizing

details, to forcefully stratify both reality and information as to fit

their schemas of interpretation, and to inflict real physical and

emotional violence in order to achieve the absolute obedience of

everything and everyone that exists.

This creordering force of simplification and regimentation is one of the

driving factors to why authoritarian systems produce such misery within

their people. As the gatekeeping of power becomes more strict and as the

group of power controllers becomes arbitrarily smaller, the hierarchy of

power becomes more extreme. The subjects of that hierarchical power are

more and more alienated from their own capacities: those qualities

within their personhood which could be turned onto the world in far more

beneficial ways, are instead put toward menial labor and repetition.

Their blood, sweat, and tears are shed only so that this great parasitic

force dwelling over them may extract its diet.

Defined in its narrow monopoly over the flow of power in society,

hierarchy demands that the raucous creative impulses of humanity are

constrained to the needs of the hierarchs. And, in this, it would not

matter whether one argued that these structures were a natural outcome

of human society or not. By the fact that they turn humans into

miserable machines, hierarchical structures stand counterposed to the

organic human composition and its fundamental desires and needs. As

Rocker says:

“Neither in Egypt nor in Babylon, nor in any other land was culture

created by the heads of systems of political power. They merely

appropriated an already existing and developed culture and made it

subservient to their special political purposes. But thereby they put

the ax to the root of all future cultural progress, for in the same

degree as political power became confirmed, and subjected all social

life to its influence, occurred the inner atrophy of the old forms of

culture, until within their former field of action no fresh growth could

start.”

That hierarchical society continues, even though it relies on sabotage

of the full capacities of human beings and the production of their

misery may seem difficult to imagine. After all, given that the machine

utilizes those very flows in order to derive its power, it would seem to

benefit much more greatly from their expansion. But, if total human

power is expanded in such a way that the hierarchs cannot extract their

toll from the expansion, then they will slowly begin to lose their power

leverage over the masses. And so, the only growth which is acceptable to

hierarchical power is that power which it can exploit. Because, in order

for power structures to perpetuate themselves, the most primary goal is

always power leverage; to maintain a position of superior power over all

other rivals. In this, it might be said that there is always an arms

race between hierarchical powers; however it is far more complex than

the acquisition of actual arms; it is a ruthless competition to earn

access to means of domination and authoritarianism.

As this monopoly is factually established, competing power structures

are then less able to access the means to accumulate their own power,

which slows their accumulation more, leading to a destructive feedback

cycle. So in order to ensure this affair takes place for competitors,

but not for themselves, hierarchical powers utilize their access to

domination to sabotage other structures. As a result, social power is

concentrated into tiers by a systemic disallowance of other beings to

access the broader capacities of society and thus the disallowance of

others to express their own creative and destructive powers, unless it

serves the owners. Therefore, hierarchical power must strangle the

fullest expression of human potentials, lest it bring about its own

destruction. Hierarchical power is then not a producer of progress, but

an exploitative parasite which extracts its sustenance from constraining

passage through the many gates of control.

The phenomena being described is clearest to see within the economy. The

economy is that place wherein power has been made so legible to

hierarchy that it is literally made into numbers; measured in dollars

and cents, calculated, predicted, and discounted, invested, depreciated,

and so on... As Bichler and Nitzan would say, capital is a symbolic

quantification of power. Capital measures the real, numeric ability of

its holders to organize and reorganize society to their will. And,

because power structures always seek to expand, the owners of capital

then seek to accumulate all of the components for creation,

distribution, syndication, and all other manner of production. They can,

through this accumulation, acquire the services of all of those with

their desired creative powers, the technological infrastructure needed

to coordinate those powers, and the supply of extracted ecological

materials to continue the construction of their means. They can come to

own the warehouses. They can come to own the land on which the

businesses might be constructed. And if those other entities within

society try to resist, they can exert their leverage to carry out wars

both of attrition and aggression.

As they gain control of these new services and access to new

information, the field of quantized power then expands, invading more

and more deeply into our personal as well as our professional lives. The

organic society which functions by way of its freedom from this

incursion of hierarchy, comes to be more and more atomized, more and

more alienated, more and more filled with the vanity of economic

domination. After all, the owners of capital did not simply will their

capital into existence. Their capital was accumulated because they

requisitioned some portion of the power already afforded to them in

order to control more of the world around them; that is to say, to exact

obedience from the economy, society, and the ecology and to therefore

perpetuate their further control of obedience. The capitalist, having

the capital within their hands to begin with, pays the workers to

produce products, sell them, coordinate their distribution, facilitate

their repair, and so on, such that the owner of the enterprise derives

all power. And the capitalist, desiring to extract the maximum amount

possible from that labor, seeks to concede as little of that accumulated

power to the worker as possible.

After all, the capitalist does not need to negotiate with the land or

the buildings or the machinery they use to run their business. These

things demand only the cost of upkeep. The worker though, thinks to

demand more than starvation! The human being demands dignity! And the

capitalist, no matter how magnanimous, is drawn to resent this fact. The

conditioning of the mega-machine is such that the capitalists will try

to reduce the worker to the status of a machine. This means to reduce

the wage of the laborer, to charge the consumer a higher price, and to

yield less through taxation; that is to say, to limit the amount of

power which escapes the grasp of the owner of capital. And, were there

no minimum wages or were the workers to roll over and do nothing, the

capitalist would happily wring out every last scrap of power which they

could extract out of them, such that they were relegated to slavery.

And, with this power they have extracted, fed back into an economy

wherein all things are quantized by capital, nearly all things become

possible. Capital is not limited only to the creation of new

commodities. If the corporation truly seeks to ensure its accumulation,

it means to sabotage the market, to more strictly constrain the access

to new technologies, to carry out adversarial ad campaigns, to

accumulate contested assets, and to capture interested consumer

demographics. If it does not, its competitors may catch up, thus leading

to an ever-expanding urge to increase power leverage. And it is this

reliable leverage accumulation that solidifies the hierarchy of one rung

over another. This is what drives the process of differential

accumulation in the theory of Capital as Power:

“...capitalism isn’t simply an order; it is a creorder. It involves the

ongoing imposition of power and therefore the dynamic transformation of

society. In this process the key is differential accumulation: the goal

is not merely to retain one’s relative capitalization but to increase

it. And since relative capitalization represents power, increases in

relative capitalization represent the augmentation of power. The

accumulation of capital and the changing power of capitalists to

transform society become two sides of the same creorder.”

This desire to accumulate power faster than their competitors is a

universal law of hierarchical power. And, indeed, the utilization of the

power of society does not end only where power is quantized. As we have

said, the entire kyriarchal machine is unified and thus the power of

capital rests on a continuum with the other powers in society. In fact,

one of the most primary mechanisms through which the capitalist class

ensures their leverage over the masses is the gatekeeping of popular

power by the state, specifically: the police and the army. Through

these, the state enforces both economic and political monopolies through

violence, enabling the ruling class to maintain its narrow bottleneck of

control. Because those workers who labor toward the goals of the

capitalist, what access do they have to these means? If workers seek to

take the warehouses and the tools and the supply lines back from those

who own them, capital will employ the violence of the state to stop

them.

This is the component purpose of the state in the mega-machine: to

establish a fixed schema, put into place by those who already rule, in

order to maintain and encourage kyriarchal growth, enforced through

monopoly on violence, coercion, and threat. Said otherwise: the state is

the primary mechanism of domination, carried out on behalf of whichever

parasite stands at the juncture of ‘deservedness.’ In this way, the

state serves to alienate the masses from the most basic capacities of

society and to instead transform each into a form of rulership. This is

why Malatesta defines the state in the following way:

“Anarchists, including this writer, have used the word State, and still

do, to mean the sum total of the political, legislative, judiciary,

military and financial institutions through which the management of

their own affairs, the control over their personal behavior, the

responsibility for their personal safety, are taken away from the people

and entrusted to others who, by usurpation or delegation, are vested

with the powers to make the laws for everything and everybody, and to

oblige the people to observe them, if need be, by the use of collective

force.”

This interpretation stands in contrast to the liberal conceit of the

state: that the state was meant to be a central representation of the

society it stood over and, in this role, was also meant to act as

mediator to alienate capital from complete administration of society.

This mistaken belief in the separation of politics and economics is, in

fact, what fuels the delusion presented by capitalists that they stand

in opposition to state regulation. But this separation between capital

and state has always been a convenient fiction. Bichler and Nitzan

explain why this is the case in their work, saying:

“[T]he pivotal impact of mergers is to creorder not capitalist

production but capitalist power at large. [...] By constantly pushing

toward, and eventually breaking through their successive social

‘envelopes’ – from the industry, to the sector, to the nation-state, to

the world as a whole – mergers create a strong drive toward

‘jurisdictional integration’ [...] Yet this very integration pits

dominant capital against new rivals under new circumstances, and so

creates the need to constantly creorder the wider power institutions of

society, including the state of capital, international relations,

ideology and violence.”

Though Bichler and Nitzan are focusing on these facts as they are

pertinent to capital, it is true of all hierarchical power. Seeing

opposition, the state will always seek to destroy or merge with its

opponents in time, whether this is through wars of imperialism, trade

agreements, foreign occupations, colonialism, annexation, invasion, or

any other mechanism. Where there exists opposition, there exists a

threat to perpetuation that must be eliminated, its autonomy replaced

with subjugation, its oppositional will destroyed. However, both

domestically and abroad, in recognition of their common interests to

control the masses, capital and state always rationally choose merger,

no matter what temporary theater they have offered to say otherwise.

Capital benefits greatly from having the duty to do violence to protect

itself outsourced to the state and the state benefits greatly from the

extractive economy of capitalism generating a surplus for it to bridle.

This is also why there never has been and never will be a “proletarian

state.” The very nature of a hierarchical power such as the state is to

alienate the masses from power. This is within its form as a machine.

Or, as Rocker has said in Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice:

“[J]ust as the functions of the bodily organs of plants and animals

cannot be arbitrarily altered, so that, for example, one cannot at will

hear with his eyes and see with his ears, so also one cannot at pleasure

transform an organ of social oppression into an instrument for the

liberation of the oppressed. The state can only be what it is: the

defender of mass exploitation and social privileges, the creator of

privileged classes and castes and of new monopolies. Who fails to

recognise this function of the state does not understand the real nature

of the present social order at all, and is incapable of pointing out to

humanity new outlooks for its social evolution.”

This is why the masses, no matter their power, can never merge with the

state. Hierarchy and the masses empowered are polar opposites, deriving

the impulses which give them their strength from precisely contradictory

principles. If the masses were to hold the power to overcome the state,

this would have represented a preceding deprivation of the state of its

power monopoly. And in the event that the people hold this power to

themselves, they would have only the choice to abolish the remaining,

anemic state or to let it remain and in doing so, let an opposing power

to themselves continue to exist - a power which, built hierarchically as

it is, would soon again seek sabotage or monopoly as by its nature.

Because, though the defenders of the state often claim that it arose as

a compromise wherein the people sacrifice some freedom in exchange for

protection, this turns out only to be an incidental fact. The state only

defends its people when it is beneficial for the state or its conjoined

hierarchies. When it is not, the state cares nothing for them unless

compelled. Their citizenry is a power host from which they begrudgingly

extract their means of subjugation. And, because the state is therefore

bound to the people underneath it in order to derive its power, it seeks

to convince them that they should be grateful for the service of sheer

self-interest that the state carries out in its defensive and offensive

capacities against other states.

To imbue this selfish delusion, the mega-machine seeks to establish a

nationalistic fervor which conceals the conflict playing out between all

peoples and their rulers, of a power alienated from the masses and made

to serve the needs of the ruling class, of a people gorged on the spoils

of other alienated peoples as a bribery for domestic suffering. Empire

seeks to convince the people that its wars of imperialism are necessary

to defend the citizens, when it is really just that the domination of

their state has expanded to such a degree that it now carries out a

global project of sabotage to maintain its power monopoly. In every

sphere that hierarchical power then expands, it is named differently as

its exhibitions differ: imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy,

colonialism, and so on… But each of these represent its need to

reproduce a global mega-machine, to control all urge to rebel, to turn

all collective powers of the planet into clientele.

Everywhere the kyriarchal machine expands, we experience the distress of

constantly living under subjugation, surveilled by the very commodities

we produce, deceived by every flow of information, distorted into sad

simulacrum by day, distracted by monotonous entertainment by night, and

forced into every other measure of distress offered by the domination

machine. Every day it tempts the limits of our misery, discovering what

new deprivation it might enforce upon us without provoking revolt.

However, the machine does not want to have to fight against the

internally motivated will of the beings it dominates; that is a costly

imposition. Given that there is a fundamental mismatch between the needs

of the masses of humans and the needs of the structures that they are

subsumed under, hierarchical powers have a wish to transform not only

the expectations and intentions of their subjects, but also their

desires; to desire their own domination and to participate in the

domination of others. Because, though domination is quite often

perpetuated through violence and coercion, systems generally much prefer

deception if it is available.

Mega-Mechanical Colonization

In his book Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher speaks about a social

phenomenon wherein the people have come to accept their state of

subjugation under capitalist society. He explains this concept, which he

calls capitalist realism as:

"the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable

political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even

to imagine a coherent alternative to it."

In this way, Fisher says, capitalism has come not only to represent a

single system oriented as it is within history, but instead the horizon

of all possible systems. We have not only reached a new stage of

society, in the words of Francis Fukayama, we have reached the ‘end of

history.’ And Fisher’s claim is hardly controversial. We can see this

being explicitly conveyed by the ruling class, for example, in Margaret

Thatcher’s propagandistic phrase “there is no alternative.” This

philosophy of justification is not even a celebration of capitalism, but

an attitude of dour acceptance. Though we want better, we are simply not

good enough for it.

But there is much more to this global power structure than capitalism.

As we have discussed, the mega-machine is not programmed as a purely

economic construct. A complex of hierarchical ideologies work together

to produce the functioning of the mega-machine, what I have called the

justifying philosophies of hierarchy in my other work. And it is for

this reason that we are faced with more than just a capitalist realism.

Because of the conditioning of hierarchical power structures, we have

become deeply enmeshed in a hierarchical realism. Whereas capitalist

realism might be said to have endeavored upon a few hundred years of

brainwashing to support its rein, hierarchical society has had

thousands. And, beaten down by these millennia of rulership, many of us

can no longer even imagine what it would look like to be free.

This is because, as each human moves through these hierarchical systems,

they are not only contorted into functional components by the machine,

they undergo considerable internal conditioning as well. After all, no

one likes to imagine themselves the villain of the story of life and

becoming reliant upon the privileges afforded to them by the power

structure, they will tend to justify the system they are embedded

within. The power of those beings acting within the structure, having

become intertwined with the system itself, is then also reliant upon the

perpetuation of that system. And for the system to cease is for their

expanded power to cease. In this, as one proceeds through a system of

power, it becomes more and more unthinkable that they should destroy

what they have built, that they should ever demure from the seizure of

new power, or that they should ever diminish the power they have

accumulated at some later date. As Rudolf Rocker says in Nationalism and

Culture:

“It is in the nature of all ambitions to political power that those

animated by them hesitate at no means which promise success even though

such success must be purchased by treason, lies, mean cunning, and

hypocritical intrigue. The maxim that the end justifies the means has

always been the first article of faith of all power politics. No Jesuits

were needed to invent it. Every power-lustful conqueror, every

politician, subscribes to it, Semite and German, Roman and Mongol, for

the baseness of method is as closely related to power as decay is to

death.”

And worse than this, hierarchical power attracts the corrupted. Seeing

within this structure a means by which they can achieve a dominator’s

ends there is little question of whether the petty tyrant will seize the

opportunity. They do not care, after all, whether they are “corrupted”

by our standards by the conditioning of the mega-machine; their simple

impulse is to accumulate power and that impulse is rewarded prolifically

within the hierarchical structures which have been brought into being.

With these corrupted components in place, it is a guarantee that such a

system will become filled with opportunists and parasites.

These hierarchical structures, controlled by the power hungry, bungled

by corrupted reformers, and staffed by an endless array of sycophants,

then have almost no checks on the free expansion of their influence.

Where these systems persist, they will tend to pervade every sphere with

their philosophies of justification, forcefully establishing the

assumptions of the ruling class as the new standards of society. And, as

this process goes on for longer and longer, it will tend to create a new

notion of normalcy which benefits it, whether it is patriarchal,

capitalist, or otherwise. The perpetuation of this normalized way of

being becomes like a social ritual that, when repeated, brings

hierarchical power further into reality.

This is the topic which queer anarchism orients itself around most

notably. That is to say, what is this construct of “normalcy” that

society develops and how are those that deviate from this standard of

normalcy treated? Susan Song summarizes this in her piece “Polyamory and

Queer Anarchism:”

“Queer theory opens up a space to critique how we relate to each other

socially in a distinctly different way than typical anarchist practice.

Where classical anarchism is mostly focused on analyzing power relations

between people, the economy, and the state, queer theory understands

people in relation to the normal and the deviant [...] Queer theory

seeks to disrupt the ‘normal’ with the same impulse that anarchists do

with relations of hierarchy, exploitation, and oppression.”

Despite its internal drive toward mechanical uniformity, however, the

kyriarchy does not have the power to ever fully eliminate these

deviations from the norm. Humanity is a boundless source of new creative

impulses which threaten to burst forth from any container made to

restrain them. And this provides an eternal struggle for the

mega-machine. The very existence of these deviations threatens the

machine’s ability to control the boundaries of what is considered

“normal” and thus to homogenize culture to maintain a bottleneck of

power.

Because hierarchical power cannot turn itself into something it is not.

Once the rulership realizes that it cannot eliminate some deviation from

the norm, it must neutralize the conflict of that form of deviation and

its own principles. This is what drives the process of recuperation.

Recuperation is the process by which some subversive ideology or

identity is maximally neutralized by a power structure. Instead of

actually absorbing the orientation, however, hierarchical power

structures are forced to absorb a mutated copy that has had all its

subversive content stripped out. And the more subversive that that idea

is to authority, the more elements they will have to neutralize. The

more and more that this ideology is hollowed out in the process of

creating its mutated double, the more that what will remain is a facade

of what once was.

Thus we see how, any time some people who have historically been

oppressed gain the power to demand their equal treatment, if they cannot

overturn the very hierarchical system itself in the process, the machine

that they have allowed to exist proceeds to tear away all of those

aspects of the popular struggle that once existed within their movement,

neutering their further ability to control the boundaries of normalcy.

The system then holds these up as trophies of its ability to progress;

empty images skirting across the screens to assure us that all is in

order; “the machine is legitimate and it can harbor progress. Be

grateful for the limited cessation of your necessary suffering.”

Through the expansion and enforcement of all of these means, every time

the mega-machine moves, it reiterates itself through its functional

components. And it is now so well polished, its creordering dynamics so

adaptive, that the machine hardly even fears a cultural rebellion. Upon

any disruption, all of its pieces go to work in discovering which

aspects of its counterbalance it may present as catharsis, even while

defying all impulses toward change. The system no longer even needs to

suppress its critics; it has demoralized the populace so thoroughly that

it even recuperates the symbols of anti-capitalist rebellion. It lets

these act as pressure release valves which diffuse popular revolt or

desire for real transformation. It uses the shifting tides of

subjectivity as a protectant against action.

As a result, the kyriarchy has now settled into nearly every region and

ecosystem, injecting its values of authoritarianism and domination

deeply into our cultures and intentions, convincing us that we are the

ones who have something wrong with us. Contained in all of its

propaganda is the idea that mutuality and libertarianism are inferior

modes of social order, that we too should desire to become subjugators,

even while no such path is made available to us. The machine vampirizes

a mass organic creativity to even exist, while demeaning its existence.

It dissuades us from a full embrace of mutuality, even knowing that

everything would utterly devolve without it. Hierarchical power, the

parasite that it is, must convince its host to despise its own strength,

so that it never acts to free itself.

In this dystopian landscape, we hear the echoes of ideas which are

explored by decolonial thinkers. In colonial occupations, the colonizing

culture comes to determine the set of thoughts which can be thought, it

establishes legitimacy, it gatekeeps power within those institutions

which prop it up and excludes access to those it dominates. Imperialist

white supremacy comes to replace the basic cultural values of the lands

it occupies, driving these colonial subjects to even believe the myths

of their own inferiority. Many even become ashamed of their stigmatized

qualities and seek relief in mimicry of the occupying empire.

But this situation wherein the dominated peoples have become the

progenitors of their dominator’s ideology is not only the province of

foreign colonial occupation. As many Black radicals have pointed out,

the Black peoples of the Americas can also be understood as a colonized

people. Taken from their lands of origin and transplanted onto another

continent, they retain much of their culture (indeed, they have built a

culture anew), constantly at odds with the dominator’s conditioning. In

this way, it is almost as if they are a sovereign people, yet integrated

into a foreign nation. This is what Lorenzo Kom’Boa Ervin means in his

work Anarchism and the Black Revolution when he says:

“Blacks (or Africans in America) are colonized. America is a mother

country with an internal colony. For Africans in America, our situation

is one of total oppression. No people are truly free until they can

determine their own destiny. Ours is a captive, oppressed colonial

status that must be overthrown, not just smashing ideological racism or

denial of civil rights.”

That such direct parallels can be drawn between foreign colonial

subjugation and domestic colonial subjugation is no coincidence. Each

component of the kyriarchy, crossing over oceans and into other

boundaries, separate though they may seem, are in fact all parts of a

historical colonial process which drives the functioning of the

mega-machine. In each, we see the establishment of a privileged group

which can coerce the behaviors of another, through the social conception

of some form of legitimacy, respectability, civility, or superiority.

This then serves as justification for why a privileged group should be

given access to the distribution of some resource, the application of

some form of physical or mental violence, or the right to exact some

form of deprivation upon the non-privileged group.

During colonization the machine has to subjugate a people that has some

memory of an oppositional culture and thus an inherent knowledge of how

they are now warped into the desired shape of their subjugator. This

drives the colonized populations to misery as they witness their people

degraded, their culture destroyed, their connection to the land, and all

else, slowly eroded. That is to say, colonized peoples are those that

are experiencing the first generations under degradation of hierarchical

realism, whereas those peoples fully subsumed by the machine have long

ago had their social conceptions distorted and their original histories

of resistance erased.

Perpetuating itself for so many cycles in our daily actions to form and

reform the world around us, the continuous existence of a ruling class

has left us exceptionally well deceived by our captors. There is now

almost no recess of our minds which does not contain the poison seeds of

our dominator’s ideology. Just as Marilyn Buck called prison “a

relationship with an abuser who controls your every move, keeps you

locked in the house” using “the ever-present threat of violence or

further repression,” society has functioned to make the abuser’s

mentality social. We are like those victims who blame themselves for

being beaten, our abuser telling us every time that we are humiliated

that it is our fault, that we need to improve ourselves to prevent our

further abuse. Within the belly of the beast, the power host is made

docile, pushed to carry out its own subjugation and the subjugation of

those abroad.

Said otherwise: humanity itself is the victim of a mega-mechanical

colonization. An ancient cycle of exploitation wherein the mega-machine

has moved into some area, crushed the organic culture of resistance, and

then absorbed these peoples and their lands into the system as a power

host. These settler peoples that now live upon colonized lands are the

descendants of a millennia-spanning program of colonization that was

once carried out upon their ancestors, but now upon their supposed

“enemies.” As a result, nearly all peoples have had their relation to

the land destroyed, their minds deeply pervaded with the ideology of

their oppressors, and an organic culture of resistance replaced with

relations of servitude.

Those who experience the results of a present day settler colonialism

can then be seen as the most recent subjects of this process of

mega-mechanical colonization. And, for this reason, these peoples also

contain a crucial knowledge of what is lost as the mega-machine expands,

of that organic culture of resistance which the forces of colonization

are still at work trying to destroy. For hundreds of years, they have

pleaded with the mega-mechanical colonists to embrace the

counter-system, but the forces of hierarchical realism have long ago

destroyed all hope within them.

And so, even those who consider themselves radical in many countries now

spend their days begging for reforms from liberal republics which

nonetheless slide further into totalitarianism by the moment, fighting

momentary insurrections for joy of struggle, not in hopes of success, or

developing micro-sects which convince themselves that one day their work

will come to courageously domineer the revolution even as they sink

further and further into irrelevance. The enemy has so fully recuperated

the revolutionary project that all that remains is aesthetics and this

is enough to dupe many millions of people. Indeed, even many of those

who call themselves revolutionaries have come to uncritically accept

systems of domination which have alienated the masses from power just

the same as the capitalist paradigm, but with the state operating as the

new monopoly capitalist. They cannot even see clearly that they have

configured another enemy system in this process, their project so

poisoned by hierarchical realism it represents a sort of disastrous

self-sabotage.

For many, what we have so far discussed will rightly appear to be a dire

landscape and it is not shocking how one could portray this framework as

a sort of political nihilism or social pessimism. For those who have

given in to hierarchical realism, this may all only seem to imply that

hierarchical power is too strong to ever defeat, that these structures

will degrade and degrade us as they proceed over time. Indeed, nowhere

within this discussion have we come to understand how to end those power

structures, nor where hope lies in the contentious terrain. The

principles of mutuality and libertarianism which we inspected at the

beginning of this work seem now such a distant thought that they might

appear to us as fantasy.

But humans cannot stand the misery of disempowerment forever. Though

these structures of brainwashing and erasure are expansive, the

resentment that grows in the core of the mechanized human can never be

truly suppressed. Just as decolonial thinkers tell us that, in order for

there to be a successful struggle, the colonial subject must reject

white supremacist conditioning, reclaim their dignity, and overthrow

their master, we must do the same. There is a struggle that lies ahead,

standing between us and our liberation. Through the trees in the

distance, that faint light still glows. Let us now proceed toward it.

A Revolutionary Light

It may seem, after this long journey, that we have wandered far from

where we began. Whereas we started with a depiction of the natural flows

of the universe and our redirection of them, of the ecology as the

originator of complex interrelations, and of the organic powers of human

beings as the creative engine of society; we, like humanity itself, have

traveled a dark path. And that light upon the horizon which I mentioned

at the beginning of our dialogue may seem now so distant that there is

no hope of escape. Worse, the very path which humanity walked to reach

this pitch blackness is so overgrown that we can no longer even double

back, nor is it clear we should want to.

But the flows of the universe move with or without our desires, the

ecology churns forth upon its processes of natural chemistry and

complexity, the human urge to create unbidden by limitation proceeds

whether power structures like it or not. It is just that our ability to

see the foundations has been obscured by a towering monolith within our

field of vision. Gazing so long upon its face, many have become

entranced by it, worshiping at its foot instead of rising to approach

the crossroads.

Knowing what we have discussed, it seems our most imminent duty is to

shake the supplicants from their trance, pleading with them to look

around and witness what subjugation that they have grown to endure. And

it is true, where these subjects of hierarchy have been deluded,

distracted, or distorted into the needs of the kyriarchy in order to

function, we must kindle the undying flame of defiance within them. It

is this flame of defiance that will immolate hierarchical realism and

all its associated justifications. It is this flame of defiance that can

burn down the kyriarchal machine, that can light the lantern which

guides us from the darkness; lying deep within the human psyche, though

hierarchy has endeavored for millennia to snuff it out, defiance is a

light that cannot die.

But we must do more than this. To rouse many individuals awake and to

bring about a driving outrage within them is not enough by itself. We

must bring about enormous energy to overthrow the system as it stands.

And to do this, a very sizable proportion of the masses must be unified

together in a common struggle. This is why the anarchist movements of

history have focused so much upon economic issues. Capitalism is one of

the only systems of oppression that cuts across all other issues of

identity, making it a fulcrum around which an enormous diversity of

peoples can be mobilized to collective action. Indeed, even those

peoples once detached from capitalist hegemony are now quite entangled

with it as it spans the globe. Thus it was not then and it’s not now

reductive to focus upon capitalism as a central hierarchy. If situated

properly within this greater constellation of intersecting hierarchies,

it must be understood in order to move forward.

However, there is something more universal than capitalist oppression

discovered within the anarchist framework. Capitalism, after all, is an

invention lasting only a few hundred years, pervasive though it is. When

we create an analysis which only understands societies in terms of their

economic arrangements, we build something fleeting and contingent; we

apply this totalizing influence of capital to history mistakenly,

projecting onto past peoples anachronistic motives and modes; we project

onto the future the very desires and attitudes that we currently wish to

bring to an end.

Such a reduction of oppression will never suffice: the true unifying

struggle of all oppressed peoples is the struggle against hierarchical

power. All peoples know misery when mechanized by hierarchy; all people,

whether conscious of it or not, experience alienation from the holistic

application of their human powers. Submission to arbitrary authority is

contrary to an inherent desire for boundlessness. And it is this issue

that cuts across all identities past, present and future, from birth

until death, in the public and the private, domestic or abroad, in the

realm of the physical and the ideological. Wherever hierarchy reins,

humanity suffers under subjugation.

And so, if anarchism can bring itself forward as the true opposition to

all hierarchies of power, it may communicate a revolutionary vision to

all peoples. This has always been the position which anarchism was meant

to fill, almost the one it was crafted to fulfill from its inception.

And this is why hierarchical advocates of all types have worked

tirelessly to defame and distort the real goals and ideas of the

movement.

If we are to tread that road which leads us from the darkness, we must

wage a war on both the ideological and material front. The machine as it

has been built is not a mere collection of individual attitudes. It is a

systemized apparatus of coercion. And, no matter the feelings or beliefs

of its masses of subjects, so long as it maintains its domination, it

will simply act to suppress those attitudes which undermine it. The

mega-machine will not be defeated simply by the passionate expression of

new desires or words of solidarity or radical attitudes. The conflict at

hand cannot be fought for in a collection of ideological silos, focused

inwardly on the personal views of a small sect of adherents or a radical

circle and their immediate periphery. As Bookchin says:

“To disengage ourselves from the existing social machinery, to create a

domain to meet one's needs as a human being, to form a public sphere in

which to function as part of a protoplasmic body politic-all can be

summed up in a single word: re-empowerment. I speak of re-empowerment in

its fullest personal and public sense, not as a psychic experience in a

specious and reductionist form of psychological ‘energetics’ that is

fixated on one's own ‘vibes’ and ‘space.’ There is no journey ‘inward’

that is not a journey ‘outward’ and no ‘inner space’ that can hope to

survive without a very palpable ‘public space’ as well. But public

space, like inner space, becomes mere empty space when it is not

structured, articulated, and given body. It must be provided with

institutional form, no less so than our highly integrated personal

bodies, which cannot exist without structure. Without form and

articulation, there can be no identity, no definition, and none of the

specificity that yields variety. What is actually at issue when one

discusses institutions is not whether they should exist at all but what

form they should take-libertarian or authoritarian.”

Because the truth which hierarchical realism has been developed to keep

hidden from sight is that this is a systems war: a war between the

system which could represent a social ecological society, to bring our

collective needs and values into existence, and the system which

represents a hierarchical society, one predicated on maintaining the

privilege of a few gatekeepers and parasites. We have simply been

unaware of this war for so long, purposely concealed as it has been from

our sight, that we have neglected to tend to those systems of horizontal

power which nourish our better nature. For now, the kyriarchy has seized

almost all available territory, conceded by the masses out of ignorance

to the conflict they are embroiled in.

This is why anarchists must not only change hierarchical consciousness,

but construct a counter-power to the kyriarchal machine. Because our

strength lies in reclaiming our alienated power and constructing the

counter-system which might direct our efforts toward a common liberatory

goal. The society of people who are turned toward hierarchical ends must

recognize their strength and redevelop the horizontal power structures

which will enable them to resist, to end the arbitrary, treacherous

expansion of hierarchical influence.

When we choose to construct hierarchical power structures, we have not

chosen, as “true utilitarians,” the means required to soberly carry out

our affairs; it is instead that we have chosen to labor in the

construction of the enemy system. As we pioneer forth in building a new

authoritarian structure or trying to seize the reins of one that already

exists, we really only work to neutralize the revolutionary aspirations

of the people and prepare that same populace to be integrated into a

global mega-machine. In the very movement which could potentially

threaten hierarchical power, capitulation to its means instead helps to

reclaim contested territory for the subjugator. Hierarchical power can

only serve to create a further hierarchical power. Where it exists, it

will attract the corrupted, corrupt the well-intentioned, and ultimately

mangle the society which it dominates.

For this reason, if we as human beings wish to create a society wherein

values opposite to such a system are expanded, it is also our

responsibility to carry out actions which produce different social

conditioning. Errico Malatesta offers a clear summary:

“[I]t is not enough to desire something; if one really wants it adequate

means must be used to secure it. And these means are not arbitrary, but

instead cannot but be conditioned by the ends we aspire to and by the

circumstances in which the struggle takes place, for if we ignore the

choice of means we would achieve other ends, possibly diametrically

opposed to those we aspire to, and this would be the obvious and

inevitable consequence of our choice of means. Whoever sets out on the

highroad and takes a wrong turn does not go where he intends to go but

where the road leads him.”

Anarchism then heeds this call for the creation of a maximally

libertarian approach, containing elements at its very core that are so

conflicting to authoritarian modes that it cannot be recuperated lest

hierarchical power risk a full refutation of its existence. Anarchism

stands as the pure negation of oppression. And it is through this vector

that we must work to create a revolutionary constituency and then

cooperate upon our shared strategic landscape. We must bring together

all peoples oppressed by the machine to undermine its functioning and to

begin forming its most robust opposition together, respecting the unity

in diversity and the equal deservedness of autonomy and dignity for all.

Because within such aspirations, a hope exists for transformation; a

coalition of all those degraded by hierarchical power, a growing series

of waves to tear down the kyriarchal mega-machine and to reverse its

colonization of horizontal society.

Having now traveled through a dark wood, filled with the most terrible

horrors, let us set upon that trail leading out of the forest. Over the

horizon there is the coming of a glorious reprieve. Beyond lies anarchy.