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Title: Re-Thinking Revolution Author: Jeff Shantz Date: 2012 Language: en Topics: revolution, social revolution, social anarchism, theory, mutual aid, DIY Source: *Philosophers for Change*. Retrieved on https://philosophersforchange.org/2012/03/07/re-thinking-revolution-a-social-anarchist-perspective/ from [[https://philosophersforchange.org/2012/03/07/re-thinking-revolution-a-social-anarchist-perspective/]] Notes: If publishing or re-posting this article kindly use the entire piece, credit the writer and this website: Philosophers for Change, philoforchange.wordpress.com. Thanks for your support.
Superseding archic society requires, in part, a refusal to participate
in dominant social relations. Anarchists call for a refusal to surrender
people’s collective power to politicians or bosses. Instead they seek to
re-organize social institutions in such a way as to reclaim social and
economic power and exercise it on their own behalves towards their own
collective interests.They seek an alternative social infrastructure that
is responsive to people’s needs because it is developed and controlled
directly by them.This is a social framework in which decisions regarding
social and economic relations are made by the people affected by them.
Such an approach takes a firm stand against the authority vested in
politicians and their corporate masters. It also speaks against the
hierarchical arrangements that exemplify major institutions such as
workplaces, schools, churches and even the family.
Large-scale civil non-co-operation and or militant confrontation with
the state and capital obviously require previous successes in
organization and experience. Thus, as Ehrlich (1996b) notes, these are
necessarily the outward, and dramatic, manifestations of ongoing
experiments in overcoming archic society. First, anarchists must develop
alternative institutions. These are the infrastructures of resistance
(Shantz 2010), the building blocks of what Ehrlich (1996a) refers to as
the anarchist transfer culture, an approximation of the new society
within the context of the old. Within them anarchists try to meet the
basic demands of building sustainable communities.
A transfer culture is that agglomeration of ideas and practices that
guide people in making the trip from the society here to the society
there in the future….As part of the accepted wisdom of that transfer
culture we understand that we may never achieve anything that goes
beyond the culture itself. It may be, in fact, that it is the very
nature of anarchy that we shall always be building the new society
within whatever society we find ourselves (Ehrlich, 1996a: 329).
Anarchist transfer cultures express “elements of refusal” or
non-co-operation with authority. Anarchists thereby attempt to undermine
the State by refusing to obey its demands. This is more than simple
civil disobedience since it also contains a positive character along
with a defensive one. It requires the development of infrastructures by
which real alternatives might be posed. It also suggests a rethinking of
conventional notions of revolution, one in which revolution is presented
as an ongoing process rather than a specific moment of rupture and
points to the incredible groundwork that needs to be laid before talk of
revolution or radical social transformation can have any meaning in the
current period.
Conceptualized as an event with specific temporality, as something for a
future time, revolution appears distant.
Todd Gitlin writing about SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] and
the new left of the sixties said at the time that if we failed it would
be a “failure of nerve.” Perhaps he was right, then. But today I would
say that if we fail it will have been a failure of imagination. Most
people have no sense of how to move outside the present – even in their
imagination (Ehrlich, 1996b: 341).
This is a view of revolution as a process of constructing alternative
forms of sociation as models of a new society.
Revolution is a process, and even the eradication of coercive
institutions will not automatically create a liberatory society. We
create that society by building new institutions, by changing the
character of our social relationships, by changing ourselves — and
throughout that process by changing the distribution of power in
society….
If we cannot begin this revolutionary project here and now, then we
cannot make a revolution (Ehrlich, DeLeon and Morris, 1996: 5).
These infrastructures of resistance and revolutionary transfer cultures,
which operate in the shadows of the old dominant institutions, provide
frameworks for the revolutionary organization of social relations in a
miniature, pre-insurrectionary, form. It is the rudimentary
infrastructure of alternative ways of being, an alternative future in
the present. It is decidedly not a millenarian project in which hopes
for liberation or freedom are deferred or projected into some imagined
future. Rather than utopian longings, these transfer cultures or futures
in the present express what social theorist Michel Foucault calls
heterotopias, real world practices in which utopian desires are given
life in the here and now.
In conventional political theory, revolutionary as well as conservative,
revolution is defined typically as the event of insurrection, generally
when some group of subordinates ousts their erstwhile overlords. This
establishes a point of rupture following which social reality is
fundamentally and irrevocably transformed. The period of reconstruction
following the revolution, in which new institutions, values and social
practices are developed, often in the face of counter-revolution from
the recently deposed elites, may also be included as existing within the
revolutionary era.
The period prior to the outbreak of active and open insurrection is
generally not viewed as a part of the revolutionary period. While people
may, during this time, be involved in smaller scale struggles or have
access to revolutionary education or propaganda, they are not, according
to orthodox approaches, involved in the everyday work of rebuilding
society. Such tasks are almost by definition part of a
post-revolutionary period. Related to this way of thinking about
revolutions is that, perhaps most importantly for the present
discussion, revolution is inextricably bound to a statist framework and
“the” revolution consists invariably or exclusively in the seizure of
state power.
Rather than a violent overthrow of the State in a destructive
Revolution, contemporary anarchists are more likely to pursue
constructive paths to social transformation through the creation of free
zones and libertarian social relations. This involves a vast range of
different tactics ranging from conventional means such as
demonstrations, boycotts, sabotage, occupations or strikes to less
familiar means such as poetic terrorism or electronic civil
disobedience. Each tactic involves “propaganda of the deed”; an
educational practice which not only shows that things can be done
differently but offers practical examples and lessons learned. As
Graeber (2004: 44–45) reminds us, “unless we are willing to massacre
thousands of people (and probably even then), the revolution will almost
certainly not be quite such a clean break as such a phrase [as “after
the revolution”] implies.”
For anarchists, the fatal consequences deriving from an absence of
infrastructures of resistance and revolutionary transfer cultures have
historically been shown in case after case, from France to Russia to
China and beyond. If people are not prepared, and somewhat experienced,
in terms of organizing and managing social relations they will have
difficulty developing a new society in egalitarian and participatory
directions, turning instead to leaders offering to coordinate change on
their behalf.
When these small groups of “vanguards” come to manage revolutionary
undertakings, people become dependent on them. In turning to vanguardist
leaders people are to some extent expressing their lack of confidence,
skills, knowledge or resources to make and carry out communal decisions.
Even beyond this, once a vanguard assumes power it becomes extremely
difficult to carry out popular education and skill or resource sharing.
Where vanguardists take up post-revolutionary tasks of popular education
it is typically from their own ideological perspective. The revolution’s
character will reflect the usually centralized position of the new
ruling group.
Significantly the hierarchical and authoritarian structure of
vanguardist leaderships and the post-revolutionary societies they lead
are not necessarily imposed on populations. To some extent they become
default positions of the population where people feel unprepared to
organize and construct viable alternatives. Active experiences of
self-management and self-organization are necessary not only for
contesting instituted authorities prior to any insurrection but also for
resisting dependence on any leadership vanguards during and after
insurrectionary periods.
Anarchists have always emphasized people’s capacities for spontaneous
organization but they also recognize that what appears to be
“spontaneous” develops from an often extensive groundwork of
pre-existing practices. Without pre-existing revolutionary practices and
relationships, or transfer cultures, people are left to patch things
together in the heat of social upheaval or to defer to previously
organized and disciplined vanguards. Pre-existing revolutionary
infrastructures, or transfer cultures, are necessary components of
popular, participatory and liberatory social re-organization.
Anarchists suggest that a liberatory revolution requires experiences of
active involvement in radical change, prior to any insurrection, and the
development of prior structures for constructing a new society within
the shell of the old society. Anarchists would suggest that a starting
point for re-thinking what revolutions might consist of is to stop
conceiving of revolution as though it was a thing or a moment of
rupture. Graeber (2004: 45) argues that taking such an approach might
allow us to ask instead, “what is revolutionary action?” He then offers
the following as part of an answer:
[R]evolutionary action is any collective action which rejects, and
therefore confronts, some form of power or domination and in doing so,
reconstitutes social relations – even within the collectivity – in that
light. Revolutionary action does not necessarily have to aim to topple
governments. Attempts to create autonomous communities in the face of
power…would, for instance, be almost by definition revolutionary acts.
And history shows us that the continual accumulation of such acts can
change (almost) everything (Graeber, 2004: 45).
Some anarchists have, rather sloppily, chosen to describe contemporary
anarchist practices as “dual power” strategies, applying, without irony,
the term used by Lenin and Trotsky. Anarchists generally use the term
dual power to suggest the idea that at some point anarchist projects
will reach such size and scope that they will offer a plausible
challenge or alternative to the state. This alternative, if not
rendering the state obsolete, will provide the base from which the state
might be abolished.
In typical revolutionary discourse a “counterpower” is a collection of
social institutions set in opposition to the state and capital: from
self-governing communities to radical labor unions to popular militias.
Sometimes it is also referred to as an “anti-power.” When such
institutions maintain themselves in the face of the state, this is
usually referred to as a “dual power” situation. By this definition most
of human history is actually characterized by dual power situations,
since few historical states had the means to root such institutions out,
even assuming that they would have wanted to (Graeber, 2004: 24–25).
The term “dual power” was used by Lenin in an April 9, 1917 article “The
Dual Power,” which was published in Pravda. Lenin defined the dual
power, which consisted of popular institutions, the Soviets, as an
incipient government that was growing alongside the official Provisional
Government during the revolution. While the Provisional Government
formed the government of the bourgeoisie, the dual power “government” of
the Soviets consisted of popular organs that provided the constructive
framework of a new post-bourgeois society.
Significantly, as history would show, Lenin conceived of dual power as a
mechanism by which the vanguard party could implement and enforce party
control over the revolution. Lenin stated famously that the proletariat
needed state power, that a centralized organization of force was
required to lead the mass of people in the work of organizing a
socialist society. Rather than an aspect of self-determination, or
popular control of the revolution, the dual power structures served as a
means of co-optation and centralization via the party within the state.
Towards the end of 1917, with the Bolsheviks in power, Lenin finally
ended the already shrinking autonomy of the Soviets, shifting all
authority in political and economic matters to the newly instituted
Bolshevik government. While the Soviets did certainly play an important
part in the empowerment and education of workers in Russia it is also
true that authority rested with the Bolshevik Party itself.
Rather than use the term dual power, I prefer to speak of
infrastructures of resistance or anarchist transfer cultures understood
as acts of self-valorization, or working for the needs of oneself or
one’s community rather than for capital (capitalist valorization). While
the notion of infrastructures of resistance or anarchist transfer
cultures might bear some resemblance to the idea of dual power, it is
important to recognize the rather significant differences both in terms
of form and substance.
Various alternative institutions, whether free schools or squats,
alternative unions and workers centres or counter-media, form networks
as means for developing alternative social infrastructures. Where free
schools join up with worker co-operatives and collective social centres,
alternative social infrastructures, or anarchist transfer cultures,
become visible at least at the community level. Contemporary anarchist
projects are still quite new. None have approached the scale that would
suggest they pose practical alternatives, except perhaps in the case of
new media activities. Yet all are putting together the building blocks
that might contribute to the development of practical alternatives that
extend well beyond even the projects that initially gave birth to them.
Many critics, most notably Murray Bookchin (1996), have argued that
prefigurative anarchist practices lend themselves primarily to
subcultural expressions or what he terms “lifestyle anarchism.”
Lifestyle anarchism, in Bookchin’s view, while making participants feel
good, leaves capitalist structures, especially the market economy and
private control of productive resources, untouched. Bookchin’s concerns
are certainly credible. Any movement that exists primarily as a
counter-cultural expression faces the well known threats of co-optation,
as elements of the counter culture are commodified and corralled by the
logic of capitalist exchange, reduced to empty symbols of themselves for
easy consumption (as has happened to hippies, punk and hip hop to name
only a few) or marginalization, as the counter-cultures are simply
ignored or tolerated, left to “do their own thing.”
Yet I would argue that once one looks past the surface of anarchist
heterotopias one finds interesting aspects of what one might call class
struggle or anti-capitalism. While these practices may appear as strange
in relation to more familiar manifestations of class struggle, such as
strikes or boycotts, they actually show everyday practices by which the
logic of capitalist valorization is subverted, contested and refused. I
would argue that much of the controversy over heterotopian anarchist
practices relates to the too easy focus on their cultural or symbolic
aspects. At the same time, anarchist notions of transfer cultures
actually reflect attempts to restore the economy to its proper place as
simply one aspect of culture, rather than as a privileged sphere
separated from and predominating over all of the other aspects of
culture, as is currently the case under capitalism. Yet practices such
as free schools and community or social centres, child care networks,
alternative unions and rank-and-file networks, squats, and community
gardens offer starting points for building social resources, solidarity
and points for contesting capitalist valorization (providing possible
alternatives to the labour market and the production of value for
capital).
If there is one area in which anarchist theory has been under-developed
it is in terms of analyses of capitalism and the relationship of class
struggle with social change. Much anarchist analysis recently emphasizes
the experiences of people as consumers confronting alienated products
rather than, the greater concern of Marxists, producers alienated from
their products and from the labour process itself. This reflects more
than an omission and may, in fact be a conscious oversight by some
anarchists.
Anarchists suggest that people should be organizationally prepared for
revolutionary struggles and transformation, not only intellectually
prepared. There is a real need for political and economic organization
suited to meeting people’s immediate needs while managing the equitable
provision of resources across communities. Anarchist heterotopias serve
as means by which people can sustain radical social change both before,
during, and after insurrectionary periods.
As anarchists suggest, whether an insurrection occurs tomorrow, next
week or in one hundred years, people can act as if the revolution is
underway today. Waiting until after an insurrection to exercise power
over our lives means nothing less than a postponement of our liberation.
People can participate in liberatory economic and social relations
immediately and can begin re-organizing society now. There is no need to
wait for the bosses and politicians to abandon history’s stage first.
Anarchist infrastructures of resistance encourage people to create
alternative social spaces or heterotopias within which liberatory
institutions, practices and relationships can be nurtured.
Infrastructures of resistance include the beginnings of economic and
political self-management through the creation of institutions which can
encourage a broader social transformation while also providing some of
the conditions for personal and collective sustenance and growth in the
present. This is about changing the world, not by taking power, but by
creating opportunities for the exercise of people’s own personal and
collective power.
Anarchist infrastructures sustain situations in which specific
communities create economic and social systems that operate, as much as
possible, as working alternatives to the dominant state capitalist
structures. Anarchist infrastructures are organized around alternative
institutions that offer at least a starting point for meeting community
needs such as food, housing, communications, energy, transportation,
child care, education and so on. These institutions are autonomous from,
and indeed opposed to, dominant relations and institutions of the state
and capital as well as “official” organs of the working class such as
unions or political parties. In the short term these institutions
contest official structures, with an eye towards, in the longer term,
replacing them. These are the anarchist transfer cultures.
Anarchists do not seek uncritical allegiance to alternative institutions
but rather active, engaged participation within them. Within discussions
of transfer cultures the expectation is that at some point the
alternative institutions will reach a critical mass such that there will
exist two parallel social systems vying for people’s support. Anarchists
are a very long way from that point however and there should be no
illusions about the status of such infrastructures in the current
period.
While much work highlights anarchists applying their principles and
practices to areas that they know best, such as housing, communications,
education and welfare, it is clear that much remains to be done. Taking
up Colin Ward’s (2003) suggestion, one might well ask: “Where are the
anarchist experts on medicine, health services, agriculture and
economics?”
A problem for any visionary politics remains that the present imposes
itself relentlessly upon the future. It is always necessary to remember
that these self-valorizing activities are marked by their emergence
within the shell of capitalism. The history of this birth scars them. It
also presses in against them to limit their range and scope and to
corrode their capacities to be sustained.
At same time advocates of immediatist or heterotopian anarchy argue
that, since there is no way to know whether an insurrection will occur,
or if it will be successful, it is worthwhile to create situations in
the present that approximate the sorts of relations in which we would
like to live. The creation of alternative institutions and
relationships, which express our more far-reaching visions, is desirable
in and of itself. It is important to liberate or create space within
which we might live more free and secure lives today, not only to build
a new society.
Not surprisingly for a perspective that emphasizes the connectivity
between means and ends, anarchist thinking about organizations is in
many ways related to anarchist notions of revolution.
And that, since anarchists are not actually trying to seize power within
any national territory, the process of one system replacing the other
will not take the form of some sudden revolutionary cataclysm – the
storming of a Bastille, the seizing of a Winter Palace – but will
necessarily be gradual, the creation of alternative forms of
organization on a world scale, new forms of communication, new, less
alienated ways of organizing life, which will, eventually, make
currently existing forms of power seem stupid and beside the point
(Graeber, 2004: 40).
There are of course limits to this approach and despite the agreement
that most anarchists would have with Graeber regarding the seizing of
power within a national territory many would disagree vehemently with
the idea that alternative forms of organization gradually replacing
archic forms of power is somehow enough. Many anarchist communists would
suggest that if at any point these alternatives actually come to pose a
threat to existing forms of power they will be met with, likely extreme,
acts of military violence. Such spaces, according to anarchist
communists, will need to be defended. Indeed the conflict over the
continued existence of these anarchic spaces, or indeed over the
continuation of archic forms of power, may well produce the very forms
of sudden revolutionary cataclysm that Graeber denies.
At the same time Murray Bookchin was surely correct in suggesting that
building alternative institutions cannot be enough. It must also be
necessary to resist and oppose dominant institutions and organizations
which will certainly seek to control, subvert or cancel any alternative
institutions that actually do become strong enough to threaten the
dominant structures. It is not enough to ignore the hegemonic
institutions, as some anarchists might hope. Their capacities and
strengths must also be corroded and diminished.
How long these projects might endure and sustain themselves is a
question beyond the scope of this work. Some have collapsed already.
Others continue and thrive. Still others have evolved or transformed
into something different than that from which they originated. Almost
all have given birth to other new projects. Most have encouraged some
participation in previously existing projects, often those rooted in
specific community struggles such as anti-poverty or housing work.
Overall, however, the freedom experienced and nurtured in such spaces is
often quite fragile and tenuous as I have tried to illustrate.
The perspectives and practices of constructive anarchy, in striving to
address immediate day-to-day concerns, provide an important reminder to
revolutionary anarchists that anarchists must offer examples that
resonate with people’s experiences and needs. Additionally, any movement
that fails to offer alternative and reliable organizational spaces and
practices will be doomed to marginalization and failure. Or as Herzen
has remarked: “A goal which is infinitely remote is not a goal at all,
it is a deception” (quoted in Ward, 2004: 32).
Ivan Illich, whose works have had some influence within anarchist
circles, refers to autonomous capacities as “vernacular subsistence.” By
vernacular subsistence Illich means “autonomous values and practices
through which people have satisfied their everyday needs despite and
against the depredations of the ‘economy’” (Cleaver, 1992: 124).
Anarchists suggest that the majority of people in a society such as the
United States and Canada owe their very survival to everyday activities
of “vernacular subsistence.”
It is this struggle over the self-liberation of creative living labour
that is embodied and expressed in the anarchist striving for autonomy in
various spheres of activity. These subsistence practices or
infrastructures of resistance point the way towards the development of
real world alternatives to capitalism. The challenge remains how such
subsistence activities might allow for the creation of greater spaces
for their autonomous development and the extension of such
infrastructures into growing spheres of life. There is an ongoing push
and pull between forces driving towards disvalorization or the
channeling of productive energies into capitalism and the forces working
for autonomous development. What is perhaps most interesting is that,
against the fears of the Critical Theorists who saw recuperation and
incorporation everywhere, such autonomous subjects repeatedly arise even
from within the expanded grasp of capitalist control and the
colonization of everyday life.
Bookchin, Murray. 1996. Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An
Unbridgeable Chasm. San Francisco: AK Press
Cleaver, Harry. 1992. “The Inversion of Class Perspective in Marxian
Theory: From Valorisation to Self-Valorisation.” In Open Marxism: Volume
II, Theory and Practice, edited by Werner Bonefeld, Richard Gunn and
Kosmas Psychopedis. London: Pluto Press, 106–144
Ehrlich, Howard J. 1996a. “How to Get from Here to There: Building
Revolutionary Transfer Culture,” Reinventing Anarchy, Again. Ed. Howard
J. Ehrlich. Edinburgh: AK Press, 331–349
Ehrlich, Howard J. 1996b. “Why the Black Flag?” In Reinventing Anarchy,
Again. Ed. Howard J. Ehrlich. Edinburgh: AK Press
Graeber, David. 2004. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago:
Prickly Paradigm
Shantz, Jeff. 2010. Constructive Anarchy: Building Infrastructures of
Resistance. Surrey: Ashgate
Ward, Colin. 2003. Talking Anarchy. London: Five Leaves
———-. 2004. Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford
University Press
[Thank you Jeff for the first of other contributions to come]
The writer is a community organizer, rank-and-file union activist and
anarchist. He has contributed articles to Anarchy, Social Anarchism,
Green Anarchy, Earth First! Journal, and Northeastern Anarchist. His
books include Constructive Anarchy: Building Infrastructures of
Resistance, Active Anarchy: Political Practice in Contemporary Movements
and Against All Authority: Anarchism and the Literary Imagination. He is
also editor of Racism and Borders: Representation, Repression,
Resistance and A Creative Passion: Anarchism and Culture. His website is
http://jeffshantz.ca