đŸ Archived View for library.inu.red âș file âș scott-nicholas-nappalos-emergence-and-anarchism.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 14:06:44. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
âĄïž Next capture (2024-06-20)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Emergence and Anarchism Author: Scott Nicholas Nappalos Date: 2019 Language: en Topics: philosophy, political philosophy, Political Theory Source: https://libcom.org/library/emergence-anarchism-philosophy-power-action-liberation Notes: Cover by: Natykos. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA.
âHappiness does not mean the attainment of a certain level of personal
or collective existence. It is rather the consciousness of marching
toward a welldefined goal to which one aspires and that one creates in
part through oneâs own will. To develop the continents, the seas, and
rearrange and regulate the environment in order to promote each
individual plant, animal, and human life; to become fully conscious of
our human solidarity, forming one body with the planet itself; and to
take a sweeping view of our origins, our present, our immediate goal,
and our distant idealâthis is what progress means.â âElisĂ©e Reclus,
1905[1]
Mark Bray
Science and socialism. For most of us this pairing brings to mind the
âscientific socialismâ of Marx and Engels that undergirded the ascension
of âhistorical materialismâ to the forefront of socialist thought into
the twentieth century. Certainly âhistorical materialismâ grew out of
the burgeoning social sciences, but the school of 19^(th) and early
20^(th) century socialist thought that most privileged the natural
sciences may have been anarchism.
Many anarchists of the era considered their doctrine to be the social
embodiment of the âtruthsâ of the natural world revealed through
scientific inquiry. âNatureâ was endowed with a redemptive transcendence
manifested through Darwinian and (especially) Spencerian understandings
of evolution. In that vein, the turn of the century Catalan anarchist
Joan Montseny, aka Federico Uralesâfather of Federica Montseny, argued
that âin the world there exists a law that is perfectly harmonious and
perfectly just: the law of evolution.â[2] Likewise, the Russian
anarchist geographer and scientist Pyotr Kropotkin grounded his
exposition of mutual aid, one of the most lasting and influential
anarchist concepts, in his studies not only of history but of the
importance of cooperation in the natural world. He even went so far as
to argue that anarchism ought to be considered one of the âdepartmentsâ
of the natural sciences.[3] Francisco Ferrerâs early 20^(th) century
Modern School, which became the model of anarchist education over the
following decades, was allegedly âbased solely upon the Natural
Sciencesâ which Ferrer considered to be the font of a unitary truth
applicable to all of existence including human relations.[4] The
prominent Spanish anarchist FermĂn Salvochea was so optimistic about the
potential of the revolution to unshackle scientific inquiry from
capitalist fetters that he speculated in 1888 that post-revolutionary
medicine could even discover the key to immortality.[5] For some late
19^(th) century anarchists, science was âour God.â[6]
As with just about every aspect of anarchism, there were those who
dissented. Nietzschean anarchists attacked the supremacy of rationalism
and science while the primitivists of the Parisian LâĂtat naturel and
the prominent Spanish anarchist Ricardo Mella were some of the most
critical of positivism.[7] It should also be noted that anarchists were
no less enthusiastic about the emergence of social sciences like
sociology. Nevertheless, the majority of late 19^(th) and early 20^(th)
century anarchists adopted the positivist, rationalist, and modernist
optimism of their era.
If the confidence that these anarchists expressed in the ability of the
natural sciences to solve the âsocial questionâ feels distant and
removed from present-day considerations of societal change, thatâs
because it is. The horrors of the world wars and the Holocaust dashed
the 19^(th) century Western expectation of a clean upward ascent for
humanity. As the 20^(th) century advanced, movements for decolonization,
feminism, queer liberation, black liberation, and others revealed the
hypocrisy at the heart of the fundamentally imperial, patriarchal,
heteronormative, and white supremacist concept of Western âprogress.â
While it would be unfair to lump turn of the century anarchists in with
imperialists, they were not entirely immune to the oppressive modes of
thought of their era. Likewise, post-structuralist critiques of
conceptions of truth, justice, and objectivity itself pushed many
radicals to examine discourses of power, analyze fragmented
subjectivities, and dissect socially reproduced layers of domination
rather than turn to the natural sciences as sources of liberation.
Inherent in this post-modern turn has been a widespread wariness of
master narratives and grand theoretical formulations across much of the
political spectrum after Fukuyamaâs âend of history.â
The audacity of Scott Nicholas Nappalosâ Emergence and Anarchism lies in
its ability to step back from the fray of intellectual trends and taboos
to offer a clear and sober analysis of how we can start to answer some
of the most basic questions about social transformation while avoiding
the limitations and pitfalls of both modernist and postmodernist
thought. Fundamentally, Nappalos reaffirms the importance of theory,
philosophy, and metapolitics against antiintellectual and âpragmatistâ
tendencies prevalent in some âhorizontalistâ movements that reduce
liberation to a technics of practices and tactics. In so doing, he
refuses to allow the positivist baggage of past attempts to utilize
science for socialist ends to prevent us from gleaning useful models
from the natural world to help solve social problems today.
Most profoundly, perhaps, his use of the scientific concept of emergence
to describe multi-causal events and developments whose outcomes are
âmore than the sum of their parts,â so to speak, presents opportunities
to build bridges between post-structuralism and more recent perspectives
on social transformation and the natural sciences in a somewhat similar
vein to Deleuze and Guattariâs use of the botanical concept of the
rhizome. The plurality and polyvalence of emergence open up alternative
routes to put Foucauldian notions of power or broad conceptions of
intersectionality, for example, into conversation with scientific
insights in the pursuit of liberation.
Emergence and Anarchism adeptly explores the tensions and synergies
between individuals and collectivities at the heart of anarchismâs
attempt to synthesize personal and collective agency. By delving into
the inner workings of agency, it challenges one-dimensional distinctions
between what have been referred to as insurrectionary and mass
anarchism.
Recognizing the enormity of the project of re-orienting some of the
philosophical foundations of revolutionary thought, Nappalos
strategically scales back his main goal by entreating the reader to
recognize the necessity of theories for action and the inseparability of
method and philosophy. Emergence and Anarchism aspires to be a
foundational building block for future theorizing and conceptualizing.
It accomplishes this goal. Agree or disagree with its premises and
conclusions, it confronts us with a broad array of fundamental questions
at the very heart of social transformation that cannot be ignored. More
than offering us answers to such questions, Nappalos demands that we all
take it upon ourselves to think through how change occurs, for
âphilosophy is the domain of all people irrespective of their
intelligence, gender, class, race, or position.â As a health care
worker, Nappalos directly challenges âthe alienation of this activityâ
from the majority of humanity through his words.
The true value of this work will only become clear in the future to the
degree that Nappalosâ appeals for re-conceptualizing theory,
metapolitics, and agency inspire others to pursue and build upon his
train of thought. Many questions remain unanswered about how to build a
new world free from hunger, war, and domination. Emergence and Anarchism
reminds us that to create such a world we must not only examine our
political positions but also their metapolitical foundations.
Throughout my attempts at writing Iâve been lucky enough to have people
willing to set aside some of their own time to help take rough ideas and
turn them into something valuable enough for others to read. A book is
always a product of cooperation and the hand of many individuals, even
if one personâs name ends up on the spine. I want to thank Nate
Hawthorne, Adam Weaver, Monica Kostas, Adam Kunin, Don Hamerquist,
Kingsley Clarke, and Luz Sierra for our years of collaboration and their
dedication to pour through my texts and make them better. Noel Ignatiev,
Mark Bray, Don Hammerquist, and Michael Staudenmaier provided me with
helpful edits and kind words for the book, and are excellent comrades
who have stimulated and inspired me over the years weâve known each
other. Kevin Gonzalez and Marcos Restrepo gave me early comments on
drafts on this book that were important in its development.
Thanks goes to Mark T. for introducing me to the ideas of complex system
and emergence, who along with Sarah T. spent countless hours listening
and arguing with me years ago until the arguments of this text took a
more solid form. Scott G. and Dustin Shannon provided copy-editing
services that were sorely needed. Iâm grateful for my mother, whose own
rebelliousness led her to the civil rights and anti-war movements, and
inspired me to question the world I grew up in. There are many others
who offered advice, open minds, and their time to discuss these issues
without which this work would not have been possible including the
generations who worked thanklessly for the cause of human freedom and
anarchism. Without their sacrifices, we would be lacking a voice and a
path for our actions.
Itâs a jarring experience to be confronted with the reality of the great
and overwhelming wrongs that exist today. Our history is filled with
avoidable evils like the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the
Americas, the centuries of barbarity against African peoples, global
environmental degradation, and the misery of people torn from their land
to become propertyless workers whose generations were murdered, abused,
raped, and wasted by successive rulers. The initial shock of discovering
these crimes sticks with you, and today the horrors constantly fill our
senses through an unending barrage of information that keeps those
experiences close. For those who do not withdraw or shut down in
despair, an old question lingers: What can we do about it all?
With all the years of resistance across the planet, it is surprising how
few answers there are to some very basic problems. If the problems of
the world are not permanent, inherent, and natural to humanity, but are
in fact contingent, changeable, and driven by specific causes, then
there are specific things that can be done to correct injustice. Yet the
number of people both aware of these issues and willing to commit
themselves to a process of social change is generally small. That
minority of people must find ways to act against the weight of the
dominating system to create a better world. In the process people who
are not yet active have to somehow shift from otherwise going about
their lives to become thinking and acting agents of social change and
join the effort to liberate humanity. The goal is a better possible
world brought about from a society with the forces of domination in
control.
Perhaps surprisingly, the traditions that tried to dismantle domination
and exploitation have provided few answers for basic elements of radical
social change. It is a frequent and frustrating experience to discover
the lack of responses to fundamental questions, such as: How is
revolution possible? How can someone become radicalized? What means
allows a revolutionary minority to because a majority? How is the rule
of all people possible?
Years ago, I was involved in the union at my job where we organized a
strike in a social service facility. In the lead-up to the strike there
was a series of fairly brutal workplace injuries that happened largely
because of unsafe staffing with a patient population suffering from
severe mental health issues. Management claimed they had no money to pay
for more staff, while at the same time they were giving out raises to
administrators of over 25% at a nonprofit serving children who were
largely victims of abuse. The staff, battered and ignored, overall were
withdrawn. A majority of the workers didnât even bother turning up to
the strike vote. The organizing committee, which I was a member of, was
pretty worried, but things had come to a head and we were resolved to
move forward and stop work. I expected a real fight to build support and
for many to cross the picket line.
The day of the strike the vast majority of all the workers walked out
while half the organizing committee of longtime union activists crossed
the picket line and became entrenched scabs for the life of the strike.
Once on the picket line, workers who had previously been cold, shut
down, and abused were literally crying with joy and outpacing the union
bureaucracyâs plans by attacking the vehicles of the bosses driving into
the job site. Virtual strangers began not only fighting for themselves,
but also questioning the class divisions at work, the role of the
government in their work and lives, and even the system itself.
Conversations on the picket line went much further than the union wanted
and that any of the few radicals involved had imagined.
That transformation stuck with me. The opening that came with taking
action altered the way I thought about social change and ultimately
shifted the course of my life. It was puzzling. How did it happen? How
does a fighting force come together to stay planted on sidewalks for
three months in the winter without much money or support from the
outside world? Why did the organizers so quickly betray the strike,
while those who ignored the union became its staunchest supporters?
After the strike people largely went their own ways and returned to
their daily lives, though a minority carried their experiences into new
activities and activism. Those events and tensions were far from rare.
Similar dynamics play out in all conflicts where the agency of people
struggling is shifted in ways that donât neatly line up with how they or
their leaders think about it.
Throughout the history of workersâ movements new struggles emerged and
forms innovated that went beyond the norms of their days and generally
in opposition to the unions and political parties that drew their
strength from the support of the working class. During World War II US
workers at the same time voted for unprecedented (at the time) pledges
for labor peace with no-strike agreements, and then unleashed one of the
largest and most militant strike waves in our history. They did so
against the leadership of the unions and the Democratic Party drumming
up nationalist support for the âgood warâ, and even against the
Communist Party who sought to rally support to save Soviet Russia under
attack.[8]
Workers similarly shook things up for the Unidad Popular (UP), or
Popular Unity, government in Allendeâs Chile. The UP had sought to
nationalize industries slowly and strategically and coordinate workersâ
activity via structures of the State as part of populist reforms. The
workers interpreted the victory of the left-wing parties differently,
seeing it as a green light to take on directly the deepest problems
affecting them. Land seizures, factory occupations, and selfdefense
structures against police, employers, and the right sprung up that were
organized by the workers in opposition to the directions of the UP
functionaries. While the vision of socialist policy makers was limited
to social welfare and State ownership, the workers began to take matters
into their own hands by taking over their workplaces and neighborhoods
to be used to their own ends.[9] These initiatives outside the
officialdom would provide the only serious resistance to the horrific
coup and tragedy that would come as the UP systematically disarmed
itself against an open and immanent threat from the military and radical
right which ultimately led to indiscriminate killing, torture, and
immiseration for decades thereafter.
The dominant script of history is colored by the habit of viewing things
through the lens of those in charge; a perspective that systematically
misses exactly the dynamic that bursts open on picket lines, barricades,
and protests. These days thereâs a fair deal of debate around the
Spanish Civil War (largely because of the growing influence of anarchist
ideas broadly), and the various positions and moves by heads of the
different factions. Augustin GuillamĂłn, in his detailed study of the
neighborhood defense committees of the Spanish anarchist union the
ConfederaciĂłn Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), or National Confederation of
Labor, reminds us how the insurrection and following war almost was not
a thing at all. The Republican government, socialists, communists, and
trade union leaders were nearly ready to abdicate after Francoâs coup
emerged. The militants of the anarchist CNT on the other hand had
prepared in the years leading up to the events. Worker militants
organized by their districts studied their areas and sought to find what
would be necessary to disarm the military and begin creating anarchist
society should a revolution occur. Decades of urban class warfare (which
saw workers and union activists frequently assassinated, tortured, and
abused by paramilitary forces of the State and employers) and aborted
insurrections (dubbed ârevolutionary gymnasticsâ by the CNT) provided
collective memory and skills for the workers who lived through an
institutionalized culture of resistance to violent repression and
poverty. At a critical moment at the outset of the coup, a generalized
workingclass force rallied behind the defense committees, which
represented one of the only real bodies organized to oppose the fascist
revolt. Only thereafter did the civil war become possible and did the
vying factions step back into the fray saved by the popular response
that moved into the opening that had developed.[10]
There are two central problems embedded within these examples: the
problem of agency and the problem of emergence. Emergence is a concept
that originally came from philosophy dating at least to the 19^(th)
century, but has been taken up by various sciences in the past fifty
years to look at complex systems like living organisms, ecosystems,
societies, and weather patterns. In these systems new things emerge out
of the interaction of vast numbers of components that together produce
something novel that is greater than the sum of its parts. Ants produce
emergent hive behavior with intelligence that doesnât exist in any
individual colony member; neurons create conscious thought that does not
share properties of the chemical reactions inside our cells; and cities
create systematic patterns of growth and decay created by people merely
going about their days. The second section of this text takes on
emergence and its related issues.
People by their nature are agents. We take action and think about what
to do or what not to do. Seeking social change is one kind of agency.
One aspect of the struggle for a better world is choosing what we do as
individuals and coordinating with others. The change itself happens on
another level of organization. Like all social things, it arises out of
the actions of millions and a larger context. What can be a surprise is
how these two elements often do not match up. Based on everything we
knew as organizers, we did not expect for our co-organizers to become
scabs and the silent majority to become militants. Since then, thereâs
been a number of other surprises like the Arab Spring, Madison, Occupy,
Brazilâs anti-World Cup and Olympics protests, and Black Lives Matter
responses in Ferguson, Baltimore, and Chicago, amongst others. The
complexities of social movements within a globalized world keep
expanding. Since 2001 at least a series of financial crises have plagued
the advanced capitalist countries, international relations have been
rocked by the breakdown of the Washington Consensus and the rise of
competitive powers of the BRIC (Brazil Russia India China) countries
amongst others; previously stable lines of political division have
gradually blurred.
The second factor in my exploration of agency and emergence was my
introduction to the life sciences through professional training as a
nurse. Biology explores causality in a fundamentally different manner
from what I had been used to. The life sciences and medicine study
adaptive living systems with staggering complexity organized into
different levels, each with their own logic, properties, and issues.
Working in hospitals brings health care practitioners into contact with
that reality as they try to navigate individuals in front of them with
their own composition and reality, and connect that to the more abstract
science of populations, diseases, and treatments. Itâs one thing to
understand statistical trends from data of populations; itâs another
thing altogether to apply that knowledge to people who as individuals
can vary substantially.
From the outset parallels between the biological world and the political
world were obvious. Biology provides fodder for political metaphors,
such as the spread of cancers, how the immune system uses memory and
exposure to evolve defenses to unknown dangers, and the self-organized
order that emerges out of reproduction. Health care is not only a source
of analogies, but is viscerally political. Attempts to solve social
problems of health through individual initiative and agent-level change
are notoriously inefficient. The greatest public health victories
utilized collective intervention through the community and the
restructuring of urban space in a holistic way. The reduction of
tuberculosis was largely won before antibiotics were discovered due to
public health campaignersâ understanding of social organization and
emergent disease. The ridiculous state of American health care makes any
tensions between the biological and political more acute for health care
workers. Recontextualized away from disease, the issues and potential
solutions to social problems have at least a parallel to the social
nature of disease, its reproduction, and treatment.
This work is primarily a work of philosophy and metapolitics. Its
contents spell out a general philosophical picture of the world,
specifically about the lives of individuals and social systems, but
particularly from the perspective of developing further tools for
understanding and engaging in political struggles. Although the inquiry
is philosophical in nature, the approach arises from issues in the
biological sciences, history, and real problems in our lives as
thinking, desiring, and intentional beings in societies of solidarity,
conflict, and injustice. Though it draws on biological and complexity
science, I am not a scientific researcher and this is not a work of
empirical scientific research or hypotheses. The goal is to use lessons
from the discussion to further our capacity for social change and
thought.
There are basic assumptions for this project that wonât be explored: a
critique of existing society as unjust and unnecessarily oppressive, as
well as a belief in the possibility of a fundamentally better world.
This is to say that things have been different, they can be changed, and
it is worth working for a different way to live. Social problems like
crime, violence, war, poverty, abuse, and alienation are not eternal or
inevitable, but rather are specific products of our society. For
example, before modern capitalism, work was limited by the cycles of
agriculture or hunting. Societies were structured on these rhythms and
allocated downtime for personal and cultural uses. With the growth of
capitalism, potential work time exploded. Long hours, overtime, and the
consumption of life by stupefying work is not a permanent fixture of
human life, but rather they are recent and avoidable symptoms of modern
capitalism. Nor are they merely incidental or sorted out by a minor fix,
but instead they are systematically produced by a system built to
maintain wealth and power in the hands of certain minorities and out of
reach of the bulk of the population. This perspective is built into the
project. The questions of agency, living systems, and emergence are
explored in the service of a politics of liberation.
Part of the historical shifts in our era have been driven by a loss in
faith in many political traditions globally. For nearly a century the
dominant leftist tendencies centered on a methodological and theoretical
framework that has suffered from a significant loss of credibility
worldwide. Marxism went unchallenged in its dominance in liberatory
thinking from perhaps the Second World War until recently. The pillars
of this thought centered on a number of variants on dialectics,
historical materialism, and Marxist visions for obtaining communist
society. Each of these pieces has since suffered a crisis of legitimacy.
Marxismâs main competitor was a liberalism that sought to improve
capitalism and expand the powers of the State in the service of an
abstract conception of rights and property, while defending the central
institutions of power through seeking to minimize their damage.
Prior to the Second World War anarchism was a global revolutionary
movement, largely of the laboring classes, that stretched from the
Americas to East Asia. In many areas outside Europe, anarchist movements
obtained dominance as the leading light for generations of
revolutionaries. A number of factors shifted the field for anarchist
movements including the rise of the USSR and Soviet-allied movements,
changed patterns of migration and assimilation, nationalism, revolutions
in capitalist production in industries dominated by anarchists, and the
spread of fascism and dictatorships in its strongholds in the 1920s-30s.
Anarchism in most of the West (with some notable exceptions like
Bulgaria and Spain for example) became a shadow of its former self and
too often retreated into a more passive role as the mere moral
conscience of the left when eclipsed by the Marxist-state-building
project earlier in the century. Anarchism lived on however as an active
practice through the Second World War especially in Korea, Eastern
Europe, Cuba, and the Southern Cone of South America.[11] In Uruguay,
Argentina, Chile, and Brazil anarchists retained key influences over
struggles and revolutionary thinking up to the dictatorships in the
1970s. In some cases, there is continuity through to the present.[12]
As thinking has shifted away from the Marxism of the previous generation
towards libertarian alternatives, gaps remain. One way to look at the
approach in this text is as an anarchist framework for revolutionary
thought and action once we have left dialectics, the Marxist vision of
revolution, and historical materialism behind. This isnât to say there
arenât things to learn from Marxism. In fact, the case is quite the
opposite. The focus here, however, is to put forward new foundations
rather than to discuss the failures of those traditions, produce more
exegesis of texts, or try to renovate or explore critiques of Marxism in
depth. A book critiquing interpretations of texts is much less valuable
than independent arguments aimed at our own time, especially given how
rare that is for these topics in spite of the popularity of libertarian
thought today.
The core argument of this text is that those seeking liberation face
particular challenges as agents. We are tasked with moving from
minorities committed to acting against powerful forces stacked against
us, while seeking to spread and propagate revolutionary ideas and
actions in a society built to contain and diffuse them. To do so
involves wrestling with large-scale social powers that are beyond our
grasp, difficult to anticipate, and yet crucial for our actions to have
an effect. A path forward can be found in adopting an analysis of our
context in terms of emergence, societies as exhibiting behaviors
characteristic of living systems, and a concept of power that links our
agency to the world of social relationships. These elements taken
together provide tools for interpreting our world and guiding our
actions that may open up new possibilities.
There are four sections in this book. The first part states the case for
the universality and use of philosophy, and explores broad issues around
the theoretical foundations of revolutionary politics. The second
section is the bulk of the work and lays out the theory of emergence,
its life in the sciences, and its application to social and political
thought. In the third section, those ideas are applied to power as a
central aspect of our mental lives and a unique concept that bridges the
world of agency and social emergence. In the fourth section, power and
emergence are used to understand the possibility of revolutionary action
and the problem of agency.
In the past few decades understanding of complex systems has exploded.
Advances in mathematical modeling of complex systems established the
foundations for modeling emergence. Computer scientists used these tools
to help physicists test theories of weather, friction, and electrical
networks. Biologists began describing swarms, hives, and evolution in
terms of complexity and emergence.[13] Social scientists developed new
concepts of the behavior of economic markets, internet communication
networks, self-organization in cities, and the evolution of language
norms through emergence.[14]
The growth of complexity science has led to the creation of tools to
analyze societies that previously were ignored. This work is quite new
and thereâs much less exploration of the political implications of
understanding societies as living systems than you would imagine. This
is particularly true for revolutionary politics. Recently, the media has
reported on scientists and think-tanks using complex adaptive systems
modeling to predict riots from food prices,[15] national security
threats from climate change,[16] and regional conflicts in a multi-polar
world.[17] Strange results have emerged with scientists calling for
revolution,[18] IT gurus proposing stateless societies, and capitalist
managers questioning the need for managing workers.[19] This is not
accidental. Emergence confronts us with a change in thinking from what
we are used toâand one that has not yet fully played out. It is not
simply a new theory, but rather sets of theories describing new
phenomena. This carries with it the potential for changes in our
behavior, interpretations of events, and thoughts on political reality.
The framework of emergence is an attempt to give us tools to describe
the world then; but more importantly it is theory with implications for
transforming our situation.
What impact on our actions does emergence have? Theories surrounding
collective liberation specifically hinge on relationships of individual
agents to collectivities, yet theories around the individualâs world and
society have been disjointed. Too often individuals get treated as gods,
directly causing changes in society or society mysteriously moving along
aloof from the individuals within. The Great Man theory of history
popularized in the 19^(th) century has managed to hang on despite early
damning criticisms that undermined its intellectual foundations. The
theory sought to explain historical periods and events in terms of
exceptional individuals who altered the course of their days, and was
elaborated famously by Thomas Carlyle in his work On Heroes,
Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History.[20] Herbert Spencer famously
critiqued this view arguing that notable figures of different periods
were mere productions of the whole social environment that produced
them, drawing from his interpretations of Darwin.[21]
Interestingly William James, one of the pioneers of the concept of
emergence, along with other pragmatist philosophers such as John Dewey,
expressed a critique of both Carlyleâs and Spencerâs theories of the
role of individuals in history in favor of a complex interaction between
the actor and their environment. James argued that individuals are both
influenced by and influence their environment in a complex interaction
across the vast web of causes and reactions throughout society.[22] This
starting point demonstrates a basic emergence approach to understanding
what role individuals can play within social networks of immense
complexity, and takes us beyond turning actors into mere puppets or
superheroes who have mysterious powers. It changes the landscape as we
know it through opening up the possibility of explaining both the
contribution of countless individuals and the separation of society from
them. It is a potentially unifying framework for people who want to
change the world through their actions and understand the social forces
beyond their reach.
The existing literature on emergence from the perspective of a politics
of social change and critique is scanter than one might imagine. It
should be said that since I am not a scholar, there are likely to be
gaps in my own knowledge and research capacity to dig for sources. In
fact, the bulk of this book was written before I discovered thinkers who
had engaged this issue. The sources and historical references were
included at the frequent requests of different readers over the years to
try and situate the ideas better for readers unfamiliar with the
territory. A historian or social scientist by trade could likely produce
something more systematic and encompassing than I have done here (with
the limitations of my abilities and restrictions due to my aims to
blame). In general, the bulk of work on the social aspects of emergence
have been purely academic and descriptive in nature. Contemporary
sociologists seek to use new perspectives on emergence as a means to
better model and explain social phenomena in their studies. One of the
most famous systems theorists, Niklas Luhmann, was notoriously morally
agnostic about the impact of his theories and clung to observation
distanced from any practical lessons for action.
In fact, Luhmannâs ideas were an attack on the notion of agency and any
kind of predictability in trying to make change. His framework was
largely conservative and attempted to justify law, governance, and
existing social relationships, while the theory itself called into
question the ability of the State and law to cleanly impose an order on
the world.[23] The questioning ends there, however, and does not
investigate or propose further critiques of the State or
institutionalized forms of hierarchy despite the weaknesses that Luhmann
and systems theorists identified in its attempt to enforce its order.
Likewise, he fails to propose alternativesânatural lines of questioning
arising from the inherent weaknesses Luhmann and systems theorists
demonstrate in the ability of centralized structures to impose their
will directly.
Contemporary critical political thought in general has not shifted
significantly from more traditional liberal and dialectic narratives
towards emergence. The few theorists who uphold radical critique and
emergence at the same time have tended to use it as an explanatory tool
for traditional left ideologies rather than an approach in its own
right. Biological theorists Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, for
example, have used emergence as a way to explore dialectics. Emergence
is a tool for the authors to explore political concepts and events
without opening up the implications of those theories to their
underlying basic frameworks and political models.[24] Dialectics,
however, is fundamentally about contradiction between oppositesâ theses
and anti-theses which oppose each other until transformed through
synthesis. This has no parallel in the world of social emergence and
complexity in which social causes are numerous or multi-polar and canât
be reduced to the abstract binary opposites. Thus even for radical
critics of present society, emergence has provided an instrument for
explanation, but has not received an in depth attempt at extracting its
own unique implications for revolutionary theory, nor to assess its
potential to replace prior political starting points including Luhmannâs
conservative anti-humanism, liberal free agency, and Marxian dialectics.
There is then a distinct absence of proposals or debates about the
potential or effect of emergence on how we do politics, or its
implications for our basic views about the social world: power, the
State, social change, and the role of organized individuals in mass
action. This isnât to say that emergence hasnât played a subtler and
more hidden role within thought about social change. As an undercurrent,
emergentist ideas get frequent play in justifying shifts in political
discourse from participatory democratic experiments to revolts.[25]
Within the anarchist tradition there remains an untapped current of
emergence. Anarchist ideas and methods operate with an understanding of
the world in which the decentralized order constructed by individuals in
cooperation produces new powers and possibilities simultaneously
harnessed and repressed by the society of the State. Anarchism, as a
broad tradition spread across the globe, has adherents who have adopted
many different approaches including utopian, liberal, and dialectical
interpretations of anarchist thought. Still within the core of the
tradition anarchist thinkers have often made use of emergence to develop
their politics.
Peter Kropotkin, famed Russian evolutionary biologist and anarchist
theorist, and Elisée Reclus, a radical anarchist thinker and
foundational geographer, both wrote about natural phenomena in terms
that today we would call ecological and complexity based. Their views of
the world were complex and adaptive with emergent order produced by the
interaction from the bottom up forming their biology and geography,
respectively, yet leaving a mark on their anarchist thinking that was
distinct from the dialectics, humanist, and liberal thought of their
day.[26] Other thinkers, such as Australian anarchosyndicalist and
ecologist Graham Purchase, have looked to complexity and emergence to
provide critiques of the State and capital and a scientific description
of how anarchist society could produce better human organization.[27]
Noam Chomsky perhaps implicitly uses similar ideas in his critique of
media in Manufacturing Consent. One way to read those arguments is that
they provide a model in which unified propaganda is produced throughout
media organizations without having overt censorship. Chomsky charts how
power flows through these organizations as a complex and dynamic system
producing emergent propaganda.[28]
As much as these ideas were present as an undercurrent there is a lack
of explicit work to explore emergence on its own and put it at the core
of a libertarian approach to social transformation. Likewise, thereâs a
parallel with power when the anarchist tradition innovated by making
power central, distinguishing it from other revolutionary traditions of
its time, and yet direct discussion of theories of power can sometimes
be difficult to find.[29] This is an attempt to lay out the groundwork
for such a politics, rather than to give immediate solutions. To address
that lacuna, the focus here is developing bases for social
transformationâdrawing out the connections between agency, cognition,
power, and emergence for a broad theory of a revolutionary process and
action. These chapters are a stepping off in that unfinished direction.
With much of the world upended, to turn to philosophy might seem like a
strange move. Philosophy, the most abstract and seemingly out of touch
of all intellectual disciplines, appears a strange bedfellow for a time
when small fires are coming out of the ground here and there: Egypt,
Chile, China, Southern Europe, India, and even the United States. For
decades thereâs been a philosophical slumber in the political world; a
cautious balance of traditions guarded by academia and a drift across
vast oceans swimming away from all the tumult raging ashore.
Itâs precisely in times of great change that people turn again to
philosophy. Today we stand at crossroads in world history again with the
global flows of capital reorganizing, the loss of the âstabilityâ of
Western and formerly Sovietaligned powers, new struggles arising around
the world, and an uncertain future both for liberation and survival at
least in the world as weâve known it. With the breakdown of the previous
geopolitical balance of forces, agreements, and models, the dominant
forms of thought, too, are under fire. The failures of the powerful to
organize society have raised many questions about the ability of
existing philosophies to account for historyâs sour turns. When matters
like environmental catastrophe, the potential for massive wars (and
expanding areas of conflict), economic collapse, and so on are on the
table, key sectors within the liberatory political landscape return to
philosophy to reevaluate and seek new ways forward. The surprising
popular success of Marxâs Capital in bookstores during the throes of
world financial crisis explained thusly makes perfect sense. Fundamental
questions are being raised, and people who normally do not engage in
that kind of activity are going back to the basics and picking up
whatever tools theyâre aware of.
Part of the struggle for a more just society is our understanding,
conception, and analysis of our reality and struggles. We donât just
reproduce ideas that we find, but we also invent new concepts, create
new ways of thinking about changing reality, and propose ways of
thinking to help us change the world. We make and reform methodologies,
analyses, and concepts. That is, we build theory. The framework we use
to build theories is called metatheory, or the tools used to construct
theory out of. It is the basic unit or vocabulary of political workâthe
bricks and mortar of a building, the basic conceptions that allow us to
have thoughts. It gives us a language to describe our political language
or thoughts with.
At this moment in history however, philosophy is an embattled territory.
Scienceâs expanding grasp of the universe has brought within reach many
things that once only philosophers considered within the grasp of raw
empirical inquiry. Today itâs miraculous to look at the endurance of
Aristotleâs physics within Western thought. A millennia passed before
new ways of explaining physics beyond the framework laid out in
Aristotleâs theories. Today imagining any scientific theory, let alone
one created by a philosopher, lasting a generation would be unusual let
alone centuries. Out of philosophy the sciences and disciplines were
constructed and the expansion of knowledge brought about by scientific
inquiry has led to rapid change in theorizing. Subsequently, philosophy
has shrunk and changed, and where its borders lie seem harder to pick
out than ever beforeâborders that are rapidly shifting and contested.
Strong anti-intellectual currents, at least in US society, make
philosophy seem to many the purest form of erudite elitism and
abstraction for abstractionâs sake. Purged of its empirical elements,
philosophy appears to be the business of settling problems whose
solutions have no outcome anywayâpure speculation and mental
masturbation. None of this is aided by actually existing philosophy,
which unfortunately is often characterized by feuding men at elite
institutions who view their role more as gladiators for hire in an arena
than as engaged citizens. These sentiments are particularly true for
liberatory political thought, which draws from sometimes justified
suspicions of professional intellectuals as well as from a desire to
move to action without the mediation of the baggage of previous
historical debates, obsessions with canonical texts, and intellectual
hierarchies stacked against the exploited and oppressed.
At the same time battles are being waged over different traditions
philosophers, canons, and what role previous philosophies will play in
understanding the victories and tragedies of political struggle. The
intellectual crises of traditional left movements with the fall of the
USSR (combined with a twin threat of an insurgent and rising global
anarchism eclipsing the Marxism and socialism of previous generations)
have created a vacuum of philosophical space. Lineage, tradition,
foundations, and starting points are being rewritten and re-evaluated.
The work of French and Italian revolutionaries brought them to Spinoza
as they sought to work out perceived shortcomings they encountered in
applying Marxism and Marxâs Hegelianism to their experiences in Paris in
1968 and Italyâs struggles throughout the 60s and 70s. Many Maoists and
Marxist-Leninists of today look to the work of Alain Badiou to provide a
philosophical foundation for understanding the limitations of the
official authoritarian Marxist-Leninist state experiences of the 20^(th)
century and paths forward while still retaining the legacy of such
movements. Anarchist and libertarian thinkers likewise have sought
philosophical tools for elaborating their conceptions apart from the
dialectics, Hegelianism, and most of all the domination of Marxism and
liberalism within liberatory thought in recent decades.
From the perspective of liberation, philosophy is live territory perhaps
now more so than in recent memory. Foucault, Badiou, Althusser, Negri,
and Butler are examples of recent thinkers who have had influence on a
wide array of relevant political issues. The importance for example of
Negri and Hardtâs Empire exemplified that.[30] Its influence was grossly
disproportionate to its actual content, and in retrospect can be viewed
as capturing the uncertainty of the time at which people began rising up
against neoliberalism while leftist dogmas one by one crumbled. With the
World Trade Organization protests coming on its heels, Empire was in the
right place at the right time. Often bizarre and strained attempts to
apply such thinkers to concrete work speaks to the poverty of and hunger
for these ideas. There is a push and pull between anti-intellectualism
on the one hand, and then a poverty of theory that speaks to the moments
and positions people who are struggling find themselves in without
roadmaps or mentors. The gap between theory and practice is more literal
than figurative.
While it is true that very few, even among hardcore political activists,
look to such philosophical work, the impact of it should not be
underestimated. Theory and philosophy matter in part because some people
think they do. Only a tiny fraction of people engaged in Marxist
struggles actually read Marx himself, but the influence of Marx and his
works was massive. This is because key actors always come back to
philosophy to help make sense of experiences. While the influence of
theory is diffused through innumerable factors, the fact remains that
philosophy is a place where important elements return to frequently and
especially so in moments of change.
Philosophy does not derive its importance from the simple fact that
influential (however we understand that) people use it and take it
seriously. If that were the end of the story, we might simply take note
of it and submit that faith in philosophy to greater scrutiny. Just
because some people believe in philosophy does not ensure that itâs
useful, worthwhile, or fruitful. There is something deeper going on in
the ebb and flow of philosophy within society. Philosophy is not only a
tool, but is also an inherent part of human life and thought.
Philosophy has no opt-out option therefore. Our mental lives are built
upon philosophy and all people engage in philosophical thinking, though
not necessarily as a conscious effort. It is through finding answers to
other questions that philosophy rises to the surface, and when our
ability to find answers in our daily lives breaks down, the underlying
philosophical elements become more obvious. This is to say that there
are inherent philosophical elements to all human thought.
What is philosophy then? Attempting to define philosophy is a minefield,
and if done seriously, would require an entire book. Bertrand Russell
underlines the trouble defining philosophy:
We may note one peculiar feature of philosophy. If someone asks the
question what is mathematics, we can give him a dictionary definition,
let us say the science of number, for the sake of argument. As far as it
goes this is an uncontroversial statement... Definitions may be given in
this way of any field where a body of definite knowledge exists. But
philosophy cannot be so defined. Any definition is controversial and
already embodies a philosophic attitude. The only way to find out what
philosophy is, is to do philosophy.[31]
A core component of doing philosophy is looking at the underlying
assumptions, structures, and values of various problems or fields of
thought. There are philosophical questions for physics, sociology, art,
literature, religion, the mind, space, time, and so on. Philosophy is
not about topics, texts, or subjects, but rather it is a type of
approach and types of questions. Traditionally the approach of
philosophy is primarily aimed at exploring elements of our knowledge,
evaluations, ultimate nature or being, and methodologies underlying
fundamental problems. Immanuel Kant delineates the terrain well showing
the wonder that philosophy can inspire in us as agents approaching a
world empowered and required to inquire and intervene:
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and
awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry
heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not seek or
conjecture either of them as if they were veiled obscurities or
extravagances beyond the horizon of my vision; I see them before me and
connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence. The
first starts at the place that I occupy in the external world of the
senses, and extends the connection in which I stand into the limitless
magnitude of worlds upon worlds, systems upon systems, as well as into
the boundless times of their periodic motion, their beginning and
continuation. The second begins with my invisible self, my personality,
and displays to me a world that has true infinity, but which can only be
detected through the understanding, and with which ... I know myself to
be in not, as in the first case, merely contingent, but universal and
necessary connection. The first perspective of a countless multitude of
worlds as it were annihilates my importance as an animal creature, which
must give the matter out of which it has grown back to the planet (a
mere speck in the cosmos) after it has been (one knows not how)
furnished with life-force for a short time.[32]
If we step back, we can discern two broad kinds of philosophical issues:
descriptive and normative. Normative issues are issues of evaluations
(or norms), most commonly morals and ethics, but not exclusively. Issues
such as beauty, good taste, and even the rationality of judgments are
forms of value judgments. Itâs important to note that there is no
science that could explain such problems. Science might tell us what
value judgments we actually make based on the universe and our biology,
but there is no science that can tell us we ought to make those
judgments or not. The universe is ambivalent to those facts; we are the
only ones who care. Normative questions concern what ought to be, rather
than what is. Normative questions reside almost exclusively in the
domain of philosophical thought.
Normative judgments, evaluations, questions, reasoning, and action
guided by such are widespread and evident in our lives. This is because
it is fundamentally human to have to contemplate our actions, their
effect, and those of others who can decide what to do or not to do.
Likewise, these judgments are contested. One generation may not even
contemplate abortion as relevant to moral thinking, yet the next might
be willing to kill over it. The prominent debates over how people make
economic choices is an example of a philosophical normative issue; what
decisions one ought to make, what purchases are rational, and so on all
embody a philosophical worldview and latent value assumptions that are
contested on all sides today. Though few discuss these issues as
philosophy it is a debate that touches nearly all of us through the
media, advertising, and education. This is the first way in which
philosophy is inevitable. Because we are creatures that must evaluate
actions, we are inherently tied to philosophy.
Descriptive philosophy deals with questions that try to capture elements
of our world. There is more overlap here with science than with
normative matters. For instance, someday neuroscience may demonstrate
how the mind and body are one and the same. People can argue that
different ways (and in fact the belief that science can is itself a
philosophical position). The science of the mind is about explaining the
data of its functioning. A robust neuroscience would be able to explain
the chemistry and biology of our bodies, and through some elaborate
explanation, the mental states, behaviors, and so on that humans have.
Science is (roughly) about explaining data based on theories that can be
reproduced through experimentation and predictions. The theory tells you
how things function, and how they ought to behave given the model. There
is a missing component thoughâneuroscience cannot tell us what a mind
itself is. Science is neutral to how we understand what the mind is,
except through its functioning. This is because science is about
prediction over time, but not all elements of what something is will
affect what it does. If the mind is purely matter or if it is ideas in
Godâs mind, it will behave the same from the perspective of science.
Questions about the nature of things like the mind are one element of
descriptive philosophy.
Consider how we attain knowledge of the nature of the mind. Whatever the
mind is, whatever the account of its behavior and laws, questions abound
as to how we would come to know any of this. Science provides accounts
of the world as we happen to know it, but that doesnât answer any
evaluation of whether or not that process gives us knowledge, the
underlying reality of our knowledge, or indeed what we are or reality
is. These are philosophical issues. In general, descriptive philosophy
deals with how we come to know things and the essence or being of
things. Though it is less obvious than with normative questions,
descriptive philosophy is an inherent component of our thought as well.
Religion is an evident domain where human philosophizing becomes
apparent.
Religions change, which causes philosophical explanations to shift. Some
religions placed humanity within a false reality, in the belly of hell
awaiting our awakening to a hidden reality. Other religious thought
placed deities as the ultimate source of all knowledge, and instructed
people to seek out truth through prayer and introspection alone.
Religions disagreed over our connection with other humans, either wholly
separating us as purely individual or autonomous beings, or placing us
as actually a single being divided by illusions of separate existence
from a unified totality. Religious thought exemplifies human attempts to
find answers to questions that underlie our other inquiries. There is no
experiment we could perform that would tell us whether or not we are in
the belly of a devil. Peopleâs aspiration to understand the knowledge
and reality of the world lead them to popular forms of philosophy.
Another example of inherent philosophizing is politics itself. While
much of politics falls in the normative domain, people come to form
political beliefs based on a latticework of more basic philosophical
positions. The debate about abortion makes this explicit. Though
religion dominates the discussion, itâs worth noting that some atheists
also reject abortion, and many religious people do not see abortion as
murder. The basic disagreement centers on a philosophical position of
what constitutes life, which is wholly distinct from scientific notions.
One way to look at the debate is that there is no fact of the matter of
when life starts in the sense that people care about; there are only
debates about the basic conceptions of life, its value, and the meaning
of our actions. Under the political issue lies questions about
causality, our agency, the nature of life, and morality. These persist
because they are questions that concern us, but which no amount of
empirical data or experiments could help us solve. Because of our
values, abortion pushes philosophical questions about life and our
actions onto us. It throws us into philosophy unknowingly. The structure
of our minds and world makes us face questions like these that are canât
be approached without philosophy.
With this in mind, we can say that all people engage in philosophy,
though not necessarily overtly. Everyone has philosophical ideas,
assumptions, and theories to explain the world. Sometimes this is
manifested in religious beliefs, folk wisdom, and unconscious reasoning.
At other times people put forward overt theories, though generally not
as philosophy per se. In the abortion example we can see how different
positions, which nearly everyone on some level has, take distinct
positions on both descriptive and normative philosophy of mind, ethics,
metaphysics, and life. This is distinct from making those processes
conscious, codifying them, having a language specific to describe them,
and so on. People may have tacit beliefs about what the ultimate reality
of life is without either naming or being aware of them, and yet engage
in self-reflection and change their underlying theories based on
reasoning. We can compare thinking of life as the beginning of a chain
of events starting at sex, the growth of a sentient humanlike being, or
the moment when a new form of life is shifted from the cells of the egg
upon conception. Each carries a philosophical view with associated
beliefs and explanations.
Antonio Gramsci, an Italian revolutionary, made a famous distinction
between good sense and common sense. For Gramsci, all people had both
good sense and common sense. Common sense is socially inherited for the
most part. Each individual has their own thoughts and beliefs, many of
which are founded upon habit and tradition embodied in a place and their
period. This is the fragmented contradictory set of philosophical
thinking we all have. Good sense on the other hand is where peopleâs
thought becomes more conscious, ordered, and coherent. Gramsci
especially praised the attempts of everyday people to try and shape
their thinking to their experiences. Theory moving in tandem with and
influencing practice was called praxis. People have experiences, they
theorize them, and those theories generate new practices, which in turn
modify the theory, and so on.
While everyone philosophizes consciously and unconsciously â good sense
must be cultivated. Gramsci lays out then the inherent nature of
philosophy to living, and argues that we should perfect it. Yet weâre
not perfecting philosophy as an abstract, but rather to fit our concrete
context: our struggles, position, and aspirations both informing and
being informed by our experiences. The distinction between good sense
and common sense points to the reasonable notion that all people no
matter their education, intelligence, or position engage in
philosophical thinking though with different levels of conscious
processes, specificity, and effort.[33]
People do not normally consider this theorizing or engaging in high
intellectual activity, but it is. Obviously thereâs a distinction
between the work of individuals who spend decades working out an
analyses of their own and the positions individuals come to as a
reaction to things occurring to them and around them. Yet the gulf is
not as wide as might be thought. Between viewing our political mental
life as purely passive or cultivated, there lies a dynamic interplay.
People are not merely responsive, but also must filter their responses.
Responses come through the lens of their beliefs, desires, and
intentions. As people live and grow, they inevitably encounter elements
of life that contradict what they think and what they have been taught.
How they choose to respond to these contradictions is one path that
leads to philosophical thinking, and politics is no different. We need
only look at all the various shifts in discourse, surveys, and activity
following the financial crisis of 2008 to see evidence for widespread
philosophical thought throughout society.
A significant barrier to recognizing this ultimately comes from an
excessively individualistic world view in which people form their ideas
roughly in a vacuum, as though peering through the windows that are our
eyes at the world outside, and only then return to social life to
implement their ideas. In reality the situation is much more complex
since divisions between individual and social life are incredibly
blurred. Peopleâs responses and questions do not occur in isolation. The
speech, actions, and reactions of the countless others with whom we are
in intimate contact (in modern cities and suburbs) influence our
conscious thinking and unconscious activity. We do not ask questions out
of nowhere, but rather we bring our own contributions to the experiences
and options offered to us. Our own ideas and behavior inherently refer
to the thoughts and actions of others in an endless spiral, each
affecting one another. We all rely on, reformulate, adjust, and create
theory in the course of our lives in order to understand our world, our
position within it, and the best course of action for us. Philosophy is
not alien or external to us. These are underlying issues inherent to
being the thinking creature that we are, and they are both inescapable
and completely widespread throughout our societies. Philosophers may
have the distinction of being called such, but it is only because they
have a discipline, tradition, and institutions that support their titles
and work. We are all philosophers.
This isnât to diminish the unique contributions individuals make, nor
the idea that people can innovate and create genuinely new ideas. It is
simply to acknowledge that we canât make sense of any aspect of human
mental and social life without referencing the lives, thoughts, and
relationships with others. From this perspective, the universality of
philosophical thinking is a consequence of the philosophical thought of
all of us united in complex networks throughout societies. Intellectuals
with texts, theories, and work are one manifestation of that broader
social process at hand. Yet more fundamentally it is the inherent
process within us all that makes theories possible.
Yet one might ask if philosophy actually adds anything to our thoughts.
Is it simply a trick? A mental trap? The ordinary language philosophers
argued as such, claiming that philosophical problems develop out of
snares in ordinary use of language that philosophers take out of their
use-context to generate their quandaries. In some instances, they sought
to reduce philosophical problems to linguistic, semantic, or conceptual
problems. Wittgenstein, for example argued:
[Philosophical problems] are solvedâŠby looking into the workings of our
language, and that in such a way as to make us recognize those workings:
in despite of an urge to misunderstand them. The problems are solved,
not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always
known. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our
intelligence by means of language.[34]
This approach can reduce philosophical questions to puzzles that fall
out of the questions or problem itself. Philosophy then does not
actually change our course, but instead only helps us explain away the
problems that come out of our language. For example, take the issue of
truth. Deflationism about truth similarly attempts to deflate or
eliminate the philosophical tension about the nature of truth through an
account that is about language and our use of the concept.[35]
Deflationists argued that to say that âgrass is greenâ is true, we are
simply saying âgrass is green.â Truth adds no new content to the
sentence, but can be a useful way to use language as a shorthand for
repetition. In doing so, they reduced the problem of truth to a
syntactic one, and showed that the ability to assert sentences using
truth as a tool played a role.[36]
This move was quite pervasive in the field in an earlier era and
parallels popular ideas about the irrelevancy of theoretical issues. At
its most extreme this approach rejected the relevance of philosophy
altogether. Extrapolating, we see that if such questions are merely
semantic tricks which add no new content to our understanding of
questions, then what bearing could they have on anything of substance?
Even if we inherently end up philosophizing, this doesnât show that it
has any use beyond the curiosity of the theory-phile.
First, itâs worth considering that philosophy for its own sake has an
inherent good. It may be good for people engaging in inquiry to test
their minds, more deeply analyze assumptions unexamined, and develop
abilities within the philosophical realm that help with analysis and
reasoning that are more applied. Philosophical practice could be a type
of mental exercise to build abilities one wouldnât otherwise get. The
process alone can improve us and benefit us.
Yet, broad skepticism concerning the importance of all philosophical
inquiries is hard to sustain. For one, large sections of contested
social life are imbued with purely theoretical questions. Ethics is an
obvious example. It is not that there are timeless and unmoving ethical
contents that philosophy merely tries to reconcile with our intuitive
beliefs and practices. Instead, ethical sentiments have both apparent
universals and historical and sociological variation. The values of the
ancients are not necessarily the values of today. Whether we ought to
have values different than our own is a philosophical problem.
Historically humanity has been repeatedly wrong concerning ethical
judgments, particularly concerning the lower orders of society, the
dominated, and the exploited. Euthanasia, racism, sexism, and countless
forms of dehumanization point to the contextual and changing nature of
values. There is no way of approaching these questions, which are
clearly vital, without philosophy in one form or another.
Beyond ethical issues there are always fundamental assumptions beneath
all forms of thought that are likewise contested. Psychology, politics,
sociology, the sciences, and literature all have their philosophical
bedrock they are built upon. In the literary arts, for example, growing
interest in language, globalization, and broad cross-linguistic trends
led to an examination of the notion of translation. Translating works of
literature is common, and when reflected upon choices around translation
show elements of artistic creation. For translators of literature,
concepts like meaning, intention, form, and aesthetic judgments form the
core of their activity. Each discipline and human endeavor has its
philosophical issues like translation in literature.
Physics would appear to be the most solid of all subjects. Yet, physics
is beset by methodological issues raised by theories that explain the
behavior of subatomic particles. Quantum mechanics and string theory are
two examples of theories that provide answers that contradict basic
beliefs we have about what it means to be an observer, how we come to
have knowledge about observed phenomena, space, time, and motion.[37]
Hard problems in the physical sciences that contradict what we believe
about the world can lead to philosophical investigations, which likewise
can generate new research. It is no accident that many of the great
scientists themselves were invested in philosophical debates of their
time, such as Einstein with the logical positivists and Newton with the
rationalists and Neo-Platonists.
The problem of consciousness in recent time is one example of an issue
raised by philosophers, drawing from neuroscience, which has been taken
up further by neuroscientists for new kinds of research. Philosophical
interest in the raw experiential sense of âwhat is it likeâ has led to
investigations and model from cognitive scientists and
neuroscientists.[38] Philosophers of mind draw from new research to help
find those boundaries as well: where does our concept of consciousness
meet with what we know about the brain? Philosophy can help us with
roadblocks in other domains, and it also provides the underlying basis
for doing work in other fields, which can help or hinder our
understanding of that work (such as conceptualizations of things like
time, causation, perception, and so on in physics). Discipline-specific
philosophical problems reflect the ethical, metaphysical, and
epistemological quandaries of their domain. At the same time, they raise
the underlying general philosophical problems they draw from and
contribute to. Philosophy is perhaps less of a separate sphere or brand
than a type of activity exhibited in broad swaths of human life with
associated content and questions.
In politics, consider the role of philosophy in major world events.
Marxism in the political world became one of the most influential
currents in history. Marxism likewise arose partly from debates within
the Hegelian societies, which in turn were debates generated by
disagreements over history, knowledge, and the ultimate nature of
subjectivity and reality. This isnât to abstract away the role of
history and struggle in forming political currents, but just to raise
the relevancy of a philosophical element amongst others. All major
political thought has found its grounding in philosophical problems
concerning a few key questions: ethics, agency, knowledge, and society.
Political problems are ones that address us both as members of societies
and as agents within the world. It is unavoidable that there be deep
questions about the direction, foundation, and justification for our
judgments, a path to a good society, and how we come to have our beliefs
about political questions. This is even truer for any critical politics.
Rejecting doing philosophy within liberatory thought means embracing
exclusively what we happen to believe or practice without reflection. If
the present order is rejected, then the ability to deflate philosophical
problems about politics becomes problematic as intuitive political
philosophy is often based upon a corrupt material and moral order.
Looking to science, politics, and even literature, philosophy raises
elements both of thought and practice that can contribute to changing
activity and generating new ideas. As experiences generate new ideas, we
respond to the ideas and create new forms of practice. This relationship
is complex and not obvious, but it points to a deeper analysis of the
role of philosophy beyond mere semantics. If we accept that there are
philosophical questions of substantive content and that these are
unavoidable at least on some level, then additional questions are
raised.
Our world thus reflects our inherent philosophical beliefs, and when our
beliefs change they can reshape the world (though not necessarily
directly or simply). Philosophy, as we discussed, helps us when our
thoughts hit limits. Particularly in times of turmoil, philosophy is
turned to for help. But what are the consequences of having it be the
domain only of philosophers? That is, if only professional philosophers
do philosophy, how will that affect our own thinking?
If we refuse to engage in it, we cede that territory to others and often
others who may or may not have our best interests in mind. Philosophy as
a professional field relies upon a series of elite institutions to fund,
train, and employ their staff. The politics and dynamics of academic
employment is sordid enough to raise questions about the ability of
professional academics to generate tools for people trying to better
their lives and societies. Their institutions are largely run by elite
intellectuals who uphold philosophy as the property of fulltime
academics, which serves a hierarchical social organization that
continually places the thinking of what is best for society into the
hands of the few. Immense social pressure exerted through competition,
funding, and the moderating effect of employment judged through ability
to publish has deeply conservative effects on every discipline in
academia. On the one hand there is a steady stream of trivial technical
work aimed at securing and maintaining oneâs employment, and, on the
other hand, strong defense of the existing power structures in one
modified form or another. This is merely to say that professional
institutions reflect the power dynamics within society as a whole.
Privilege and power get disproportionate voices and have extensive means
to reproduce ideology throughout society, academia included.
By failing to take up the theories that are continually pushed upon us,
and questioning our own, we allow leaders (either of movements or of
dominant society) to often decide key questions for us that not only can
impact the underlying theories, but often day-to-day strategies and
tactics of struggles for liberation. For instance, contemplate writings
and coverage of things like the foreclosure crisis in the United States.
Through the media, academic publications, think-tanks, and government
reports various positions on resistance, the problem, and potential
solutions are developed. People interact with these through points of
intersection in their daily life: their union, church, school,
workplace, television, associations, and political affiliations. These
positions are developed largely by people who have direct investment in
the maintenance of the system through the funding of their employment,
and the simple fact that it is working for them. Consequently,
institutions of the powerful tend to set the debates. In the case of
foreclosures key actors like SEIU, the Democratic Party, and a network
of non-profits tied to foundation grants or unions led to focusing on
the defense of private property of individuals rather than questioning
capitalist housing itself that turns peopleâs homes and neighborhoods
into commodities which has generated countless similar crises.
While this does not mean that itâs not possible for such people to be
critical, on a broader social level it is true that perspectives that
protect the dominant view are consistently overrepresented and defended
by professional thinkers. This translates into people seeking to remedy
the problem looking towards official channels set by the dominant power
holders.
Dissidents do exist of course. Yet still too often we are lacking a
vehicle for independent thought. Meanwhile, hostile perspectives that
seek to maintain the status quo are able to use a monopoly of
professional intellectuals to move concrete philosophies in everyday
life that serve their interests, often against the interests of the
great majority. This is not to pass judgment on those individuals or to
reduce their positions to their social class, but rather to raise the
issue that allowing for a whole realm of human mental life to be
dominated by professionals or even to write it off is to passively
accept the reproduction of the ruling ideology on fundamental questions
for people trying to enact change. If we want to see critical
perspectives, especially those of the dominated, we have to
independently intervene and create philosophy with wider participation.
Recognizing the role of philosophy in our lives begs for another
approach. The division of labor between thinkers and workers, the
academies and society at large should be questioned. There should be an
effort to expand working intellectual life, and to deepen both the
capacity of people to engage with philosophy in their daily lives.
Obviously not everyone will become a philosopher and write theories, but
everyone can learn to think philosophically, question dominant
philosophical thinking, and develop their own positions. Everyone,
though particularly liberatory movements, should engage in questioning
and developing theory in the course of their actions. Thereâs no reason
to assume this is only a matter of individual education and willpower,
either. Our education system pushes us to think individualistically in a
way that doesnât reflect how people learn. Scientists most evidently do
not do research in this manner. Collaboration and collective projects
are at the heart of their practice, beyond some base level of mastery
that all scientists much engage on their own. If we recognize the
potential for people to learn collaboratively with common aims and
interests, the possibility of a popular intellectual life informed by
peopleâs aspirations could be a tangible reality.
This is not a call for everyone to sit, as Descartes did, in front of a
fireplace contemplating the mysteries of the universe. That is fine and
often fulfilling to many, yet it is different from what we have been
discussing. Within us, philosophy grows and develops, tracing the arcs
of our lives and our beliefs. Theory and philosophy are not islands to
which we swim only when things have gotten rough on the mainland. Our
theory is not simply internal to us, but it additionally undergirds the
rest of our activities and thinking. Theory evolves with our
experiences. Humans are biological creatures with an endowment that
shapes our thought through our genetic legacy, yet it is an open
process. As we grow, change, struggle, and thrive, our ideas about the
world change with our experiences. Living in cities and experiencing the
technological revolution of mass communication, for example, certainly
altered the way humans thought about their lives, families, work, and so
on. In actual fact, theory and practice do grow together.
The best, of course, is when our theory and our practice move together
organically, learning from practice and creating new theory, and the
theory generating new practice. This is sometimes called praxis. Praxis
is an ideal we aspire to. That is, that we should make our philosophies
explicit, question them, weigh them against our experiences, and
reformulate them so we have more tools to keep doing what we think is
the best thing to do. This intentional, conscious process can help us
think more clearly and learn from our mistakes. Action is more than our
conscious intentions, and yet at the same time this doesnât invalidate
the usefulness of trying to achieve a praxis.
Philosophy as something inherent to our mental lives, something within
reach of all, can be liberating both in understanding these points and
in applying them. The universality of philosophy within society doesnât
mean that we should diminish nor exalt explicitly- theoretical texts
like this one. Instead, it is to recognize that philosophy is the domain
of all people irrespective of their intelligence, gender, class, race,
or position. In societies based on domination the alienation from
philosophy is apparent. It is also a grave mistake to look at such
activity as alien to the oppressed and the sole property of elites.
There is no option to avoid doing philosophy; there is only a choice to
do it well or not.
This isnât to say there arenât barriers. Todayâs society is built on
divisions that try to enforce the ownership of theoretical thought by
professional intellectuals. Anti-intellectualism is ultimately
self-defeating. In the course of this struggle we have to be creative
and find new ways to do philosophyâa philosophy of collective creation
and a liberatory philosophy. Simply wishing philosophy to be popular is
not enough. We canât merely overcome these issues by manipulating the
terminology or method to be more accessible, while people continue to
experience the limiting and alienating effects of capitalist work and
all its stupefaction of everyday life. Just as artistic creation has
been stolen from the public and relegated to a spectacle by
professionals reproducing artistic commodities for the market, so
philosophy often has been chained to an exploitive system of thought. We
need to seize philosophy again, see what we have available to us, and
discern how we can recreate it for our own purposes.
Issues inherent to ethics, social justice, biology, science, and
societies are confronted through the course of the arguments working
from emergence to agency. Though weâve been speaking about philosophy in
general, much of this work takes on critical political philosophy
specifically. In this sense it comes from the perspective of a critique
of todayâs society alongside aspirations for a fundamentally different
social order. The main focus of such is with political questions, and
specifically with the underlying method and framework for doing
politics.
Political questions can be divided into two different levels of
analysis. One the one hand are raw political questions like: Is abortion
wrong? Is it just for starvation to exist? What is the best form of
governance for society? These questions deal with content and specific
issues within a broader framework for political debate. This is simply
politics or perhaps social questions. Answers at this level address
assertions, such as âAbortion is morally permissible because it is not
murder, and therefore should be socially permitted by law.â
Beneath these is a different type of questioning, questions about the
underlying methodology and theoretical foundations for asking any
political questions at all. This is the metapolitical. Metapolitics
deals with the fundamentals that make settling political questions
possible. For example, we might ask what the notion of a polity is
altogether. What methods yield political truths? What distinguishes the
political from other categories like the social or biological?
Metapolitical inquiries provide answers not to political questions, but
rather to the underlying concepts and structures upon which political
questions are built. All political actors have latent philosophical
foundations that they use to understand and guide their struggles.
Ethical, social, and philosophical beliefs form the core from which
people create their ideas for a political path to the world they seek,
and an understanding of the current one. Metapolitical theories then
give us the tools with which we build our theories.
This does not mean that when people come to political conclusions and
take part in political acts that take sides they are explicitly thinking
first of their metapolitical assumptions and then second working out a
response. Metapolitics is a level of analysis, a place where questions
of a certain sort can be asked. Anyone who engages in political life
(which means social life in general and not merely conscious political
activity), engages in metapolitical thought. The reasons are the same as
for the universality of doing philosophy. Since we are creatures with
minds and live in societies like we do, metapolitics is an implicit and
unconscious element of human social life. We can attribute metapolitical
assumptions to people either by their thoughts and expressions or by
their actions. Human nature, for instance, often plays a strong role in
political theory. Most people likely have thoughts about human nature,
make judgments based on it, and indeed shape their lives in relation to
perceived nature in people. Yet what about the concept of human nature
itself? What is it? Answers to these questions are metapolitical; but
simply by having belief about human nature, people have tacit
commitments to ideas about nature itself.
Besides latent thoughts, there is as well conscious metapolitical
thought. This is also universal, though not in an obvious form. Because
of the dominance of professional intellectuals and the sequestering of
their thought to institutions, such as academia, think-tanks, NGOs, and
so on, metapolitical activity of nonprofessionals is not widely
recognized. Yet people do come to change their beliefs about fundamental
ways in which society operates and how to effect change. People come to
believe or stop believing in the ability of individuals to fundamentally
control the course of history. People come to see institutional
structures of power or capital as determining agents controlling all
society independent of the individuals involved. People become cynical
of the potential for escaping the invariable dominance of human nature
corrupting all social life. Within these attitudinal responses to
political events, people take on political positions proper, but also
are changing their underlying assumptions about how societies operate,
and forming new opinions based on this.
Simply making our internal process conscious doesnât guarantee it will
help us either though. Most of human mental life is unconscious anyway,
and being conscious of underlying assumptions does not necessarily allow
us to escape pervasive errors or introduce new ones. Engaging in
explicit metapolitics as this work is intended to do is simply to add to
our capabilities and experience as people trying to work critically
within a process for liberation. The explicitness is not a holy grail,
nor is it a standalone solution. It is one part of our political
activity, amongst many. The relative importance of this is an open
question. Realistically, it is likely to help us through addressing real
underlying issues, but it also does not have any great privileged status
that invalidates other elements of political life. The contestation of
theory, practice, intuition, creativity, emotion, reason, and so on
reflect the divisions within society that try to advertise and
monopolize their dominance alongside the struggle of individuals and
institutions within this system. More collaboration, humility, and
respect for the plurality of contributions is sorely needed. The crisis
in political thinking is unfolding rapidly in an evolving world, making
rethinking foundations for political inquiry more relevant today than
ever.
Anarchism is not, as some may suppose, a theory of the future to be
realized through divine inspiration. It is a living force in the affairs
of our life, constantly creating new conditions. The methods of
Anarchism therefore do not comprise an iron-clad program to be carried
out under all circumstances. Methods must grow out of the economic needs
of each place and clime, and of the intellectual and temperamental
requirements of the individual. âEmma Goldman.[39]
One approach to doing politics centers on the nature of political
methods. Some radicals have proposed viewing political methodology as
the fundamental basis for politics. Within the Marxist tradition one
school of thought used methods as what defines Marxism. For example,
Karl Korsch[40] argued that:
âScientific socialismâ properly so-called is quite essentially the
product of the application of that mode of thought which Marx and Engels
designated as their âdialectical methodâ⊠Only those who completely
overlook that Marxâs âproletarian dialecticâ differs essentially from
every other (metaphysical and dialectical) mode of thought, and
represents that specific mode of thought in which alone the new content
of the proletarian class views formed in the proletarian class struggle
can find a theoretical-scientific expression corresponding to its true
being; only those could get the idea that this dialectical mode of
thought, as it represents âonly the formâ of scientific socialism,
consequently would also be âsomething peripheral and indifferent to the
matter,â so much so that the same material content of thought could be
as well or even better expressed in another form.[41]
Since this position is about how we carry out politics altogether, it is
a metapolitical position, though one that attempts to sidestep doing
theoretical work in a way. The popularity amongst political thinkers in
discussing method and political-struggle-as-method warrants
investigations of the problem. What is method? What is content? What
relationship is there between theory and method?
Alongside issues with philosophy sits the problem of methods. Methods
are
not simply a section of theoretical issues. In their rawest form,
methods are systematic ways (and associated conceptual tools, analysis
of such, and so on) of trying to achieve something. Methods involve
steps, sequences, and instruments for carrying out practices in some
form or another. This is often obscured in metapolitical discussions of
method, which more frequently focus on hazy notions of frames,
world-views, and perspectives as methods. Hard cases make bad law, so
letâs take up more concrete notions of method.
The scientific method is one of the most tangible examples we have. In a
nutshell, the scientific method consists of research, posing a
hypothesis or something we propose in order to test it, conducting
experiments, and drawing conclusions. The parts are related, but also
related in the sense of moving through the steps in a direction. Methods
have elements of theory or concepts and elements of construction or
process. From another perspective, the scientific method is about
systematically weighing certain kinds of beliefs (scientific ones)
against their ability to predict real world events.[42] There are past
evidence, hypotheses, future experiments, and/or predictions we test
them against. Each component is related and serves to gain our object
(knowing whatâs right or not). Likewise, thereâs a process we go
through.
The scientific method was practiced throughout history before being
codified as the method of science. There were experiments, hypotheses,
and people went through similar steps to draw conclusions about the
world. This isnât to say people always intuitively engaged in the
method, but people certainly formed hypotheses, conducted experiments,
and used the data as the judge of their beliefs.[43] A method then is
not only something we consciously follow or even understand, thereâs
also an unconscious practical element to it that our theory of methods
tries to codify and capture.
At the same time the production of the theory of the scientific method
gave scientists further tools for doing their work. Armed with a way to
understand that work, future scientists inherited an understanding of
how to account for existing data (research) as well as future data
(experiments) in a way that can be reproduced, thus verifying
hypotheses. The theory posed a challenge; run your belief through this
course of tests, and the likelihood of it being true is high. That
common ground allowed for collaboration, evaluation, and assessing
scientific work. With set rules of the game open to all, it forms a
shared way of hashing out our beliefs not just as individuals but also
collectively. It created the backbone then not just of specific
theories, but for how science as a collective activity of humanity would
develop.
The first thing we should take from this is that theory (or philosophy)
and methods are not identical. Theories are not necessarily organized
into methods, and methods are more than just specific theories. The
scientific method was practiced in various forms before it was
theorized, systematized, or institutionalized. Likewise, methods
themselves have theoretical components. There are the steps, sequences,
relationships among the elements
(hypothesisevidence-experiments-conclusions), and importantly practices.
Thereâs theoretical work and thereâs methodological work; related but
distinct. The scientific method commits people to theories about
evidence, experimentation, predictions, inference, time, observation,
and so on. There may be many positions compatible with a method, but it
is not theory-neutral.
Sometimes people try to argue that theory is a waste of time and that
instead we should focus on strategy and methods only (or worse, just do
whatâs most immediate). It should be clear why this is a false
dichotomy. Theory is inherently a part of methods. Without reflecting on
our underlying assumptions (and theories), people tend to reproduce
uncritically the dominant schools of thought of their time. While
somewhat inevitable, accepting assumed theory robs us of tools to
critically assess our work via our methods.
The example of the scientific method clarifies what use theory can have.
By creating a method, with associated theorizing, the scientific method
was able to blossom and expand the scope of inquiry. Though any method
we might want to consider may be in existence already producing fruitful
activities, the story doesnât end there. By creating overt methods
(through engaging in theoretical or philosophical accounts of both
existing processes and ones that we want to exist), we gain extra tools
to do what we want to do. Making things explicit lets us evaluate our
underlying assumptions, identify problems, and experiment. It gives us
more space to try new things and figure out whatâs ultimately driving us
forward or holding us back.
This is all true independently of the fact that explicit theorizing
isnât the be-all and end-all of doing good work. Method is judged not by
our conceptualization of it, but by the sum functioning of getting us
what we want. Theory has a role there, but only as a component of the
total effort. We donât get to opt out of theory, but likewise we canât
only do theory and believe that we have a method.
What about methods for liberation specifically? Understanding the
differences and relationships between philosophy and methods, and their
respective uses, leads us to further questions. Radical thinkers have
often sought to cast their traditions as ultimately reflecting a
methodology of struggle rather than an ideology. Emma Goldman is one
example of this within anarchism. Goldman was an Eastern European
immigrant radicalized by her experience of life in the United States.
She came to be one of the foremost radical voices of her day for not
only anarchism, but also the liberation of women and the struggles of
workers. George Lukacs is another within Marxism. A participant in the
Hungarian insurrection, he was a one-time dissident Marxist who later
joined the officialdom, repudiated his own ideas, and ultimately became
a faithful defender of the orthodoxy of the Soviet Union. The young
Lukacs argued that Marxism was not a set of theses to implement as a
canon, but instead a method for coming to conclusions.
Orthodox Marxism⊠does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the
results of Marxâs investigations. It is not the âbelief â in this or
that thesis, nor the exegesis of a âsacredâ book. On the contrary,
orthodoxy refers exclusively to method. It is the scientific conviction
that dialectical materialism is the road to truth and that its methods
can be developed, expanded and deepened only along the lines laid down
by its founders.[44]
Since Lukacs and Goldman, many thinkers sought to elaborate and
sometimes place method at the center of radical work. Yet what does this
mean? What does such a method look like? Lukacs says such a method is
the scientific convictionâwhich we can only interpret to mean a belief
that is evaluated against evidence rather than faith.
Goldmanâs quote at the outset of this chapter goes perhaps more deeply
in placing the implementation of the method into the context of the
people carrying it out. It varies based on the environment it is
realized in. These were ideas also raised by Errico Malatesta, the
Italian revolutionary electrician and theorist of anarchism whose
participation in the movement led him to organizing and participating in
revolts across Europe, the Americas, and Africa.[45] Malatesta took such
a position in discussing how an anarchist society would develop
economically through a series of experiments varying with local context.
Kropotkin himself argued similarly in describing the function of
anarchist society.[46]
If we understand methods to be a set of practices in sequence with
associated theoretical assumptions, there is good reason to be a skeptic
about the use of methods that are in currency amongst some radical
thinkers. For instance, consider the differences between Lukacsâ method
and those of the anarchists discussed above. Lukacs centers his ideas on
method on notions of dialectical materialism, and the teachings of its
founders. What would those steps be and how could they be understood to
follow a systematic pattern? Understanding in any usable way how
dialectics are a method to draw conclusions is notoriously obscure.
Whatever use of dialectics there is, thereâs a looseness about method
being employed here.[47] Compare this to Goldmanâs notions or Malatesta
conception of creating a just economy based on experimentation in a
postrevolutionary moment. The anarchist conception of method embodied
here is about implementing libertarian practice with libertarian means.
Sometimes this is partially characterized by having oneâs means match
oneâs ends. This is much more methodical than what Lukacs is proposing.
There are theoretical commitments (ethics, notions of practice), a
series of strategic and tactical proposals, and a method for how to
relate them across time.
There is good reason to be skeptical in general about what Lukacs calls
a method at all. If it is taken at its crudest, one would have to try to
extract sequences from dialectics. One approach would be trying to
reduce phenomena to their contradictions and look to a synthesis in some
complicated manner. Lukacs and most Marxists would likely reject this as
a crass deformation of their ideas, though it is often what the
Stalinist orthodoxy (and notably the overwhelming majority of Marxists
throughout history) tried to pass off as their dialectical science for
decades. On the other hand, a broader approach of defining the
dialectical method as looking to multi-level changing processes across
time is not a method. Itâs much more of a framing for problems, or a set
of vocabulary and ways of thinking that we can use. Used in this way,
Lukacs gives us more of a theoretical perspective than a method. Thereâs
a laxity here about what counts as a method. A method is not simply a
way of looking at things and broad lessons to learn from. Indeed, when
most write about âa Marxist method,â they in fact do not mean a method
at all, but instead a collection of ways of framing things,
question-posing, and assumptions that have no clear methodology. In
practice this is evident. The rarity of people able to understand and
apply a dialectical or Marxist method makes its obscurity and difficulty
applying it clear.
Historically there was a strong strand of thought, determinism, that
made methods appear perhaps more important than they are. Many Marxists
and a few anarchists (such as perhaps Kropotkin) followed the belief of
the inevitability of their future society. The victory against
capitalism was seen as being secured by natural economic laws governing
society. Believing that such laws guaranteed ultimate victory led to
privileging methods both for interpreting history and in trying to act.
If historical fate secures victory, then theory as well as action are
somewhat less important than our method for understanding and proceeding
with the inherent laws that are already unfolding. Analysis (and
methodology of analysis) would have a higher place than actually trying
to solve problems and intervene since we already know the outcome.
Determinism pushes people towards passivity, since the inevitability of
victory problematizes which, if any, actions are necessary. At its worst
it provided justification for religiosity towards the actions of its
adherents, often at the same time they perpetrated great crimes of
history.[48] Today determinism has fallen out of style, perhaps in part
because of the historical failures of the Marxist-Leninist states and
the seemingly never-ending human tragedies of the 20^(th) century and
beyond (fascism, ethnic cleansing, religious and nationalism terrors,
life in the capitalist peripheries, and so on). Whatever historyâs
course, it doesnât seem to be headed step-by-step towards paradise.
Based on the previous discussion, we should be skeptical of a strong way
of interpreting those ideas in general. Anarchism for example is more
than simply a method for achieving anarchist goals. If different radical
philosophies are only methods, then they run up against the problem that
they contain within their methods underlying theories, and theories that
go beyond the steps and process of their method. The vision, goals, and
assumptions of all radical projects commit us to doing theory in one
form or another. Methodology is also important, but doesnât allow us to
evade theory as methodology itself has its own theoretical work.
Stepping back a bit allows us to extract truths from these ideas. A more
charitable way of reading it, perhaps, is less as a way of rejecting
theory altogether (in favor of pure method), and instead that radicals
do not hold their theoretical forefathers as pure truth-bearers.
Everything is on the table. People set out from the path of their
inspiration, but the ultimate judge of the beliefs is our practices.
These impulses are broadly correct and useful. While we may not be able
to circumvent politics or theory by focusing on a pure methodology,
methods are clearly important. Against dogmas and stagnant ideologies,
looking to methods and practices gives us ways to discuss and test our
ideas in the political world. In this way, methodology-centric politics
does stress important elements of political work.
What about a liberatory method? What would a method of liberatory
thought entail? What makes a method liberatory in the first place? A
liberatory method should contain a few key elements: the techniques and
methods, the aim and scope, and evaluations. Here libertarians have
elaborated considerable work. Tactical elements, the objects of
libertarian struggle, and truth have been explored by the tradition. Yet
explicit discussions of the method are unfortunately rare and unsettled.
First, there is the scope of the libertarianâs objectives. There is no
single theory of such, and indeed it is contested. One central theme is
that of libertarian struggle as being defined not by particular
institutions, but through the relationships of those struggling to the
power relations they are combatting or new powers being constructed.
Libertarians do not seek to rid us of injustice simply by attacking the
existing State as an institution, but rather by transforming the
relationships between those in power and those suffering the
consequences of illegitimate power. The construction of liberatory
answers is therefore based on contextual historical and regional
circumstances. Social relations of power vary, and thus particular
solutions reflect the historical, objective, and subjective features of
the problems posed. The libertarian struggle is defined by its material
circumstances, its participants, and their place in history. There is
neither a timeless central framing (good vs. evil), nor is it only
defined through central institutions like particular states or
capitalists. Noam Chomsky puts forward a definition of anarchism quite
close to this view in his introduction originally to Daniel Guerinâs
book, Anarchism:
At every stage of history our concern must be to dismantle those forms
of authority and oppression that survive from an era when they might
have been justified in terms of the need for security or survival or
economic development, but that now contribute to---rather than
alleviate---material and cultural deficit. If so, there will be no
doctrine of social change fixed for the present and future, nor even,
necessarily, a specific and unchanging concept of the goals towards
which social change should tend.[49]
Emma Goldman likewise emphasized the relativity of the application of an
anarchist method in the quote at the outset of the chapter. This isnât
to say simply that there is a plurality of different ways anarchism
could manifest, but rather that methodology gets its life directly
through its struggles. If we think in terms of what Chomsky writes, the
method is worked out based on the oppressions and illegitimate
authorities that people seek to dismantle. The doctrine is understood
through application of the method to the reality of the rebels seeking
liberation, and not merely through attempting to codify it or imposing a
set of beliefs to a subservient reality.
Secondly, there are the actual tactics and techniques inherent to the
method that define it. Typically, anarchists focus on tactics, and
usually direct action, directly democratic assemblies, and horizontal
delegation. Using these ways of solving problems is supposed to bring us
towards the anarchist ideals. It is not simply the targets (the State,
capital, oppression, and so on), nor a decentralized and historically
rooted application. Inherent to the method itself are certain practices
that make it anarchist. There is a relationship between the ends (goals)
and the means, and the means are secured by choice of tactics. Direct
action and direct democracy are themselves thought to deconstruct
statist relationships within those struggling. Horizontal structures
begin to rebuild power relationships on an anarchist basis.
This framing of the issue is not completely right though. At the core it
seeks to express the idea that a libertarian method uses libertarian
means to libertarian ends. This connects the third piece. There is a
core set of values that helps us choose our tactics, evaluate struggles,
and analyze our situation. Yet in the second component of the method,
people often put forward structures or forms of tactics. Direct
democracy is a structure in which decisions are made, but not
necessarily the relationships or decisions of those people. Direct
action is a type of action carried out by people, but it is not
necessarily direct action to libertarian ends by people with libertarian
intentions. Direct action can also be used to different
endsâauthoritarian and repressive ones like radical fascist actions.
Using libertarian means will not necessarily bring us libertarian
outcomes.
Consider when hierarchy emerges from horizontal structures. There are
many mundane examples. Formal democratic procedures donât bar people
from dominating through other means, such as charisma, social
connections, education, or knowledge. Fascist groups use direct action
to attack immigrants, queers, and leftists. People can use informal
hierarchies and re-create bureaucracies in directly democratic councils
to dominate. Horizontal delegation can be manipulated through networks
of power, which can be utilized to carry out agendas against minorities
or even majorities. For instance, a militant racist and anti-communist
in the US military developed a concept of leaderless resistance against
a potential soviet invasion. Louis Beam, a Ku Klux Klan leader, took
this up and argued for decentralized cells organized without higher
bodies:
An alternative to the pyramid type of organization is the cell system.
In the past, many political groups (both right and left) have used the
cell system to further their objectives. Two examples will suffice.
During the American Revolution âcommittees of correspondenceâ were
formed throughout the Thirteen colonies. Their purpose was to subvert
the government and thereby aid the cause of independence. The âSons of
Libertyâ, who made a name for themselves dumping government taxed tea
into the harbor at Boston, were the action arm of the committees of
correspondence. Each committee was a secret cell that operated totally
independently of the other cells. Information on the government was
passed from committee to committee, from colony to colony, and then
acted upon on a local basis. Yet even in these bygone days of poor
communication, of weeks to months for a letter to be delivered, the
committees without any central direction whatsoever, were remarkable
similar in tactics employed to resist government tyranny. It was, as the
first American patriots knew, totally unnecessary for anyone to give an
order for anything. Information was made available to each committee,
and each committee acted as it saw fit. A recent example of the cell
system taken from the left wing of politics are the Communists. The
Communist, in order to get around the obvious problems involved in
pyramidal organization, developed to an art the cell system. They had
numerous independent cells which operated completely isolated from one
another and particularly with no knowledge of each other, but were
orchestrated together by a central headquarters. For instance, during
World War II, in Washington, it is known that there were at least six
secret Communist cells operating at high levels in the United States
government (plus all the open Communists who were protected and promoted
by President Roosevelt), however, only one of the cells was rooted out
and destroyed. How many more actually were operating no one can say for
sure.[50]
This did not make Beamâs ideas liberatory obviously, no more than others
using decentralized organizations to authoritarian ends. While a
libertarian methodology is necessary to achieving equality and liberty,
it isnât sufficient. Structures and forms alone donât come with
automatic guarantees. You may utilize a libertarian method and still
produce new (or old) forms of destructive hierarchy.
Using libertarian structures certainly will help us. Direct democracy
likely minimizes potentials for authoritarian abuse. All things being
equal direct democracy is better than directives from dictators or the
aristocracy of representative structures. Direct action does have an
inherent liberatory potential as well. Acting directly means cutting out
the mediation from our lives: representatives, bureaucrats, recuperative
institutions, and so on. Yet this is different from identifying our
goals with the structures that can help us achieve those goals. What
makes something liberatory is its recognition of the capacity of people
to self-govern, implement egalitarian social relations, or whatever. The
content of our goals is served by structures, but structures and means
provide no guarantees that we will achieve them. There is another
component missing here.
This is another way to say that there is also a need for content in the
radical project of transforming society. On the skeleton of our method
and tactics, we build it up through putting the flesh of content on the
bones. Anarchism can be liberatory not only because it uses direct
democracy to achieve its ends, but also because of its ends:
organization of societyâs products for all, self-organization,
cooperative labor, and a holistic development of individuals for their
own chosen ends (to give potential examples). Tactics are applied to
ends; ends arenât automatically generated by tactics. This cuts both
ways for instance between different trends in the libertarian world:
social anarchism and insurrectionary anarchism. Militancy itself isnât
inherently liberating, even decentralized or popular militancy.
Likewise, popular democracy can just as easily produce authoritarian
consequences as liberatory ones. There is no reason to assume that
struggles against authority towards a better social order could be
divorced from the ethical content of such aims. It is easy to forget
that libertarian means can be directed at contradictory ends, like when
people use process and spaces for their own emotional needs against the
collectivity. Without such, we rely upon either a belief in the
inevitability of our victory, or that the means themselves inherently
produce just and good outcomes. Both beliefs are false since what
produces injustice and hierarchy is not simply how they are achieved,
but also why. Part of structures and social relationships are the ideas
and goals of the people within them.
There are lessons we can extract from the exploration of methodological
thought in whatever form. First, the emphasis on the historical nature
of liberatory thought is critical. Often philosophies are thought of as
things that are contemplated, laid out, and brought back to the world to
be debated and in some manner implemented. Perhaps in other less
concrete fields this can seem more plausible, but in the social world it
is patently impossible. The issue involves both time and space.
Concepts, institutions, and actors do not remain the same across time.
People who expend their time, for example, in order to live are not the
same in every age. A slave, peasant, worker, and a subsistence farmer
all expend time for their ability to live, but the social relationships
that define their work change across the ages. This change is both
defined by the society they grow up in, and the time period they exist
in. An emphasis on understanding our ideas through method helps keep us
grounded in analyzing these factors. If we seek liberation, what does
that mean in this environment for these people with this situation and
this history?
Secondly, these accounts highlight the way in which a theory of
practices can guide us towards our aims. It is not merely getting to the
gates of power that matters, but the process and tools by which we got
there. A putsch is different from a popular uprising. The sequences of
events that produces putsches and popular uprisings have historically
meant a great deal in terms of the ability of rulers or would-be rulers
to stem the tide of popular power. And as another example: wining the
freedom of political prisoners through taking action versus it being
granted by the courts acting on a purely legal basis is different.
Process is an inherent part of liberatory politicsânot merely outcomes.
Lastly, the content of our struggles combined with our methodology are
what makes struggles liberatory or not. Liberatory methods are grounded
in the conjuncture of those struggling, are based on liberatory
processes, but they also are directed at liberatory content. This
content must also be fought for, and is not contained within the fight
itself (even if itâs suggested). By honing in on content one can see
that within liberatory methods there is still a struggle for liberation.
That is, the struggle is not merely between liberatory methods and other
methods, but within libertarian struggles there are other tendencies
that lead us away from our goals. Those battles are fought largely
around content.
When past thinkers honed in on method they unearthed strong
relationships among history, aims, and tactics. This is a relevant
insight today. It is clear however that something deeper is necessary as
well. Part of the task of building a liberatory thought and practice is
elaborating a method that incorporates within it a positive content of
liberation, and harvests the material reality of its application at the
same time. Such a method connects the relationship between social forces
and our orientation as agents figuring out what to do in a constantly
changing world. The tools extracted in the course of this inquiry will
give us insights into some of the contradictions seen already: how
hierarchy can emerge from anti-hierarchy, how dispositions and
intentions relate to beliefs and desires, and where motivation fits in.
Emergence is a concept originally developed in the 19^(th) century by
philosophers looking at the problems of life and change. Today,
alterations in our understanding of the living and physical world are
spreading its use throughout the sciences. The social world, being a
formation of living things, also exhibits emergence, and theories of
emergence can help us understand otherwise mysterious social phenomena.
Emergence gives us a toolbox to understand and explain complex
phenomenon through familiar things from daily life like cities, bodies,
and natural phenomena. Because emergence is a feature that is familiar
and surrounds us, it can become a means of comprehending and better
communicating liberatory critiques and proposals.
Early theorists of emergence began writing about the subject in the
19^(th) century. They came from the UK primarily, though some US
thinkers also wrote on the subject.[51] John Stuart Mill was perhaps one
of the first, and with impressive brevity and clarity set out the
problem in his A System of Logic in the chapter âOn the Composition of
Causes.â Mill came to emergence looking at what happens when different
forces combine. In many cases, causes simply add. In other situations,
the addition of different causes produces totally novel qualities that
are not derived from the mere addition of their parts, such as in
chemical reactions in which new substances are formed or when substances
are heated to the point at which they change states of matter. After
exploring various examples in which the combination of chemicals or
forces produces novel materials, reactions, or properties, he concludes:
As a general rule, causes in combination produce exactly the same
effects as when acting singly: but that this rule, though general, is
not universal: that in some instances, at some particular points in the
transition from separate to united action, the laws change, and an
entirely new set of effects are either added to, or take the place of,
those which arise from the separate agency of the same causes: the laws
of these new effects being again susceptible of composition, to an
indefinite extent, like the laws which they superseded.[52]
Another early theorist of emergence was G.H. Lewes, a nineteenth-century
philosopher, who tried to understand the mind and how ultimately
thoughts can arise from the physical matter of the brain. He defines
emergence in terms of the difference between the parts and the whole,
and stresses the difficulty reducing one to the other:
Every resultant is either a sum or a difference of the co-operant
forces; their sum, when their directions are the sameâtheir difference,
when their directions are contrary. Further, every resultant is clearly
traceable in its components, because these are homogeneous and
commensurable. It is otherwise with emergents, when, instead of adding
measurable motion to measurable motion, or things of one kind to other
individuals of their kind, there is a co-operation of things of unlike
kinds. The emergent is unlike its components insofar as these are
incommensurable, and it cannot be reduced to their sum or their
difference.[53]
Note the presence of two framings of emergence here that had already
arisen in the discussion. There are the ways in which our minds are
capable of comprehending the transformation of emergent properties from
their parts, and there is the transformation itself. One way to
understand the newness or novelty of emergent things (or the more than
in the end being more than the sum of its parts) is to look at the thing
itself and another is to look at how we come to know it.
Thereâs a gap between the complex systems as a whole that produce
emergence and our experience of our world as organized, predictable, and
discernible. In this gap, we see different levels produce different
rules and activities. My thoughts are not chemicals, yet chemicals
produce my thoughts. A single thought, such as thinking of a goldfish
floating in a bowl, is created by the events and substance of the brain,
the nerves, and the whole organism of the human being thinking the
thought. Yet reducing that thought simply to relationships between
sodium, potassium, and chloride in neurons, for example, (if that were
possible) does not describe the thought itself. The thought has
different properties than its constitutive components. Thereâs a
transformation that occurs that produces thinking out of material and
chemical components. The atomic level is distinct from that of thoughts.
But where is the gap? Is it in the thinking? In the substance? What are
the new things that emerge out of their parts, yet do not resemble or
work like the parents that gave birth to them?
Within emergentist thought there has been a variety of positions. Some
philosophers have introduced a distinction that classifies different
theories as strong or weak emergence. Strong emergence involves
commitments to fundamentally new things emerging out of unlike things,
something from nothing in a sense. For something to be strongly
emergent, it isnât just that we have trouble understanding how the
emergent thing/property/behavior arose out of its producing elements,
but also that itâs impossible to reduce it to its parts. Perhaps
counterintuitively they still have the power to causally affect lower
levels despite being fundamentally distinct. On the other hand, weak
emergence is described in terms of the models we use to understand
emergent phenomena, and the nature of our ability to follow such
processes.[54] Weak emergence is a question of knowledge or
epistemology, and strong emergence is a question of the nature of
emergent things themselves or metaphysics. Different philosophers of
emergence carve out different terrain based on how they define strong
versus weak emergence and whether they believe in one or both. Some are
committed only to weak or strong; others argue not only for weak
emergence, but also for strong emergence while connecting it to physical
causes that seek to eliminate the alleged mystery.[55]
A different position argues that these two phenomena are not
incompatible. It is possible for fundamentally new things to emerge from
unlike components in a way that is still wholly determined by a chain of
causes. The issue hinges on reducibility. Does the mind reduce to
chemical interactions or not? Ultimately can we follow the path directly
from chemical interactions to thoughts? Weak emergentists argue that,
yes, we could; we just donât have the cognitive ability to trace it
(except perhaps by modeling artificial life that could show us such
paths).[56] Strong emergentists say emphatically no; the mind is
produced by chemicals, but there is a leap when the mind is created that
is objectively new and irreducible.[57] A third position argues that
there are different activities when looking at causes and effects and
when comparing the qualities and order of things at different levels.
Corning, for instance, tries to connect emergence to broader synergistic
effects of combinations of things throughout the world.[58] The synergy
of combinations presents new useful elements not present in the
constituting components, and this is true whether or not there are any
creatures to use or understand them. The novelty is objective (that is,
it exists outside our minds or capability of knowing things). Such
properties are measurable and observable, and yet they are still made up
of and created by more fundamental causes. The third view in one way or
another makes reference to different conceptual modes between causal
explanations (following chains of causes and events) and understanding
novelty at different levels characterized by emergence. It involves both
limits on knowledge based on our minds and fundamentally new physical
properties that emerge.
Wherever one stands in the debate, its sufficient to note the
limitations of our minds to follow such changes and the novelty of the
properties created for the purposes of the arguments here. Because of
the way that emergence happens, there is a division between reality and
our experience of it.
In one sense this is obvious. We canât see the microscopic world with
our eyes. Artificial tools are necessary to experience or even model the
heavens above and the worlds below. While my thoughts evolve from
interactions of chemicals, it isnât necessarily the case that we could
ever trace an individual thought to particular chemical reactions. It is
likely the case that causal chains are sufficiently complex that we
canât follow how it evolves in particular instances.
Thereâs no good way to look at the popular revolt in Hungary in 1956,
for example, and explain exactly how particular individuals physically
and chemically came to the decision to take up arms against the USSR.
But they did so for reasons that are built out of that same physical
stuff on some level. Everything emergent is made of matter. However,
when you put it all together, itâs sufficiently complicated that for any
one instance we canât say exactly how it occurred (except by larger
trends, general rules, models, and so on).
When I raise a glass to my lips, no scientific account yet can trace all
the physical and chemical reactions to produce an account of my hand
rising. More importantly, even with such a list, we wouldnât learn very
much about that act, someone raising an arm. There is therefore a
division between our knowledge and the reality of living systems and
events therein. This creates a limitation in our knowledge and ability
to foresee how particular events may unfold both for upcoming events and
our influence on them. We may never know in any exact sense what causes
a particular protest, nor how our actions will affect the development or
death of social changes.
Likewise, the experience of the taste of salt, the shape of its
formations in the earth, the shine of its flats against the sun, and
other such emergent properties of sodium chloride are all distinct in
some sense from the chemical and physical forces that make it so. There
are the forces themselves and then the qualities of those forces in the
world. Physical things correspond to these forces and qualities, and
living things as well. Reactions occur to the uses things are put to, to
their phenomenal experience, and to their role within the actions of
living organisms. There is a practical level of explanation here that is
distinct from lower ones, and is not identical to how we explain it. The
functioning at one level is different from that at another. Salt in my
body is on another plane in some way from the electrons and neutrons
that make it up.[59]
Emergence isnât magic; something does not come from nothing. Nor is it
random or disorganized. Emergence is systematic. Certain properties of
systems produce emergent things in discreet processes. The science of
emergence is to understand and model the functioning of such systems,
and explain the processes and rules governing emergence. Any deeper
understanding of the way that things emerge takes us into the territory
of complexityâsystems that exhibit very unique properties in the natural
world.
Action is at the center of social thought, particularly when viewed
through an ethical or political lens. We approach the world as beings
that feel, perceive, weigh, decide, and chose courses of action.
Likewise, things beyond our choosing act upon us. Society is built from
a multiplicity of interwoven forces, events, causes, and responses.
Faced with this, we choose how to act while limited by our objective
situation. In a messy world with limited possibilities, questions about
how to proceed ethically and bring about the best outcomes perpetually
arise.
Within the political realm, a number of cases are troubling. For
instance, many movements for human liberation contribute to catastrophic
disasters and, worse, end up setting back freedom and wellbeing for
decades. As discussed in the preceding chapter, struggles against
hierarchy can produce new hierarchies; libertarian methods can produce
authoritarian structures. Many of the 20^(th) centuryâs revolutions (at
certain points in their trajectories) seem to have had this character.
Whole sections of the socialist movement helped mobilize Europe for the
First World War and popular revolts contributed to creating the
repressive world of the official Marxist-Leninist countries (Russia,
China, Vietnam, Cuba, and so on) that strangled their peoples for nearly
a century (and a few still continue to do so today). Oppressive
hierarchies and injustices repeatedly emerge from otherwise liberatory
and non-hierarchical efforts.
Indeed, many dramatic political events appear to have come out of
nowhere, even when we know they do not. Riots, revolutions, crises, and
coups are clearly the product of countless actions of individuals. But
when they occur, they often donât seem that way. The singularity of
historical events, their apparent uniqueness, can make the actions of
individuals and groups appear strange and almost magical. This is more
acute with dramatic events, but equally present in our daily lives and
social existence. From the perspectives of people committed to changing
society, such quandaries are even more troubling. Actions have force;
they change things. Yet it is nearly impossible to trace the force of
those acts in practice. History rolls along either in spite of our
actions or disproportionately explodes because of them.
It is here that the structure of the most fundamental political disputes
gets laid. There is a gulf between behavior on a gross social level
(with associated forces, structures, powers, and entities) and the
actions of agents within those systems. Our experiences and ideas about
how our actions affect the world seem to depart from how political
events often unfold and respond to our actions. Strangely, political
thought has often been only glancing, or worse silent, on these issues.
Thereâs a gap that needs to be fleshed out. The world of agents is
connected physically and conceptually to the world of social forces. Yet
how? Where do the reasoning, problems, and interventions of people come
into contact and separate from, or where are they even born within those
large scale social forces that are so evident in our lives? Such a gap
lies beneath political theory in its philosophical and metatheoretical
groundingsâthe structures upon which all of our social thinking rests.
This problem, connecting the worlds of agency and emergent social
forces, is a political question because it speaks to the attempts of
individuals and groups to find ways to alter the course of history
through their actions. Looking at it another way, it is simply to
explore how our actions can positively affect efforts towards a
liberatory society given the immense and unpredictable powers that seem
beyond our grasp and defy prediction.
How does a riot happen? Or how did the financial crisis which began at
the end of the first decade of the millennium come to be? What reality
is there behind the mythology of the Great Men of history? Did a small
handful of armed guerrillas in the mountains really overtake Cuba? Did
Hitler conquer Germany? How was Russia brought under the tyranny of the
Stalinist bureaucracy? Hierarchy emerging from non-hierarchy, apparently
spontaneous events, disproportionate influences of actions on the course
of history, the impossibly complex ping-ponging of individualsâ actions
in creating riots and revolts, and power which takes on a life of its
own, these phenomena need explanations and interventions. If we were
able to connect societal functioning to the world of actors
systematically, a foundation could be constructed to approach these
problems. In our new century such issues have become too present to not
take up in light of the events of Egypt, Tunisia, Latin America, and
Occupy, the disruptions in China and India, or even worker unrest in the
United States. Each month the political landscape shifts, revealing
slowly a changing world and unfamiliar environment for those who seek
the transformation of society.
This series of problems is connected by key characteristics and
relationships. The events are more than the sum of their parts. New
things appear that do not share the traits of the actions, parts, and
structures that produced them. It is this coming out from that will take
up the course of this work and lead us through biology, power, agency,
and cognition. This is the problem of emergence.
Emergence is a product of systems that exhibit forms of complexity. In
fact, one definition of complex systems is that they are systems in
which agents or elements interact in a way that produces emergence.
Complexity itself, and the systems that exhibit it, would require a
whole book for full exploration. Instead, we will look at what some of
the notable features of complex systems are, and specifically those that
contribute to our understanding of agency and events in the political
world of societies. Such systems exist in a range of domains: raw
physical forces, astronomy, biology, and psychological, chemical, and
social systems. We find emergent behavior in the interaction of forces
within subatomic particles, large scale interactions of planetary
systems and galaxies; we also find emergent forces within weather like
hurricanes, geologic phenomena like earthquakes, and so on. Non-living
non-rational systems can produce emergent forces as real as the fury of
a tornado, and out of chaos produce reliable orderly large-scale
emergent events.
If we look ahead to the exploration of social emergence, the treatment
of these non-living systems will be limited. Though they are no less
examples of emergence and there is a great deal to learn from there, the
primary task will be understanding the living systems that produce
emergence. This is because living systems are most closely linked to
social systems to the point that one could reasonably ask whether a
distinction between living and social systems is even worthwhile. More
importantly as politics agents, we have a setting off point within the
living world. Our perspective and framework derive from such systems,
and it is the characteristics of those systems that give us the tools to
gain deeper insights into the politics of emergence.
We inhabit a living biological world. Our bodies, environment, social
world, and cities all exist and evolve either as or because of living
organisms. Thereâs something special about the way living things work.
Living organisms and systems change and develop new capabilities over
time (evolution and adaptation). Through the march of time, life takes
on new properties to survive and adapt to its environment. Our planet
has some amazing examples of this like bacteria that developed to live
within volcanoes or that survive within nuclear waste, or even the
coconut palm, which developed the ability to travel across the seas with
its seeds to find new shores to grow upon. Living things and systems are
able to respond to and create new situations based on their environment
and neighboring life. Trees shed leaves to survive the winter; people
gain immunity to diseases through exposure; and streams of traffic keep
moving around accidents that block their course.
Most importantly, living things are emergent. New properties emerge out
of the organization of their parts (organs, cells, and units). In a
basic sense, a living adapting organism is the most obvious example of
emergence. Out of countless chemical/physical events and reactions, a
more highly organized entity emergesâlife. Life constructs larger
structures though; organisms join together; they struggle, co-evolve,
form ecosystems, make war, and cooperate. Life selforganizes forests,
cities, and our whole planet. Living organisms are systems, but they
also build larger scale systems through their actions. The world itself
as we experience it is an emergent product of the interaction of
countless living organisms bound together in vast networks of systems.
The connection between biology and emergence traces back to at least to
Darwin, who proposed a process of natural selection in which traits were
(somehow) promoted or inhibited across time, which led to adaptations to
increase survival or the flourishing of a species. Itâs easy to
misunderstand how this works in practice. Darwin did not mean to imply
that this principle applied to individuals per se. Given the complexity
of biological systems, many living things may happen to survive while
others more adapted to survival can die. Darwin wrote:
It may be well here to remark that with all beings there must be much
fortuitous destruction, which can have little or no influence on the
course of natural selection. For instance, a vast number of eggs or
seeds are annually devoured, and these could be modified through natural
selection only if they varied in some manner which protected them from
their enemies. Yet many of these eggs or seeds would perhaps, if not
destroyed, have yielded individuals better adapted to their conditions
of life than any of those which happened to survive. So again a vast
number of mature animals and plants, whether or not they be the best
adapted to their conditions, must be annually destroyed by accidental
causes, which would not be in the least degree mitigated by certain
changes of structure or constitution which would in other ways be
beneficial to the species.[60]
It is only when we look at broader statistical trends that the evolution
of the species can be said to take place.[61] Within the lives of
particular individuals, a number of other factors (being in the right
time or the right place for instance) may end up determining their
personal circumstances of survival, health, and proliferation. At a
higher level of biologic organization and over time, patterns of
emergent biological orders evolve.
To understand a living systems approach to anything social (let alone
struggles and movements), we must first understand the nature and
functioning of such systems. First, those things are living or have
life, and second they exist in systems. A definition of life itself is a
well-worn philosophical battleground. Whatever it is that makes
something alive versus inanimate, living things are more than a list of
their chemical facts. They are higher-level organizations of chemical
components that exhibit all the things we know living things to do.[62]
Defining a system is equally treacherous and would represent another
detour from our road. Roughly, living systems are organized; they have
things (living and non-living) in interconnected relationships; and they
have properties and behavior specific to their arrangement. Apart from
the philosophical and scientific jargon, living systems are organized
groupings of a particular kind. In the following discussion, weâll get a
sense of the types of things that living systems do, and in the process
better understand life and systems.
One of the hallmarks of our experience as humans is that our world is
ordered, organized into levels. This is to say that biological and
social reality isnât flat like a plate where everything is laid out next
to each other. Instead there are worlds of atoms, worlds of chemicals,
worlds of cells, creatures, eco-systems, and galaxies. There is the
level of the creatures and plants in an area, and then the level of the
forest itself. There is our settlement, and then the mountain range we
live in. The body has organs. Within organs are cells, organelles,
enzymes, chemicals, and so on. Society has individuals, groups,
formations, structures, etc. As time rolls on, the levels change and
affect one another; new levels emerge and others crumble. The world of
living systems is the world of organisms, bodies, minds, ecosystems,
bioregions, and societies.
What happens at different levels is organized. For example, DNA is the
hallmark of life as we know it. Biologists now have sophisticated
knowledge of how DNA is transcribed and replicated, and how it produces
proteins within the cells that make most of the behavior of living
organisms possible. When we talk about cells, we can talk about the
order of DNA, proteins, membranes, and so on. There are rules of how DNA
functions in cells, how cells work, the role of the specific enzymes or
proteins, and so on. These rules and behaviors are consistent,
regulated, and predictable. But these are not identical universal rules
that apply willy-nilly everywhere at all levels and at any time. Though
my arm runs on the power of DNA, we have different concepts and order
for my arm than for one cell in my arm. We could look at DNA forever,
but it would not tell you about why dancers move the way they do. Dance
is made possible by the activity of DNA, yet DNAâs organization and that
of dancing are different. The rules in each domain are distinct.
Higher levels are generated by lower levels, and yet the path is not
evident. This is because the individual pieces are hard to separate, and
because of the complexity of interactions among the pieces. How do all
the cells in the arm of a dancer add up to a graceful or clumsy
maneuver? Feedback is an integral concept to understanding living
systems. Things donât happen in isolation in bodies, ecosystems,
societies, or worlds. They occur in the context of infinite other acting
entities that are all responding to the changes around them.
For example, for every chemical reaction in each individual cell, nearly
every other cell responds in one way or another through hormones,
intercellular signaling, consumption and generation of energy, and so
on. Take oxygen. Cells use oxygen in their basic functioning. Cells use
up oxygen in making energy, and produce carbon dioxide as a byproduct.
Oxygen is breathed in; carbon dioxide is breathed out. Oxygen and carbon
dioxide can build up in the bloodstream of animals in various
proportions. As each cell is consuming and producing oxygen and carbon
dioxide, there is a balance in the blood. Too much carbon dioxide in the
blood causes a chain of reactions telling the cells to slow down, use
less oxygen, and produce less carbon dioxide. With each change in
direction, every other cell in the body is affected in one way or
another, though obviously some more than others. The actions of each
cell resonates with all others in essence. It is like a web in which
pulling one strand pulls on every other strand.
For even the simplest event like lifting a can with my hand, the sheer
number of chemical reactions and atomic movements, as well as all the
physical forces involved, are overwhelming. Imagine that I could name
every chemical and every event in all the cells of my arm (which would
be in effect infeasible because of the sheer number of cells, reactions,
complexity, and so on). It would be impossible in practice to trace
exactly how my arm moved. A full explanation of a single movement would
involve all the reactions and occurrences in cells and components that
play a role. Yet, if all cells are being inherently affected by each
other, responding to each other, and sending signals to one another,
then in every event, such as a motion, countless cells and causes would
be involved. Looking to the oxygen example, we see that in living
systems causes are tied together. Individual units are inherently bound
up to the goings on of all the other units linked to them in systems.
All their actions are in feedback with one another. The contribution of
individuals must be described in relation to others because all causes
are inherently linked. They refer to one another to the point that their
actions are mutually referential.
Think about a crowd in a frenzy, perhaps if thereâs a fire in a
building. If we want to trace the paths of all individuals trying to
escape, we can simply look at how they move (their intentions, paths,
abilities, and so on). As each person moves (causes motion), every other
person in the crowd reacts to a degree and moves as well, though to
greater or lesser degrees based on their distances to one and another,
the chairs and exits in their way, and so on). That movement influences
everyone else around: if someone turns in front of me my path is blocked
and I move right, thereby altering the course of those behind and to the
right of me, and so on. This is feedbackâthe echoing, amplification, and
mutual resonance of causes in a complex system. One special hallmark of
living systems then is that the behavior of any individual or component
cannot easily be understood to act without looking to a greater system
of causes. Though this seems intuitive in a sense, it goes against our
experience of the world. As individuals in crowds, we often do not
perceive our own path as inherently intertwined with that of the crowd
as a system. We perceive it as arising from our will, and perhaps feel
frustrated by people who stand in our way.
Looking at the complex web of causes behind my arm moving raises
additional problems. What causes are my own causes that make my arm
move? Is it merely my will or my muscles, or does it include the gases
and forces that my arm moves through, or the compounds that fuel its
movement? We cannot only look at people to understand their actions, but
rather we also need to see the complete environment in which actions
take place. In the world of individuals and causes, separating the agent
out is, in practice, difficult. This is because biological entities are
historical, and have both an individual developmental story and a
collective one connected to countless other life forms.[63]
That history is not monodirectional. The story of each living thing is
constantly itself contributing to the vast changes swirling around us at
all time, and being redefined by all the others it is in constant
connection with, and which indeed make up its being despite being in
some sense separate. There are all the living organisms inside me, on my
skin, and in the air, the energy around me, the forces of physics, the
energy my body creates and absorbs, and so on. Bacteria live on my skin,
in my gut, and throughout my body. Without them I could not survive,
even while we normally would not include them as a part of ourselves.
When the food I eat is digested and sustains meâwe tend to think that we
do it. What about the myriad of organisms involved? Is the bacteria part
of me? Is it separate? In what sense is the digestion mine? Two things
are true: there is something that is me that is digesting, and there is
a whole world of causes and effects apart from me occurring. In living
systems those relationships are nearly impossible to pull apart.
Take the example of mitochondria, the energy factory of cells.
Mitochondria exist within cells and help them do what they need to do.
Mitochondria have distinct DNA from the rest of your cells (i.e. nuclear
DNA, what most people mean by saying DNA). The striking resemblance of
mitochondria (in terms of their DNA and organization) to bacteria led
scientists to hypothesize that they are an adaptation of internalized
bacteria (to simplify things) that was beneficial along the way. At some
stage in evolution, bacteria likely made it inside the cell and
co-evolved to play a functional role within the cell. We now consider
mitochondria to be a part of us, a component of our cells.
The divisions between our environment, things alongside us, things in
cohabitation with us, and parts of us are much blurrier than we believe.
Rather than discovering clear lines of what is internal versus external,
part of us versus environmental, in reality we are finding changing and
adapting interactions between individual components and environment. The
degree of interaction is so vast and complex that distinguishing among
the contributions of individual components and their effects, as well as
borders between elements that are neither fixed nor easily identifiable,
becomes for practical purposes impossible. That is, not only does
complexity make it difficult to trace the path of causation between
lower and higher levels in living systems (like our bodies), but also
the divisions between the components themselves are often unclear.
This state of feedback is not only characterized by mutual influences,
but also by dramatic causes. Normally, when we combine things, you can
say that we add them. Simplifying for the purpose of argument, if I use
5 lbs. of strength, I could push a 1-lb. object a given distance. If I
use 10 lbs. of strength, I could push the same object double the
distance. The relationship between the increase of force I use produces
a proportional increase in effect; the distance is increased by the same
measure. In emergence, it doesnât work like that.[64]
A popular metaphor for this is a butterfly flapping its wings in South
America, causing a tsunami in Japan. The butterflyâs wings do this
because they help initiate a series of events that have much greater
power than itself. The example of the butterfly is actually a distortion
because it abstracts the way in which the butterfly is merely a single
link in a chain. The butterfly flaps its wings and flies upon the winds
caused by temperatures, lakes, oceans, and currents. Other wings,
machinery, factories, mountains, and so on shape the air that moves the
butterfly. In turn the butterfly has an effect upon the air it flies
upon. The air is systematically connected to waters, such as seas, which
respond to temperature, force, and shifts in the airs above. Butterflies
flying cannot be extracted from all the forces of nature, living things,
and interactions of the systems they exist in. In this way then in
theory the flapping of the butterflyâs wings could initiate a series of
events that cause a tsunami.
Taking another example, think of someone applying force on a bicycle.
Weather is a complex system that can produce unpredictable events like
large gusts. In the broader system including the environment and all the
forces moving a cyclist, a random rapid gust can make the cyclistâs
application of force to the pedals have a disproportionate effect by
changing the actionâs relationship to motion through air. This is an
extreme example, but it illustrates the ways in which in such systems
causes can be amplified dramatically, and even take on new
characteristics in light of the strength of response.
Like the disproportionate power of the butterflyâs wings flapping,
complex (living) systems exhibit what can be called nonlinear causation.
Itâs nonlinear because what happens isnât a straight line of actions
with equal and proportional response like dominos falling in a row, but
instead even small causes like butterfly wings can have disproportionate
power. Social disruptions are the perfect example of this, as simple
events can set off a rapid and dramatic chain of events. For example, in
2011 when Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor in Tunisia, set himself on
fire, it contributed to subsequent protests in ways that went well
beyond the act itself. The symbol of the vendorâs suffering, his
suicide, mobilized other forces in a disproportionate way, spreading the
fires of resistance well beyond the single act of defiance. In a system
in which parts are systemically interrelated, causes donât occur in
isolation, but instead ricochet and amplify each other. This isnât to
say that the suicide caused the protests throughout Tunisia. Instead,
its effect was disproportionate because of its occurrence within a
complex system that overall produced an emergent event, the ruptures of
2011. The focus of media on the event itself in some ways shows how
complex systems work since it is the salience of the act of protest that
is so important to us and not the conditions that allowed the act to
have whatever resonance it may have had.
Both feedback and nonlinear causation make single acts difficult to
trace. In a hurricane it would be hard to tell what caused any
individual object flying through the air to take flight. If I had not
pushed the weight, would it have spontaneously taken to flight anyway?
What interactions with other flying objects, currents, reflection of
winds off buildings, and so on are relevant? This disconnect occurs
between the different levels of organization. We canât follow the chain
from chemicals to motion, or from individuals to a riot. It requires a
different level of explanation, which our minds at least cannot trace
from lists of chemical facts. There is a shift from one level of
explanation to the other that escapes our way of thinking. The
complexity and interconnectedness of causes makes analyzing them
difficult in such systems.
These systems then have forms of interconnectedness in which the pieces
are mutually defined, produce effects in a broad system of interrelated
causes, and do so in ways that make them challenging to parse for our
minds. Within this complex web of relationships there are organized
levels like we discussed. There are chemicals, cellular components,
cells, organs, and bodies. Importantly, the levels donât merely differ
by scale. Cells donât look like bodies and bodies donât look like cells
(except when you go back down to the level of cells). At different
levels, new elements emerge. Emergence is made possible by the different
levels of organization by complex systems. Take a very simple example,
salt. When sodium and chlorine combine, they create a familiar compound:
salt. Salt has properties that neither sodium nor chlorine hasâthe
tastes of salt, its formation of crystals, and so on. Sodium is a
silvery-white very reactive explosive metal. Chlorine is a pale yellow
gas. Salt is a stable, innocuous compound unlike its dangerous parents,
sodium and chloride.
The new properties of salt are caused by the atomic properties of its
components (sodium and chlorine). Yet the properties of the new thing
are not described by just putting them together. The effect, salt, is
more than the sum of its parts. Whatever way we look at it, the metallic
and gaseous properties of sodium and chlorine donât add up to salty
properties. However the combination occurs, it ends up producing
something fundamentally different. Thus with emergence there are new
things that emerge from lower levels, and the properties that emerge are
more than simply the sum of the properties of their lower level
components.[65]
Emergence, then, is a theory of organization and existence across time.
Chemicals interacting over time create compounds. Cells replicating and
dividing grow until a baby is created (with a lot of work along the
way). Out of the chaos of heat and pressure over a time period, a highly
ordered diamond forms from carbon. Living systems are merely a more
particular case of these, as are social systems within living systems.
Representative government evolves alongside emergent forces of wealth
and power that interact to try and wrest more and more control over the
forces of the State from other powers and the citizenry. In complex
adaptive systems, there are ordered or organized interrelationships
among components in the whole that act together to produce new events,
structures, or properties.
This world is not simply chaos, however. Systemic order also exists. New
things do not emerge without organization. New things emerging and
causing transformations in massively complex chains may seem mysterious.
This is actually counterintuitive since it doesnât feel that way. We
walk on the ground and eat food regularly because of the stability of
our world, not because of its chaos. We can rely upon the sun rising,
rivers flowing to the seas, and people behaving largely in a regular
fashion. Every day the efforts of billions of people deliver food,
medicine, energy, and goods to people all over the world with remarkable
regularity. The order itself is emergent, the product of countless
interactions of pieces in a systemic whole.
Living systems in general (though not only living systems) are
selforganizing. Self-organization means that they are able to respond as
a system with ordered internal behavior. Consider body temperature in
mammals. The environmental temperature fluctuates, but the
self-organizing system of the mammalian body maintains a stable body
temperature throughout. The body emergently produces consistency through
the interaction of all the heat-bearing and heat-shedding activities of
the cells, ingestion of compounds, sweating, cool/heat-seeking behavior,
and so on. Living systems then can respond in an ordered fashion to
neighboring causes (such as when our bodies respond to infections), and
over time tend to evolve. On a short timescale, they adapt. As we
reproduce, as all living systems do, the offspring respond to their
environment and traits are promoted or inhibited in an ongoing cycle of
reproduction over time. On a longer timescale, they evolve. Species
develop abilities that allow them to thrive in their environment and
pass on mutations to their offspring.
Within the organization of these systems, there are varying degrees of
stability. Just as laws operate at different levels (like DNA behaving
predictably), stability too emerges in systems. Ecosystems are a vivid
example of this. Out of the chaos of the innumerable parts of the
forest, a relatively stable order emerges in which all the creatures and
plants are connected and evolve alongside one another. A forest often
can be a forest for thousands of years without gross disruptions,
absorbing damage from even landslides, volcanoes, or hurricanes.
Still, it would be a mistake to see equilibrium as timeless because our
world is alive; equilibriums occur, grow, change, and also break down;
mass extinctions occur; forests die; seas grow and retreat; asteroids
destroy regions; new forms of life evolve that colonize novel areas. In
society, regimes fall; empires last a thousand years before collapsing;
slavery is destroyed and resurrected; revolutions lay waste to
everything people thought about governments and economies. Living
systems grow, stabilize, die, and give birth to new offspring,
ecosystems, and orders.
A body when ill begins to lose its order. If bacteria can spread
throughout the body, the body loses its ability to self-regulate,
disease may set in, and the results are potentially fatal. Chemicals run
wild opening veins, temperatures increase, organs become damaged through
loss of blood, and toxins from bacteria corrode living tissue. These
systems then have equilibrium, which can vary. When stability or
equilibrium decreases, disorder increases and space emerges for new
orders to reproduce and spread.
The social world is a world of emergence. Two people exchanging crops
from their back yards exhibit a social relationship of exchange. Similar
exchanges on a global scale create emergent forces of markets whose
effects are grossly distinct from simple one-to-one exchanges of
surpluses amongst neighbors. Individuals owning property create forces
within society of vested interests that create laws, attack other
forces, anticipate challengers, and act nearly as organisms within a
field of other emergent organisms. The interactions of individuals
create such forces, but the forces themselves exhibit behavior distinct
from individuals.
Emergence then is a potential tool for understanding how societies and
social organizations develop, unfold, and change. In a cell, all the
enzymes, DNA, RNA, organelles, and so on systematically interact to make
things happen. You canât understand anything that happens in a cell
except in reference to the totality of causes, or at least a rather
complicated chain of chemicals and structures. Society is the same.
Letâs take a series of examples.
Earlier we discussed the path of people fleeing a fire. Traffic is a
ready phenomenon that shows emergence in societies. From pedestrian
traffic to the great flows of the worldâs cities, the movement of people
within complex adaptive transit systems exhibit the behavior of living
systems. Traffic jams can be disproportionately caused by small actions
by one or two individuals, such as in a crash. Slow traffic causes large
shifts in the system, rerouting many people, changing the behavior of
drivers, and unfurling countless events in the lives of those traveling
and awaiting those traveling across cities.
Another obvious case is the growth and change of cities themselves. Far
from growing linearly bit-by-bit, cities evolve in an emergent fashion.
Urban decay of neighborhoods or the boom of fashionable areas emerge out
of innumerable changes happening in the homes, businesses, and streets
of their areas. Those changes themselves are intimately connected to
larger shifts in society, which are affected by the evolution of the
neighborhoods and their residents. Neighborhoods can expand and decay
explosively, though gradual change is more common.
People act and develop in ways that arenât simply the sum of
perspectives or actions of the individuals involved. A common example of
this is mob mentality, when crowds behave differently from how people
normally would on their own in some sense. When combined into social
groups, individuals become generators of emergent powers and behaviors
that do not directly reflect their routine mental states or even
actions. A mob is simply a different kind of entity than the people who
are swept up into it, though obviously the people create the mob. The
law reflects these different perspectives as well. There are different
crimes and sentences for rioting, the acts of property destruction or
violence associated with it, and inciting to riot. This is part of an
attempt to segregate components of the emergent force that comes into
motion, its causes, and manners of participation.
All of human life in societies exhibit emergence. The most mundane facts
and changes can be viewed in a new light once we grasp the influence of
living systems and their emergence within our lives. Though this is
clear with the mundane, itâs more profound when we look at the political
world. Social organizations of power, and events contesting that power,
also lie within the realm of emergence.
Though often people fixate on the power of the media, we see examples of
emergent phenomena with governments, elections, and âpopular support.â
Consider the evolution of the victor in elections. The end results of
votes can differ from opinion polling, visible activity in the streets,
and even established methods of advertising, funding, and hype. This
isnât only because governments and capitalists attempt to socially
engineer legitimacy and support, but also because of the ping-ponging of
peopleâs views, actions, and social groups. Whether or not people think
a candidate is winning or not influences their likelihood to show their
support and mobilize. The sense of a candidateâs likely victory is
complexly produced, not from a single organ like the media, but rather
from a multiplicity of factors throughout society. This is infamously
fickle, including factors such as weather on voting day, positioning
within the ballot, physical appearances, and so on.
Popular opinion has an emergent character that can resist even massive
attempts to socially engineer the publicâs thinking. Politicians have
repeatedly attacked social security and utilized corporate media to try
to assault the vast popularity for the program. Despite such attempts,
popular opinion continues to strongly support maintaining and even
expanding social security, and that support alone is sufficient to stave
off further attacks. This is true even without any major public force
protecting or advocating for social security (perhaps until recently).
Institutional liberal organizations in the past were content to accept
market reforms alongside a trimmed-down social safety net, something
that remains unpopular, leaving public opinion without an advocate.[66]
It is the emergent force of popular will here that poses a threat to
established power, and that will is created not only through the organs
of ruling powers (media, schools, think-tanks, organizations, and so
on), but also through the complex interaction of individuals throughout
society. In this case, power was unable to impose its will on a system
that continues to reproduce emergent counter-powers against austerity of
that kind.
Today social scientists have begun exploring the impact of emergence in
their fields.[67] Complex systems and emergence present narratives of
social structure and behavior that link individual psychology and
biology, while contributing explanations of how social structure
functions in line with more basic natural phenomena. Viewing society and
social structures through the prism of living systems and emergence also
raises questions for those who seek social liberation. These concepts
reflect the divisions in both our experience of the world (as thinking
agents trying to respond from our own perspective to others and forces
greater than ourselves) and the emergent orders that govern everything
that are beyond any of us. If things like states, movements,
institutions, rights, freedoms, work, and slavery are emergent, then
what questions does it raise about how things came to be the way they
are? What other ways of being are possible?
Most importantly, how could we change what shouldnât be?
Emergence is not only a tool of knowledge, but also one of action. The
specific properties of living systems have implications suggestive of
directions for struggle and show the limits of others. An understanding
of social systems and emergence can unify seemingly disparate social
categories. It gives us a foundation for critical thought and practice
when applied to the social world.
Yet despite years of work by scientists and philosophers, the
application of this work to a critical politics is rare. Bringing an
emergence perspective to social struggles is work that must be carried
out in the coming years. The connection of large-scale political
questions like the nature of the State, capitalism, and hierarchical
oppression are clear examples of places where emergence can inform our
understanding and potentially transform our practices. What is the
essence of the State? How does it reproduce itself? How can the State be
overcome?
We have a general framework for understanding emergence and a direction
to approaching social problems. The task of working through the specific
problems is up to those of us active in taking up emergence. Addressing
things like the State, capitalism, patriarchy, and so on is beyond the
scope of this text and in some ways would distract from laying out
emergence as a means to take a variety of positions on those
issuesâemergence as a metapolitical tool.
Interestingly, anarchist thought had from its outset deep emergentist
currents within. This isnât to say that other theories were not present;
some adopted dialectical or other alternatives of their day, but
anarchism was unique amongst modern social movements for developing
independent ideas about emergence in an environment in which such ideas
were both uncommon and largely unexplored. Explicit discussion of
emergence in the anarchist literature is uncommon, but the general
approach is clear enough if you look throughout the traditionâsomething
that should be celebrated and highlighted.
Two of the heavyweights of libertarian thought came to anarchism in part
due to their scientific research. Peter Kropotkin became an anarchist
partly due to his work as an evolutionary biologist. He is widely
recognized for his foundational work on the role of cooperation and
mutual aid in evolution.[68] Kropotkinâs ideas about emergence are
clearest in his biological writings and within his political work in
which he speaks of nature and evolution. There is a clear connection
between those ideas and his political proposals, but it is one that has
not been made explicit frequently. Graham Purchase did so and
demonstrates Kropotkinâs anticipation of emergence and complexity theory
in his PhD thesis about Kropotkinâs thought.[69]
Elisée Reclus, a contemporary of Kropotkin, veteran of the Paris
Commune, and militant anarchist, is famed as one of the founders of
modern geography. Reclus describes in his writings on the natural world
how order emerges from complex interaction between innumerable elements,
and ties this to how order can emerge from the base up in anarchist
society and the struggle against the State and capitalism. In his
chapter, âThe Distribution of Human Population,â from Man and the Earth,
he presents a view of human societies as coevolving with their
environment and producing emergent organisms out of their activity and
adaptation. His concept of geography, surely one of the earliest such
approaches in modern European traditions, is on display when he argues
that â(e)very new city immediately constitutes, by its configuration of
dwellings, a collective organism. Each cell seeks to develop in perfect
health, as is necessary for the health of the whole. History
demonstrates that sickness is no respecter of persons; the palace is in
danger when the plague rages through the slums.ââ[70] His geography is
embedded with a picture of human (and ecological) life viewed through
the prism of living systems (microcosms) that interact to form emergent
structures with their own separate properties.
The earliest groupings are microcosmic, and then they become more and
more extended and complex over time, to the degree that an ideal arises
and becomes more difficult to achieve. Each of these small societies
constitutes by nature an independent and self-sufficient organism.
However, none of them are completely closed, except for those that are
isolated on islands, peninsulas, or in mountain cirques whose access has
been cut off. As groups of men encounter one and another, direct and
indirect relations arise. In this way, following internal changes and
external events, each swarm ends its particular, individual evolution
and joins willingly or forcibly with another body politic so that both
are integrated into a superior organization with a new course of life
and of progress before it.[71]
It was not only the scientists amongst the anarchists who came to
emergence. Pierre Proudhon, the French socialist and member of the First
International Workingmenâs Association, was an important early thinker
of the anarchist movement. He influenced key figures, such as Bakunin,
Kropotkin, and Reclus, though he held important differences with the
collectivist and communist forms of anarchism that developed thereafter
by preferring cooperatives and a peopleâs bank in what he called
mutualism. Laying out his theory of power, Proudhon argued that there
are specifically collective forms of power that are not reducible to
individuals who constitute them.
It is not only individuals that are endowed with force; collectivities
also have theirs. To speak here only of human collectivities, let us
suppose that the individuals, in such numbers as one might wish, in
whatever manner and to whatever end, group their forces: the resultant
of these agglomerated forces, which must not be confused with their sum,
constitutes the force or power of the group⊠Collective force being a
fact as positive as individual force, the first perfectly distinct from
the second, collective beings are as much realities as individual
ones.[72]
This argument may seem out of place or extraneous except that Proudhon
then immediately uses the concept of emergent powers to construct his
critique of the State, a topic we will return to. Likewise, he
understood that the issue of our knowledge of emergence was a key factor
in disguising the functioning of social systems. âSocial power,
inaccessible to the senses in spite of its reality, seemed to the first
men an emanation of the divine Being, for this reason the worthy object
of their religion⊠Even today, the economists have barely identified the
collective force.â[73] Nor did he believe that emergence was produced in
a unidirectional manner of individuals creating higher-level
organization, as can be seen when he argued that â(t)hrough the grouping
of individual forces, and through the relation of the groups, the whole
nation forms one body: it is a real being, of a higher order, whose
movement implicates the existence and fortune of everyone. The
individual is immersed in society; he emerges from this great power,
from which he would separate only to fall into nothingness.â[74] Here
the individual is seen both as a product of society and an element
producing the society shaping her at the same time. Proudhon clearly
elaborates the novel aspects of emergent social forms, and connects them
to the individual with all the political implications of the view at the
center of his thinking around the State and even his economic ideas.
Itâs safe to say that this aspect of his contribution is not well
recognized, and though his ideas on emergence are not fully developed,
he is one of the few thinkers both to utilize that framework and to
connect it to his critique of capitalism and the potential of liberatory
society.
Anarchist thinking around emergence was not limited to describing
nature, but rather it was also integral to an understanding of power and
the capacity of groups for their own liberation. Rudolph Rocker, the
German union organizer and theorist of anarcho-syndicalism, elaborates
an emergence approach to how radicals attempt to sort out history and
courses of action. Criticizing the Marxian view of history as determined
purely by economic forces, he wrote:
There is scarcely an historical event to whose shaping economic causes
have not contributed, but economic forces are not the only motive powers
which have set everything else in motion. All social phenomena are the
result of a series of various causes, in most cases so inwardly related
that it is quite impossible clearly to separate one from the other. We
are always dealing with the interplay of various causes which, as a
rule, can be clearly recognized but cannot be calculated according to
scientific methods.[75]
More recently, Graham Purchase developed a unique ecological critique
based on complexity and chaos theory. He posits a natural order that is
stifled when the emergent order of society is constrained through
centralized of dominating minorities. Starting in the 1980s, he
connected the potential for climate crisis to capitalism and the State
via emergent disequilibriums that might problematize human
societies.[76] One could object to the narrative of naturalness as being
arbitrarily defined. Where would the line be drawn exactly in terms of
nature on different forms of social organization? Still, exchanging
naturalness for values is an obvious way to see the utility of
Purchaseâs writings. There are better and worse ways to organize
societies based on the goals the author argues for, such as ecological
health, solidarity, and human flourishing; and those can be connected to
an understanding of the natural phenomena of emergence that could either
encourage or inhibit achieving those goals.
Though it would be a longer argument this is at least part of what is
going on with Murray Bookchinâs social ecology.[77] Part of the break
from Marxism by Bookchin was a shift towards the more methodologically
open process Rocker speaks of and coming to view struggles and the new
society in terms of emergent relationships between people and their
environment. Like Purchase, Bookchin uses ideas about living systems and
complexity in both his critiques and proposals, without necessarily
elaborating a theory of emergence.
There are three aspects to the role of (perhaps proto-) emergence
theories within anarchism: an understanding of the natural world as
exhibiting emergence out of complex systems, using that functioning to
demonstrate weaknesses in the dominant power system, and proposals for
social change and future society drawn from emergence. In Reclus and
Kropotkin, these are implicit threads that run throughout their thought.
Proudhon directly addresses the phenomenon and uses it to critique the
State and capitalism. Purchase raises the potentials of emergence for
anarchist thought, including ecology and our relationship with the
natural world, though without elaborating a theory of emergence or
agency. These developments are particularly remarkable given that the
general thrust of European thinking from the 1600s until the present can
be classified essentially as reductionism.[78] Such science was
reductive in so far as scientists and thinkers broke up their subjects
of study into analyzable parts and sought to reconstruct them piece by
piece. This method led to the emergence of science as we know it, and
only hundreds of years later did the limitations of such approaches
become clear.
More recently some radical thinkers have taken up emergence directly and
drawn out lessons. Immanuel Wallerstein, Dante Arrighi, and other World
Systems theorists should be mentioned. Wallerstein in particular was
influenced by complexity theory and his analysis of capitalism and
predictions for how the system evolves clearly use his interpretation of
that framework in a way that is productive and is useful for
revolutionaries.[79] While critical of liberal reform and the social
democratic tradition Wallerstein has been often agnostic on other
possibilities or at times bordering on similar positions he critiques.
His positive proposals then have limited applicability for those who
seek a different route to a society beyond the State and capital. Still,
for such theorists it is clear that theyâve moved beyond the methods,
vocabulary, and theories of the left they grew out of and are producing
interesting novel analyses that are relevant and challenging.
A few scattered articles have explored more overtly revolutionary
implications of emergence and complexity in preliminary ways. Nicole
Pepperellâs dissertation attempts to cash out a Marxist approach to
capitalism via emergence. Pepperell seeks to make dialectics compatible
with emergence, and to recast concepts of Marxist political economy into
the language of emergence. If we set aside whether polar dialectics are
compatible with the multidimensional world of emergence, we will see
that this is an important attempt to wrestle with our changed
understanding and struggles with large scale forces like capitalism from
a critical perspective.[80] Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins explore
emergence in depth as biologists. However, their aim is not to elaborate
a framework from an emergence perspective, but rather to explore biology
through the lens of Marxian dialectics.[81] They do however draw
interesting conclusions for social change out of these issues.
Interest, unfortunately, in emergence has been largely academic, and
itâs found much more popularity as a tool for metaphors about existing
theories than in something worth taking seriously on its own.
Specifically, there has been a failure to thoroughly consider the
implications for practice of viewing social struggle and societies via
emergence. Previously Iâve tried to introduce emergence in the course of
analyses of post-capitalist economics, workplace organizing, and
political organization within history.[82] Beyond limited attempts like
these, the field remains wide open.
Emergence and living systems teach us two kinds of lessons that help us
struggle: lessons about what we know and how we know it, and lessons
about the nature and qualities of the social world. The most intuitive
and obvious outcome of these ideas are as limits of what we can know,
understand, and do. As aweinspiring as emergence is, it makes clear the
limits of our minds and capacities. Our abilities to predict, control,
and interpret living systems are limited by both our own capacity to
follow them and by the sheer force of dominant powers within. On the
streets of New York City, the patterns and undulations of the crowd are
impossible to see. We only get a sense of it in glimpses. From the
trees, the shape and evolution of the forest is obscured. Or take the
example of Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor whose suicide
served as inspiration for many in 2011. As individuals, our ability to
register events like this and make predictions is quite limited. Other
such suicides have occurred throughout history without the same effect.
Similar causes, based on their context, have dissimilar results. From
the level of agents where we stand, we are unable to pull ourselves out
of our own situation to the higher-level of organization, society, and
track the events of our lives towards larger emergent ones. This is a
hard limit based on the structure of society and the limitations of our
minds.
While it may seem intuitive, in fact it goes against a large portion of
liberatory thinking and tradition. Adoption of different approaches as
political agents will not elevate us above the system we reside in nor
the emergent forces that are beyond our immediate control. Had we been
participants in the crowd in Tunisia, we would have had no way of
knowing that such an event would have the effect it did. Neither could
we anticipate the effect of the struggles that occurred surrounding
Bouaziziâs suicide. Our position within the tumult of actions places us
in a poor vantage point to the stage upon which social forces act out in
history. We do gain insight about emergent events, but only when we
switch frames to that higher-level of analysis, and neither translate
directly into each other. Each level has its own domain, logic,
practice, and analysis.
Likewise, within levels, complexity exceeds our capacity to follow the
movement of social forces. It is logical that we would be unable, say,
to trace the actions and causality of each person in a crowd that comes
to take part in a riot.
The riot is made up of all the myriad thoughts, beliefs, desires,
physicality between individuals, motions, and experiences of all the
participants. Each motion, action, and response in combination yields
uncountable interactions each defining each other in a dizzying array of
reactions. Though itâs readily understandable why itâs difficult to
think that way, we regularly attempt to do this anyway. Much of
political thinking is directed towards applying the logic of individuals
to these group situations, something emergence should make us suspicious
of.
During the Arab Spring many activists and some in the media sought to
attribute the protests to the role of social media. In Tunisia the
suicide of Bouazizi was cited as the cause of the disruptions. Obamaâs
messages of hope and change in 2008 are argued to have caused youth,
blacks, and Latinos to vote in record numbers. Surely all these things
played roles in the events analyzed. Likely these analyses seek to
capture what is different about these situations from others when
similar events did not take place. Yet they share an attempt to isolate
the interaction of individuals with their respective factors (actions of
Bouazizi, content of Obamaâs message, social media in the Arab Spring)
with the overall event.
In fact, the causality is much more complex than that. Similar to
explaining a riot, what makes people vote is complicated. It may be
useful to isolate single elements to look at them, but thatâs not how
those decisions are made. Even when weâre not in physical proximity to
each other, such as in riots, crowds, traffic, and so on, our political
decisions are made through constant dialogue among ourselves on a
worldwide scale (though obviously how worldwide and to what extent
depends on the individual event, too). The decision to escalate
protests, enter into the electoral world, or modify my relationship to
those movements comes not in isolation, but instead within a total
framework of the world political environment, the forces around me, and
the decisions of people I know, my own history, etc.
Both levels of organization and complexity can thus change the way we
look at political events, but emergence itself also makes its own
contribution. Consider the newness of emergence. With emergence, things
that are not contained (however we understand this) in their parts come
into existence. Neither study of its parts nor the thing itself will
tell us the complete story of the emergent thing. As we said before, no
list of chemical reactions could tell us about the life of a cell.
Likewise, with political entities we are similarly limited. Take the
State. If we look at the institutions, personalities, and functions of
the State in society, we will fail to understand the way in which the
State is created through the relationships of individuals throughout
society. Yet looking only at those interactions will not make visible to
us the overarching force of the State in society. The State is more than
the sum of the interactions of individuals that create its reality. It
is an emergent force beyond the level of individuals, though constituted
by them. The State has properties that the individuals do not, even
though the individuals create it. This isnât to say analysis is
impossible or unimportant; quite the opposite is true. As political
agents, the complexity of living systems limits our predictive and
anticipatory power. Yet there are other tools available that let us
address complexity, levels, and emergence.
Todayâs complexity science in practice bears this out. Unbound by prior
radical thinkersâ methodologies, todayâs scientists use artificial
modeling of complex systems to make projections. Researchers of the
dominant ruling forces (economists, political scientists, sociologists,
biologists, military planners, law enforcement, and so on) look to
large-scale modeling to help guide their attempts to drive society. In
2013 complexity researchers used emergence theory to predict worldwide
disruptions surrounding food, which made international news and exposed
a wider trend of military and government researchers attempting to
outpace explosive protest movements and maintain social control.[83] The
prevalence of such models is becoming deeper, touching everything from
election campaigning, the National Weather Service, military models of
artificial life in warfare, and law enforcementâs attempts to use
passive technology to track potential radicals.
This is the burgeoning field of artificial life, or more mundanely
simply modeling. Models exist, but as of yet they are very broad. Still,
reflect on the fact that it is through modeling the system as a whole
that the path of hurricanes and famines, spread of disease, and so on
may be tracked rather than just contemplated by thinkers creating lists
of historical events and trends. Likewise, this departs from the
traditional sociology of individual researchers trying to pinpoint
trends using their reflection in combination with citing studies, and
extrapolating an order in a linear manner. Artificial life and modeling
integrates the lessons of emergence through its centering on levels and
the special behavior of living systems.
This isnât to say that individual analyses of sociologists,
philosophers, or political thinkers are irrelevant. Rather itâs to
delineate how different types of analyses put us into different
relations with different points of the system. Models abstract features
to make them manageable. They represent reality so we can play with it
and get results that approximate reality, more or less. They reflect
reality then, but they are not reality. Likewise, the role of the
political thinker isolates other features of society, crafting a
narrative and arguing for threads. Both reflect reality and have their
own role. Looking at the difference between those two modes of analysis
illuminates emergence. The multiplicity of perspectives characteristic
of emergence produces those different paths to discovery. Living systems
create different channels we can explore, and each channel contains
truths and projects singular to its own domain. Emergence shows us the
limitations of the nature of our inquiries at least in attempting to
grasp all social phenomena from the comforts of the armchairs of
political strategists. Modeling can show us the emergent behavior of
different elements of systems at certain levels, but it is limited by
its variables, perception, and level of analysis. The same is true with
individual analyses, statistical regressions, or experiments in action.
The uptake of all this is not only limits, but also suggested directions
for action. First, emergence allows us to understand specific failures
and avoid them, showing more promising paths. For example, levels of
organization and causality demonstrate why attempts to control
individuals and society on a broad level fail. At work, micromanaging is
a good example of how trying to impose upper-level plans directly on
groups actually breaks down efficient production (except when the
workers disregard managerial discipline). Bosses micromanaging disrupts
the emergent workflow through their attempts to insert concerns from the
managerial level directly on the plane of the employees carrying out the
work.
A traditional method of striking called work-to-rule uses exactly this
tension. Working-to-rule involves following all the formal rules and
standards management creates, but which are essentially never followed
precisely because to do so would be too inefficient. Before mail sorting
and processing was mechanized, in theory workers were required to weigh
all letters to ensure proper postage was paid. Workers in the Austrian
postal service typically did not weigh letters that were clearly
underweight, thereby obeying the rules in spirit but modifying them to
ensure workflow. During conflict with management, they began weighing
each piece of mail, which tied up deliveries significantly. Workers
thereby effectively rebelled against management through strict
obedience.[84] This manipulates managementâs weakness in organizing the
workplace from above.
It is successful because when workers actually follow all of
managementâs rules, work stops. This is due to the fact that the rules
created by managerial hierarchies do not reflect the reality of daily
work life. The bureaucracy of management is an emergent product of the
company separate from the workforce. The rules they create are often
contradictory, inefficient, and could not function if they were applied
fully. Workers know this and selectively ignore them without ever
spelling out in paper or deciding explicitly which rules they follow.
Work-to-rule shatters this emergent order by implementing the artificial
regime of management, grinding work to a halt by following the rules
that cannot be applied at that level.
There is a subtle genius here. One on hand, it means that the rules and
order of which management conceives arenât really followed, or at least
that workers selectively and intuitively follow rules in a way that
allows work to continue. This is done intuitivelyâ workers do not
generally sit down together and decide which rules will be followed
when. Workers instead produce the rules collectively through their
interactions and follow some level of discipline. The example of
work-to-rule strikes shows the ability of people to emergently create
organization in the face of attempts to impose order constructed at a
different level and points to their ability to destroy and replace it at
will.
There are darker examples, such as the USSRâs attempts to build the
Belomor canal. The canal was taken by the Soviet authorities as a
triumph of central planning in the Soviet economy using gulag labor. The
canal was conceived as part of building industrial infrastructure
necessary for transforming the Soviet economy into a functioning
industrial economy. The building of the canal cost countless lives and
created massive suffering for the gulag laborers who built it.[85]
Separated from the reality of construction on the ground, and insulated
from the creativity and collective knowledge of the laborers forced to
work under tight centralized discipline, the bureaucracies could not
produce a well-functioning project. Though often ignored, the individual
and collective creativity of workers serve a crucial role in making
plans and engineering function properly in implementation. Workers solve
problems with collective intelligence that could neither be planned for
nor anticipated by bureaucracies. The massive financial and human costs,
prison labor, and so on of the canal are severe enough to show the
dangers of central planning. Yet even more ironic is that the canal
itself ultimately served no function except to transport foreign
dignitaries and party officials on tourist ferries as a propaganda
effort. The canal was never made wide enough to transport the industrial
vessels it was meant for, and thus both wasted humanity in its creation
and made the effort in vain.[86]
The focus on central planning and party discipline of these governments
explains their fascination with crowds. Mass games, large orchestrated
exhibits of synchronized movements and images generally telling official
party history, and military marching formations can be viewed through
this light. It was a totalitarian fantasy to reduce the chaos of the
crowd to the discipline and organization of the committee, politburo,
and sect. People are transformed into colors, objects, and components
moving much as a machine does, and without any relationship to their
aesthetic creation except their implementation of the planned spectacle.
Mass games are a metaphor for the totalitarian imagination in which the
party can drive all of society through central planning, and where
society is mobilized into an amorphous mass unified around the thought
of the planner.[87]
Both traditional micro-management and centralized planning of
Marxist-Leninist governments (USSR, China, Cuba, and so on) were
likewise bound to suffer systematic problems for similar reasons. Acting
at a higher level of organization, such strategies attempt to directly
cause activity in systems with different logic at lower levels, where
simple causation is materially impossible in the way conceived. There
simply is no way to force the complexity of workforces into the logic of
individuals in a boardroom. Nothing gets done without the collective
intelligence and emergence of order from workers interacting in an
adaptive system. It is literally impossible to engineer liberated
societies in the manner of social engineering and totalitarian thinking
that emerged in the 19^(th) and 20^(th) centuries.
The point is deeper than just a rejection of the worst forms of social
engineering and the crassest management. When we look at the emergent
world, we see that in fact other alternatives can be more fruitful.
Interestingly, managers and industrial relations theorists have begun
looking at emergence for management strategies through creating
environments of autonomous workflow organization aimed at profit. In
other words, they see that what functions the best is when organization
arises organically out of social relationships of workers cooperating on
the job. People are creative, and collaboratively they make work run
better with minimal mediation by managerial structures. Workers can
independently solve problems that hold back profit, but often are
impeded by managerial bureaucracy from improving business. This is
something that is evident to anyone whoâs ever worked in a subservient
position. Social order emerges from the complex interactions of
individuals united in an effort through largely decentralized
person-to-person networks.
But thereâs work and then thereâs work. There is a complex interplay
between emotional bonds, aspirations, incentives, and a system of
control that maintains an individualâs participation in the workforce.
Workers engage in work not because they are necessarily personally
committed to their job, but also because of a compulsory system of
discipline. We work because we need to pay the bills, and if we donât
work how they want us to, thereâs an array of disciplinary measures in
place to force us back into line and to work harder. On the one hand,
you need the voluntary labor and initiative of individuals creating
solutions to problems in an unmediated collective environment. On the
other hand, you need to ensure that people work and do so for the profit
of the company. That mediation creates inefficiency and antagonism.
The rub here though is that thereâs an inherent tension in the attempt
(selforganized capitalist workplaces) to empower workers to perfect
their work because disciplinary infrastructure is always necessary. If
there werenât coercive and repressive means within the workplaces,
people might otherwise organize it to their benefit (let alone avoid
work all together), and management recognizes this problem. If workers
were radically free, they might redirect their activity not towards
profit of the owners, but rather toward their own collective benefit,
toward the benefit of others, or toward some other aim. Just as the
order they produce is emergent, people working together can create
emergent forces towards their ends. This is something management exists
to restrain, repress, and channel into the desires and whims of those
who maintain wealth and power.
This example teaches us a number of things. Inherent in emergence is a
critique of hierarchical power relations. In understanding how social
organization is an emergent property of social relationships, and how
centralized power is inherently flawed in attempting to bridge those
gaps, we see also a critique of institutionalized hierarchies and a
libertarian method for political work. Those hierarchies are a net drain
on society and introduce a form of disease into how the social organism
functions. Complex systems help us critique why centralized management
of labor and society are regressive forces that parasitically feed off
the emergent orders of human collective creations.
Likewise, the order that exists is already emergently produced by people
adapting and responding to their circumstances. In our daily lives, we
have the inherent ability to construct alternative orders, not as
architects or planners, but rather through our interactions within the
social ecology. While there are no guarantees about what kinds of
organization can be produced, investigating emergence opens up
possibilities. We see both inherent antagonism created by emergent
parasitic classes and the possibilities of more libertarian orders
without dystopian social engineering schemes. Emergence provides a
framework to think through that project, leaving that plane open and
arming us with both critique and examples for moving forward in a
critical liberatory struggle.
Second, emergence allows us to understand and act upon the potential of
political events. It presents an alternative means of understanding
political events that moves away from mechanistic and determinist
accounts. Emergence uses the multiplicity of levels within events and
the complexity in how they unfolding over time. Doing so presents a
number of available approaches to both creating and understanding
action. For instance, ruptures are political events that roughly break
from the dominant order of their time, often ushering in new eras.
Though caused by the actions of individuals, events such as ruptures
burst politics as usual to present new potentials as the equilibrium of
dominant power is disrupted. These shifts are disorienting for political
agents, because they are disproportionately caused by and occur with
complexity that outpaces our capacity to understand them. We cause them,
but they seem to us to come out of nowhere (until much later we are able
to carry out a higher level of analysis). Ruptures are clear examples of
nonlinear causation and emergence forces coming out of seemingly
nowhere. Without understanding social emergence, the speed and depth of
changes in such insurrectionary eras can seem mystical. Indeed, much
political thinking is divided between belief in spontaneous rebellion
and in only relying on the actions of small groups substituting
themselves for larger bodies. Emergence gives us tools to see how
ruptures are possible and how they come from real activity of groups and
individuals before the rupture, as well as to situate them within the
functioning and evolution of systems of power.
If this is right, it is evident how we can both help facilitate ruptures
(though we will be unable to reliably predict them with any great
accuracy) and deepen them. Ruptures are another way of saying a
breakdown in the equilibrium of social forces and institutions. Think
about a body struck with a horrible disease like cancer. Whole organ
systems, hormonal triggers, blood vessels, and so on are hijacked by the
cancer to sustain its own life against the body it emerged from (since
cancer cells are your own cells mutated against you). The normal
functioning of the body begins to change and rapid shifts in the rules
of normal chemical reactions, body functions, and so on occur. In
society likewise, when the forces of equilibrium are functioning well,
some doors are realistically closed. Our ability to help produce
emergent liberatory forces on any significant basis is improbable
(though itâs hard to know this from where we stand at any given moment).
While the system has a functioning cooling system and can absorb the
heat we produce, it keeps moving. But sometimes systemic problems can
break down those recuperative mechanisms and produce so much activity
that the whole thing begins to deteriorate.
As that order breaks down, however, new possibilities for new emergences
can rapidly explode as the previous systemâs means of ensuring stability
break down. Political events have systemic contexts. Ruptures are merely
a name for particularly extreme version of events that are more routine.
How causality unfolds depends on the broader stability and equilibrium
of the system, the emergent forces within, and the composition of the
higher-level emergent powers maintaining order. Emergence allows us to
feel out where we stand in the changes of the system, where to
intervene, and how to grow with the changing forces that social struggle
creates. As a framework, it gives us the ability to propose specific
answers to those questions, though not any particular proposal. This
isnât to say have faith in spontaneity, but rather it is the opposite;
it gives us tools and an understanding of the historical reality of the
dynamic between organized activity and the emergence of new protagonists
in struggle. As we stand, agents trying to choose different courses of
action, emergence brings to light how we are situated in a web of causes
throughout society that can reverberate with other forces in society and
either be absorbed, amplified, or transformed in the unfolding of
political events.
Likewise, the activities of organized bodies, even quite small ones, can
in the right context have disproportionate effects. We donât need to
look only at butterfly wings and tsunamis here. Anyone seriously
involved in social struggle has tasted the dramatic shifts that can help
when a small group in a certain moment takes action. This can be both
positively when it moves a movement forward, such as in the Flint
sit-down strike when the organizers made the decision to strike by
occupying the factory and thereby started a revolution in workplace
organizing, or negatively when small groups clumsily attack the police
at the wrong moment and a protest collapses. Groups acting in a
favorable context can have deep transformative consequences. In the
right situation, organized revolutionaries can have a disproportionate
effect either against popular power or with it. Lewontin and Levins
propose a model of action based on these considerations.
In chaotic systems, anything cannot happen; only a range of alternatives
within a set of constraints can happen. It would take more than the flap
of a butterflyâs wing to induce monsoon rains in Finland or a drought in
the Amazon or equal representation of women on the Harvard faculty.
Great quantities of energy and matter are involved in particular
configurations for the major events to occur. Only when a system is
poised on the brink can a tiny event set it off. Therefore, the task of
promoting change is one of promoting the conditions under which small,
local events can precipitate the desired restructuring.[88]
Here the authors focus primarily on these kinds of ruptures and suggest
focusing on facilitating them, but we could expand that view. From the
perspective of human liberation, it may be superior to find ways to
promote consistent counter-powers across a wide area that may not lead
immediately to such ruptures, but may improve the lives of numbers of
people, and encourage the shifts in conviction and thought that empower
new revolutionaries and aid insurrectionary work in other contexts.
These differences show the potential of the theory for cashing out
strategic differences, rather than being limited only to a single frame.
This isnât to overemphasize the actions of small groups, nor to say
groupings should act in the name of movements, but rather to place
revolutionaries within a non-privileged sphere of revolutionary action
without the assumption of leadership that substitutes itself for the
multitude. There are potentials and limitations to this kind of
causation, and understanding the problems of groups attempting to act in
the name of systems as a whole, emergence places the role of organized
revolutionaries back within the movement, rather than as its executor.
Ruptures are when these elements become most obvious and necessary.
Yet even within normal political activities where equilibrium is
sustained, these tools can be applied to understand counter-systemic
action by political agents in more localized forms and in strategic
thinking. Brazil, for example, exploded in protest that nearly brought
the government to its knees in 2013 over increases in the cost of
transit with grievances over the existing services. The Movimento Passe
Livre, or Free Fare Movement, arose some ten years earlier out of
localized struggles in different cities where organizers were
persistently agitating around transit issues with limited success until
the fury of the population boiled over.[89] It is easy to forget that a
vast sea of grievances that exists within society is typically brought
to a more cohesive form by the investment and experience of committed
militants who have the vision and practice to shift proposals into
concrete actions.
Navigating the evolution of the system, its ability to reproduce, and
the breakdown of its order is part of the tasks for forces organizing
for liberation. Understanding our limitations, the tentativeness of our
predictions, and the real potential (both for recuperation and for
disproportionate influences) places both objective factors and group
intervention at the core of action. This seems common sense, though for
much of the history of political thinking there was an unbridgeable
chasm between the individual and society created by ideology that failed
to connect agency to society. Living systems demonstrate the balance and
relation between different modes of social activity and struggle, not
merging them simply by squishing them together, but rather giving each
its place in a coherent whole reflecting the structure and adaption of
society itself.
Lastly, itâs worth stating that emergence is a materialist theory of the
political world.[90] Materialism in its widest sense tries to explain
reality through only appealing to matter. That is to say, there is no
external realm of ideas or spirit outside the material world in which we
live and breathe. It thus provides a potential method for showing how
basic physical forces produce the whole universe, of which the
psychological, social, and political spheres are only different
presentations of that same basic underlying material reality. Having a
direct connection to physical existence and science is a strength of
these ideas, for the basic reason that it makes the political cohere to
more basic forces in nature.
This isnât to say that society doesnât have its own specific content,
but it makes it less magical and mysterious and brings it within the
domain of potential actions. Indeed, itâs been the obscurity of
societyâs functioning that often has been used as a tool against people,
a tool to reinforce dominant power through ritual, faith, and even
obscurantist or technocratic science. Political leadership of the State,
despite the rhetoric of participation and democracy, wraps itself in
rituals of expertise and superhuman abilities to reinforce its exclusive
claim to governing, when in reality it is the unconscious actions of
millions that sustain the social order that the State struggles to
maintain its influence over. The theater of power is filled with
parliaments, architectural feats of awe, oval offices, pulpits, and
presidential limousines and airplanes. These are not only the excesses
of an insulated elite drunk on their own power, but also a conscious
cultivation to hide the fact that their decisions can be forced and
eroded not with expensive fountain pens, but with the calls and
footsteps on the streets below their balconies.[91] The more we can
grasp at this world and bring it within the reach of all, the more power
we have to challenge the wrongs enforced on people every day.
Through the discussion of emergence, a view of political events has been
elaborated that frames and centers the role of agents and provides a
framework for the relationships between peoplesâ actions and larger
social forces. Likewise, this understanding contributes to unifying the
living and physical world based on shared laws and matter by explaining
why it is difficult for us to conceive of the transformation of the
physical into the living and social. It does so arguing that different
levels of organization produce different behaviors and properties.
Inherent properties of living systems have political significance in
demonstrating how order is emergently produced; institutionalized
hierarchies introduce inherent problems into social systems and mark the
potential for a liberatory selforganized social order.
The real work of this theory is yet to be done. Its implications for our
understanding of capitalism, the State, and oppressions are in its
infancy and will be the task of those of us working to develop this line
of thought. Revolution, self-management, non-statist society, and
organization are questions ripe for critical answers from an emergentist
perspective. It is there in the large questions of liberatory politics
that emergence shows its real use. The work of addressing all of them
would require a text on its own. There are a few core concepts though
that increase our ability to tackle these large questions, and which
require their own sections of this book. Part of the appeal of this
perspective is its ability to explain the functioning of power as an
emergent force in society, and to situate political thinking and action
in a radical light. In the next section, power will be explored.
In social and political life two spheres weave around each other and the
events that make up our reality. On the one hand there is the experience
of living as individuals with all of our senses, feelings, perceptions,
and thoughts. We are creatures with subjective experiences of the world.
On the other hand, there is the construction of the social world by
large-scale emergent forces that shape us even from before weâre born.
The cities we live in, political institutions, cultural patterns, and
group behaviors all are living forces around us that are greater than
the sums of the individuals within them, and in fact make up part of how
we become who we are. We inhabit a socially-constructed order of powers
that divide, arrange, organize, and rearrange societyâs many divisions.
We ourselves are shaped by our relationships to these forces in all
their manifestations, whether classes, genders, races, or more mundane
structuring like beauty, charisma, and urban/suburban/rural life. Yet we
come at that world as beings with senses, and we enter into political
activity through our experiences, desires, and intentional and
motivational subjectivity.
As we saw in the last chapter, linking these two aspects of our world is
the concept of emergence. Emergence, a concept borrowed from the
biological sciences, describes the process of events happening based on
higher-level behaviors being produced by lower levels through complex
and adaptive means. Just like countless cells having chemical reactions
eventually producing our thoughts, systems of domination emerge from
countless individualsâ experiences and actions. The rules at different
levels of analysis are themselves distinct. For example, our neurons use
sodium, calcium, and potassium to create signals and patterns in our
brains. Those electrolytes however donât feel longing for a lover, but
the loversâ loving is made up of and caused in part because of the
action of the electrolytes working to make our neurons do what they do.
In a way the world of our experiences and the world of emergent social
forces are separated by a great chasm. Individuals function at a level
of organization with different rules from, say, capitalism. Our actions
produce capitalism, but do so generally without our knowledge and only
through the relationships of the system (between individuals,
individuals and groups, and between groups and groups). Emergence
bridges the world of our mental lives and the world of systems like
capitalism.
There is a parallel distinction in the political sphere between emergent
social forces and the perspectives of political actors. Power, like
emergence, is a concept that functions with our subjectivity and in
social relationships or intersubjectively. This aspect of power is
underappreciated, and carries with it the potential to understand how
our agency interacts with the context we act within.
One of the central insights and value of the anarchist tradition is that
power lies at its core. Anarchism builds a critique of existing society
and the potential to transform it from an analysis of power in human
life. Power itself, however, has been greatly overlooked primarily by
the historic left, who have followed selective readings of Marx.[92]
They sought to explain power only as a distant effect of economic
forces; mere superstructure produced by the economic base.[93] Against
this, anarchism consistently critiqued the view of power as a derivative
of economic forces. Luigi Fabbri, for instance, wrote âWe believe as
well that political power is not only an effect of economic force,
rather that one and another are alternatively cause and effect.â[94]
There were, in fact, a number of different positions within the
anarchist movement, which are present up till today, concerning power.
Some libertarian thinkers emphasized power as an exclusively negative
concept. Power is thus a means of coercing autonomous beings to follow
oneâs will. In keeping with these goals, this is not typically a
philosophy of power, but rather a revolutionary political orientation to
the political powers of the day. Elisée Reclus, for example, argued that
anarchism is defined by the resistance to the corrupting influence of
power, and aims at dismantling permanent structural power.
The conquest of power can only serve to prolong the duration of the
enslavement that accompanies it⊠It is in fact our struggle against all
official power that distinguishes us most essentially. Each
individuality seems to us to be the center of the universe and each has
the same right to its integral development, without interference from
any power that supervises, reprimands, or castigates it.[95]
Malatesta, similarly, does not give a general theory of power, but
attempts to delineate its role and functioning both amongst the ruling
class and those resisting. His treatment of power, at least in the
limited writings of his we have access to in English, focuses on the
State.
For us, government is made up of all the governors; and the governorsâ
kings, presidents, ministers, deputies, etc.âare those who have the
power to make laws regulating inter-human relations and to see that they
are carried out; to levy taxes and to collect them; to impose military
conscription; to judge and punish those who contravene the laws; to
subject private contracts to rules, scrutiny and sanctions; to
monopolize some branches of production and some public services or, if
they so wish, all production and all public services; to promote or to
hinder the exchange of goods; to wage war or make peace with the
governors of other countries; to grant or withdraw privileges...and so
on. In short, the governors are those who have the power, to a greater
or lesser degree, to make use of the social power, that is of the
physical, intellectual and economic power of the whole community, in
order to oblige everybody to carry out their wishes. And this power, in
our opinion, constitutes the principle of government, of authority.[96]
Mikhail Bakunin, Russian participant of the First International
Workingmenâs Association and generally considered one of the most
important founders of modern anarchism, wrote extensively about power in
the context of its transformative effect over individuals. This was
against the authoritarian socialists of his day, who believed the
existing capitalist State or future potential workersâ State could be
harnessed to create a free socialist society.[97] Though his view of
power is largely a negative one, he made a distinction between power and
authority. âIn the matter of boots, I defer to the authority of the
bootmaker.â[98] Power then for Bakunin consisted of institutionalized
and coercive powers, while authority could be oppressive or based on
some earned capacity that others could voluntarily respect. If authority
is taken as a form of non-State power, his view could be construed as
recognizing different forms of power, some constructive and others
parasitic.
Similar to what Bakunin had done, Rudolph Rocker divided destructive
power from constructive authority in his book, Nationalism and Culture.
Just as power is negative and authority potentially positive, so Rocker
argued against a dangerous nationalism and for a potentially sociable
culture. Influenced by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche,
Rocker argues for the centrality of power in understanding politics when
he claims that â(t)he will to power that always emanates from
individuals or small minorities in society is in fact an important
driving force in history. The extent of its influence has up to now been
studied far too little, although it has frequently been the determining
factor in the shaping of the whole of economic and social life.â[99]
Though not strictly an anarchist, British philosopher and activist
Bertrand Russell was at one time a libertarian socialist and retained
ties to anarchist causes late into his life. His book, Power, reflects
that libertarian perspective of centering social life and analysis of
power alongside a critique of the dangers of State power. Criticizing
orthodox economists and Marxist views that placed economic interest as
the fundamental drive of social life, he wrote:
This error in orthodox and Marxist economics is not merely theoretical,
but is of the greatest practical importance, and has caused some of the
principle events of recent times to be misunderstood. It is only by
realizing the love of power is the cause of the activities that are
important in social affairs that history whether ancient or modern, can
be rightly interpreted⊠The fundamental concept in social science is
Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in
physics.[100]
Russell goes on to provide an analysis of power as the ability to
produce intended effects. His account ties power to the intentionality
of the agent, something that will be explored more in depth in the
fourth part of this book.
Emma Goldman similarly took a Nietzschean view of the will to power as
the main force of life. She was not alone. Benjamin Tucker, American
individualist anarchist, was one of the first to translate Nietzsche
into English for an American audience. Nietzscheâs influence on
anarchism was greater than one would imagine given Nietzscheâs elitism
and explicit hostility to socialist and anarchist ideas. In general, it
was his critiques of the State, nationalism, and the destructive aspects
of power in modern society that appealed to thinkers like Goldman and
Rocker, though surely many anarchists felt great disdain for the
philosopher. His promotion of the positive aspects of power immanent to
all humanity, however, are less easy to identify in the anarchists who
explicitly engaged him.
There are other threads within anarchism however that have recognized
power as a broader concept. Indeed, within Russell, Rocker, and Goldman
power is seen as one of the central components of all social life, and
not merely as a negative property of abusive authority. Luce Fabbri,
anarchist theorist from Uruguay and daughter of the famous Italian
anarchist Luigi Fabbri, argued for such in the early 1950s.
Socialism does not deny that expansive manifestation of the life
instinct that is often called the will to power; it satisfies it rather
in that which is higher, and that is to say more human if not for fear
that we would embarrass ourselves with too many examples of animal
solidarity that Kropotkin gives us in his âMutual Aidâ and that we find
day to day in nature. A healthy will to power leads to the desire for
freedom and self-control, in the desire to form hostile nature and inert
matter to the needs of man, the appetite for work, creation of
knowledge; and especially in the association that multiplies and
extends, until the limits of the known universe, the possibilities and
energy of individual action, in the solidarity that is the basis of the
collective subconscious of the species, it becomes in the field of
consciousness, fraternity, love, spirit of sacrifice. In the individual,
a healthy life instinct leads both to give and to do as to take and to
enjoy; and in this to give and in this to do seeks ultimately, a
superiority.[101]
Here power is a feature of daily life and not merely a property of the
State and hierarchies. Power indeed can be actively productive. Luce
Fabbri does not make use of the distinction between power and authority,
but instead focuses on good and bad forms of power. In his introduction
to anarchism, Angel Cappelletti similarly dismisses the idea that
anarchism is against power per se.
âAnarchismâ does not want to call for the negation of all power and all
authority: it wants only to call for the negation of permanent power and
institutionalized power or, in other words, negation of the State⊠The
socalled primitive societies are not unfamiliar with power (and even as
Pierre Clastres[102] wishes, political power) but are characterized
essentially against civilized people to ignore the state, that is,
permanent and established political power. Anarchists aspire to a
society without divisions between rulers and ruled, a society without
fixed and predetermined authority, a society where power is not
transcendent to the knowledge, moral, and intellectual capacity of each
individual.[103]
Proudhon interestingly attempted to give an account of power, even
emergent power, in terms of individual and collective force. He begins
by questioning what makes up the reality of social power and answers,
âcollective force,â which he defines as âthe faculty or propertyâŠof
being able to attract and be attracted, to repulse and be repulsed, to
move, to act, to think, to PRODUCE, at the very least to resist, by its
inertia, influences from the outside.â[104] Power is something then that
expresses itself differently in the entities that contain it. It is a
property both of the rulers and the ruled; there is liberating force and
repressive force but also mundane force. Proudhon uses this basic
concept of power to demonstrate how collective force takes on its own
powers beyond the âsumâ of its individuals.
Anticipating theorists of power today, Proudhon places the power of the
State not in its purely violent force, but in its capacity to reproduce
obedience. âIt isâŠnot actually the exploiter, it is not the tyrant, whom
the workers and citizens follow⊠It is the social power that they
respect, a power ill-defined in their thinking, but outside of which
they sense that they cannot subsist.â Rulers thus appeal to a broader
force to sustain themselves, and the failure to do so leads to revolt
Proudhon argues. The nation itself is not its rulers or institutions,
but ââŠthe grouping of individual forces, and through the relation of the
groups, the whole nation forms one body: it is a real being of a higher
order, whose movement implicates the existence and fortune of
everyone.â[105] This approach of connecting emergent social force to
maintaining hierarchical power that is dependent on those emergent
networks has not been given its due. Proudhon lays out a barebones
emergentist understanding of the State and power in these passages and
connects them to a liberatory politics, something unique in his time and
rare still today.
Though there are differences between these positions, the commonality is
the belief in the centrality of an understanding of power within
society, in pursuit of liberation, and against specific forms of power
that sustain exploitation and oppression. Building upon this current
with its analysis and critique of power, complex systems and emergence
offer another view of how power operates within social groups. Powerâs
unique character that crosses between agency and the world of emergence
can give us new ways to understand and transform our reality, not merely
as a critique of institutional power, but as a living concept of social
systems and individuals.
Pinning down power is tricky in part because we use it so often. Our
daily lives are shaped by the contours of power in all our
relationships, intimate and political. It is such an integral part of
human experience, itâs not surprising to find power peppered throughout
our language, culture, and thinking about ourselves and the world.
Understanding power means having to grapple with different aspects of
the concept. There are so many senses, applications, and uses of power
that any analysis of it as a concept will struggle to navigate all of
its varied uses. We tend to define power in terms of other concepts that
invoke it like potential, potency, ability, and so on. At its most
basic, having power means someone can or could do something.
Consider the sentence, âJane has the power to inspire.â If we dissect
power, a few elements stand out. Thereâs the relationship between Jane
and whatever she has the power to do or over; thereâs the power itself;
and then thereâs Jane as a powerful person. These three pieces are the
relationship of power, what power itself is, and the subject of power.
Exploring those different aspects of power will help unpack the problem.
Traditionally most political analyses of power have been about its
exercise by political institutions: the power of police or military as
armed forces, the power to reconstruct society through State
intervention, contestation of the State machinery, and so on. In
English, we commonly refer to this as power over something or another.
The police have power over this neighborhood. A patriarchal husband
holds power over his wife. Parents have power over their children.
Foucault famously made a lot out of its comparison with another sense of
power, the power to do something.[106] One can have the power to
persuade others to listen, the power to seduce a lover, the power to
inspire action. Power over is about the potential to get others to do
what you wish, whereas power to is about abilities to act. Both are
forms of capacities, one as influence and the other as capabilities.
Discussions of power typically rely on concepts like abilities,
potential, potency, or possibility to explain it. Yet such concepts
reference power in a basic sense. Defining power in terms of capacity,
influence, or ability covertly makes reference to the power to do
something in other terms. If Jane is able to jump, she has the power to
job; she can or could jump; she is jump-able.
These definitions are circular because power is such a deep component of
our mental and social lives that much of our thinking is constructed out
of it. Our thinking about actions are built upon our own abilities and
limitations, patterns of behavior structures surrounding powers, the
abilities of others, and the imposition of the powers of the natural
world on our wills. So we drive differently in rain or snow, walk with
caution in dangerous neighborhoods, greet friends and loved ones
distinctly from others, and exercise rage within the boundaries of
acceptable targets and circumstances.
Lewes in his early emergentist text takes up power during his
discussions of cause and effect. For similar reasons to above he
concludes that power is merely a concept we use to talk about causality
with agents. He is a power skeptic therein arguing that there is no
thing beyond the cause and effect itself.[107] In a sense this is true,
but he is missing a few things. Most importantly such an account would
not explain the social notions of power or more abstract potentials.
Having a concept like power gives us additional mental tools to
understand and describe such states. Perhaps power is merely a robust
form of causality, but if so it is a special one, and one we canât
manage to think without.
Power shapes both our own thinking about how to act and the society we
live and grow in. It stands intimately close to our basic mental
processes surrounding action and relationships with others because power
is part of our fundamental conceptual vocabulary and is something that
resists further breaking down into conceptual parts. Powerâs closeness
to our mental life and its operation throughout society gives it
strength as a potential tool for understanding societies and politics.
What about who and what can have power? People can have power, but we
also apply the term to other things as well. For instance, power can be
discussed as a concept of social events, institutions, and behaviors. In
this sense it is described as property of powerful institutions, groups,
and people. Governments hold power over people, the working class has
the power to shut down production, and a riot has a powerful resonance
in the history of a city.
Another framing for power is as a subjectivity and element of
experiential life. This is the way in which one experiences power nearly
as a sensation. There is a particular feeling when our words inspire
others, when another dominates us and we are powerless to fight back,
when we are aware of our ability to wrong or violate others, but choose
not to, etc. We experience the power of our words, the power of touch,
the powerlessness we feel with lovers, and the feeling of power building
up in us that we fail to exercise when calming down from a rage. There
are then experiences of power as agents, and structures or forces of
power in societies. Both can be the agents of power, and in fact
individual agents themselves interlinked in a society produce the larger
emergent forces of power.
What kinds of things can be in relationships of power? The most common
discussions focus on power relationships between people or groups. Yet
only looking at the relationships between people gives an incomplete
picture. We talk about the power of a politician over a country, the
power of the US military to impose its will, or the power of Wall Street
in Washington DC. Power is not simply a social relationship, however,
because power can also exist not just in relationship to other people,
but also in relation to ourselves and to the natural world, such as the
power to change oneâs environment and oneself. We exert power on
inanimate objects like lakes, trees, animals, and mountains. Our ability
to impose changes on our own personality, habits, or thinking (or the
inability to do so) is also a kind of potency.
Additionally, power can be abstract and exist between forces rather than
people or groups of people. Emergent forces themselves (which are not
people) stand in relationships of power to each other. Think about
things like the stock market of futures in commodities like cattle and
agenciesâ predictions of weather. Bad weather predictions have the power
to change the price of futures markets because of the anticipation of
shortages from things like drought, or good corn years making feed
cheaper, and so on. The institutions generating the predictions have
power that influences the market. Both the institutions and the behavior
of the market are connected to real things like cows, people, weather,
feed, and so on, but the relationship of power occurs at a higher level
of organization between the forces of the market and the predictions
(both of which can be absolutely wrong about what is actually
happening). Agents of power can thus be people or emergent forces.
Itâs important to consider that power is not simply exercised by
powerful bodies, but also linked as relationships across society.
Exercising power makes good on the potentials actors have. Society is
built upon powers, exercised and latent, standing between individuals
and groups. The power of the police, for example, structures the
behavior of individuals through existing balances of forces. Power
influences society without being exercised at each moment, however.
Stable relationships develop based on balances of power, experiences of
individuals in relationship to powers, and the collective patterning of
relationships.
We donât obey the State, for example, simply because there are armed
people who will harm us if we donât. Instead respect of State authority
is transmitted and reproduced constantly in smaller ways (i.e.,
deferring to State authorities in trying to solve neighborhood problems,
framing discussions with friends in terms of the boundaries laid out in
official channels, affirming each otherâs need to go through established
hierarchies, and so on). Similarly, when the respect for authority
breaks down or is resisted, it often happens because of subtle acts of
defiance and power being reproduced within social groups.
Consider workplaces. They are structured to enforce the existing power
relations between bosses and workers, but also between workers. Offices
are arranged to reinforce the perception of the boss as powerful and in
control (managementâs offices, parking schemes, break rooms, freedom and
direction of foot traffic, and so on), to divide workers from each
other, to minimize unproductive social interaction, and so on. This
happens through layout design of the rooms, surveillance equipment
installation, active patrols by managers, and building in tasks that
need perpetual monitoring to keep workers busy. Workers can reinforce
the power of management through enforcing managementâs rules on each
other, giving gifts to the boss, hiding conversations between coworkers,
and seeking out management to solve interpersonal problems rather than
settling them amongst themselves. The power of the boss is constructed
through the structures and framework that management organizes, yet the
actual power they hold over workers comes in large part from reproducing
the respect and order management seeks amongst the workers.
Conversely, the power of the boss is threatened by the failure of
workers to reproduce it. When they disobey and start following their own
rules, the authority of the boss can evaporate. This is precisely what
happens in strikes and job actions that target the workflow inside, such
as sit-down, working to rule or slow-down strikes, and even workplace
occupations and seizures. Such breaks from the power of bosses are
things we see emerge again and again in periods of militancy when
workers have begun reorganizing their workplaces with their own desires
and perspectives in mind.
In our interactions with countless individuals, we transmit and maintain
relationships of power through our actions and thinking. Social
interactions are opportunities to express the language of power through
our actions. Those relationships, constantly reproduced and modified in
daily life, provide the terrain for the construction of power relations
across society. Emergent powers come out of those interactions, and draw
their life force from the decisions individuals make in groups
responding to the structures, patterns, and mechanisms of emergent
powers within society. Different power relations are transmitted when we
break from established power, and social unrest spreads, creating new
relationships and capacities. Protests, strikes, riots, revolutions, and
other forms of political events are alterations in the networks of
power, and they transmit activity and information through the social
networks constitutive of society. When we struggle, we are creating new
abilitiesâpowers to do things that were not or could not done
previously. The bedrock of power then is our actions and interactions
either to confirm, reject, or change the flow of power relationships in
society. Emergent social forces like the State or the capitalist class
exercise power on individuals and social classes. The State uses its
power over the population in crackdowns, propaganda efforts, and social
engineering. Capitalists use their power to mobilize vast resources to
create new markets. Just as individuals have and transmit power, so do
groups and emergent social forces.
Looking at the role of power takes us to its relational aspect. Remember
that power can be both experiential and social; it can exist between
individuals and the world, individuals and themselves, between
individuals, and between groups. A power relationship then is the type
of relationship between an agent or force, the object of their power,
and the capacity to do something or another. The power to make others
laugh is characterized by ability to humor, to bore, and so on. Powers
carve out sets of capacities that are related in such a way. They then
are constituted by particular sets of relations between abilities and
inabilities of individuals and/or groups.
Power relations take the form of a potential of an actor A to do action
X, when that possibility may invoke some B that is another person,
group, or institution, or A themselves or itself. Power is thus a
concept based on possibilities that modify relationships between people,
objects, and their strength to do or not do various things. Each power
has a different relation. The power to seduce is about the relationship
of someoneâs presence to the motivational states of others. The power to
run quickly is about the states of the body, someoneâs capacity, and
facts about the world. The form of those relationships represent power
in general in its role. A better understanding of the concept is had by
seeing it as a way of correlating relational states of agents and
potential agents to different actions. Politics has largely been
concerned with specific types of power rather than power itself. We can
think of political power as a set of particular capacities (political
ones) between people and social forces. Other forms of power are
constructed around different sets of abilities.
These relations are divvied out in a tiered manner. Power is organized
according to the relations and states between actors. As said before,
power relations can be between individuals and the world, individuals
and others, and emergent forces with any combination of individuals/the
world/other emergent forces. For the agents of those relationships,
power has different effects as well. These relations manifest at three
levels: states of mind, social relations, and as emergent behaviors of
groups.
Itâs important to note the internal subjective or phenomenological
component of power, because it can be easily ignored in the more obvious
examples of power between people. There is an experience of power that
we go through as beings. Even more still, there are power relationships
we can have to ourselves reflexively. For example, the experience of
being powerless to overcome oneâs challenges as a rock climber is a form
of power, and one with a reflexive subjective character that is inherent
to that power itself. Without being an agent that is capable of
experiencing, willing, and struggling, we couldnât make sense of that
type of power or powerlessness.
Taking a similar example, the experience of being crushed by a rock, but
unable to free oneself is again a power relationship. It is a power
relationship with an inanimate object, something incapable of having
agency, and yet it is still a power relationship. Out of the basic
relationship of power, a number of things emerge. Individualsâ power
relations produce subjective states. There is a particular kind of
terror to being rendered powerless by natural disasters or from attacks
by wild animals. There are distinct sensations of pleasure from our
power to please others. Our subjective states of power derive in part
from our relationship to those powers.
This is not merely metaphorical. Power is a fundamental experience of
human life only because we have agency and will to do things. Yet our
existence in a social and physical world outside our creation both
constitutes and inhibits our will within all the dizzying complexity of
our environment. Power doesnât only enter our life once we enter into
all the loves and struggles of being a social creature. It resides
deeper in the basic make up of our minds since we are perceptual and
cognitive beings.
As agents, we exist in a world of other agents with their own powers and
relationships throughout societies. Individuals systematically interact
with groups and other individuals, and in doing so sustain the social
aspect of power. Power as a relational force of possibilities
fundamentally shapes our activity as social creatures, causing us to
pursue or avoid each other, and providing basic underlying drive and
logic to our interactions. These interactions create social force. The
social relationships between workers produce the power that can maintain
or stop production. Power relations between lovers can sustain or
prevent abuse. People exercise, withhold, and transmit power among each
other.
With groups, power relations produce emergent forces, events, and even
structures. Within the State, ruling forces battle for dominance.
Countries engage in power struggles over territory, resources, and
position within global hierarchies. Emergent blocks among capitalists
struggle for market dominance. Power has an animate life within society
that emerges at the level of social forces. Beyond the individuals
within, we can see the conquest of power by institutions and emergent
powers, such as social organisms (or perhaps ecologies) like the State,
classes, and social formations.
At each stage (individual, intersubjective, and emergent social) power
relations influence each other in a broad social system. Individual
experiences of power influence actions. Transmitted between individuals,
they sustain large scale power structures like domination. Regimesâ
power is challenged or sustained by the actions of individuals working
in groups. Power is part of the living system of society, and flows
through the different levels, creating new forms and structures. Working
between subjective and intersubjective worlds, power is constructed,
reproduced, modified, and transmitted between humans throughout society.
Power is either a capacity or an incapacity that people and groups have.
Likewise, power is not simply exercised, it may be retained and implied
without ever having to be realized. Therefore, power is inherently
contextual between the social relationships of its actors and the total
environment of an individual with powers. In other words, to understand
power we have to understand both the actors that have the powers, the
powers themselves, and the total situation that created both the actors
and their situation. To understand the ability to go to war, we must
understand the nation, the soldier, the means of producing war
materials, living, the species, etc.
Power then occupies a unique position in human life. It is both a
constitutive element of our experience of the world, and at the same
time a social relationship with emergent powers and properties beyond
our individual experience of such. Power is part of who we are, and an
expression of our intentionality in the world as actors. At the same
time, it makes up our social reality and its force bears down upon us.
It comes from within, and while acting from without changes our very
being. By occupying this space, a common substance of different
arrangements in the subjective and intersubjective realms, power gives
us a gift. It can both account for the breadth of much of political life
and our experience of such. It is a unifying conceptual force in the
hands of political actors.
Itâs beyond the scope of this text to provide an adequate analysis of
the State. Still looking specifically at power, we can lay out some of
the ways that emergence and power can be used for political action. In
the realm of the State, for example, power gives us the ability to
understand why it is naĂŻve to believe that building a State with the
exploited rather than a dominant class would insulate any movement from
the corrupting influence of capitalism. If we analyze movements and the
State not simply in terms of their class character, but also in terms of
an underlying foundation of power relationships, the falsity of that
view becomes evident.
This gets at the center of anarchism, which is to center constructive
proposals for society in juxtaposition to a critique not of particular
elements of power, but in more fundamental power relationships that
penetrate society. Bakunin warned against such a simplistic perspective
of the corrupting influence of State power in his debate with statist
socialists.
There can be no equality between the sovereign and the subject. On one
side there is the feeling of superiority necessarily induced by a high
position; on the other, that of inferiority resulting from the
sovereignâs superior position as the wielder of executive and
legislative power. Political power means domination. And where there is
domination there must be a substantial part of the population who remain
subjected to the domination of their rulers: and subjects will naturally
hate their rulers. who will then naturally be forced to subdue the
people by even more oppressive measures, further curtailing their
freedom. Such is the nature of political power ever since its origin in
human society. This also explains why and how men who were the reddest
democrats, the most vociferous radicals, once in power become the most
moderate conservatives. Such turnabouts are usually and mistakenly
regarded as a kind of treason. Their principal cause is the inevitable
change of position and perspective. We should never forget that the
institutional positions and their attendant privileges are far more
powerful motivating forces than mere individual hatred or ill will. If a
government composed exclusively of workers were elected tomorrow by
universal suffrage, these same workers, who are today the most dedicated
democrats and socialists, would tomorrow become the most determined
aristocrats, open or secret worshippers of the principle of authority,
exploiters and oppressors.[108]
Today we can see that he had great clarity about the ability of the
internal institutional dynamics of the State in sustaining the
participation and investment of its members reaching beyond their
ideologies. This mechanism of power can be separated from the repressive
mechanism Bakunin describes. In the modern nation state, recuperative
functions have perhaps transformed that dynamic that may have seemed
more plausible in the 19^(th) century than today. The awareness of the
emergence of power through the collective entity of the State
transforming individuals into guardians of privilege here sets the
libertarian critique of the State apart from the more selective
critiques in terms of the composition of the State, its laws, or the
embrace of hypothetical class/racial/national reconstructed states.
Reproducing hierarchical power relations within an authoritarian state
carries the potential for capitalist relationships to re-emerge. Even if
one makes the argument that destroying the economic basis for capitalism
is a form of intervention against capitalist power relations, it is
insufficient because power relationships do not only flow from single
sources, such as the State. Hierarchical power can be constructed from
countless points in a decentralized manner and emerge just as our
actions emerge not from a single core, but instead they are the products
of innumerable chemical reactions in cells. If the statist power
relations are not destroyed and an institutionalized form of hierarchy
remains within the control of a privileged class of State bureaucracy,
from the perspective of power, thereâs no reason to believe that class
tyranny wonât re-emerge. That is, unless we specifically undermine such
relationships and reproduce new ones on a different basis, itâs unlikely
if not impossible that statist and capitalist power would be overcome.
The State itself is an emergent product of power relationships built in
hierarchical society. Yet if we take the analysis of power seriously,
then the structure of the State itself is not enough to grapple with it.
Just as we cannot expect the class character of its participants to
automatically abolish its role, the abolition of statist relationships
is bigger than its structure. If power is emergent and emergent from the
reproduction of its relations in a diffuse manner, then simply attacking
its structure doesnât guarantee a liberatory outcome. Replacing the
State with a system of direct democracy, for example, doesnât ensure
that the State will not re-emerge. It is necessary that people and
society produce new social relationships, and in essence are transformed
in order to make the Stateâs reemergence unlikely.
The problem then with the State is not simply who is in charge of it,
but rather the basis for statist relationships throughout society. Here
the analysis of power shows its use not only as a tool for
understanding, but also as a tool for action. We need to destroy not
only the institutionalized hierarchies of the State, but also their
basis for ruling throughout social relationships.
This does not mean however that we will understand the State only by
looking at power. Power is a foundation for understanding and acting on
social struggle. On top of that foundation, the whole social world is
built. To understand the State, we need to look the particulars in the
context within the development of the situation.[109] This is to say
that power is a fundamental concept, but one concept among many, and we
should not make the confusion of seeing the importance of comprehending
power with overlooking the need to have specific contextual analyses of
our situation and moment. For example, to give a full account of the
State one must grasp not only the State as social relationships, but
also its history, institutions, its class basis and role, relations
between force and consent, divisions, and so on. The examples offered
here are illustrative and should be taken as demonstrating directions
that theorists could develop using such a concept, rather than being
sufficient in themselves.
Still with the example of statist social relationships, it should be
noticed that the understanding of power offered outlines a concrete
historical approach itself. Power is a bridge between the subjective and
intersubjective worlds, and is so only in reference to concrete social
and physical contexts that make power possible. This understanding is
part then of a method of rooting political work both in the ethical
challenges of liberatory struggle and in a concrete reality of social
struggle across different specific historical points.
The concept of power is nearly physical; it is so close to life. One can
practically feel it whenever we find ourselves in families, schools,
amongst feuding friends, and in the clutches of the disciplinary State.
Though there isnât space to lay out a specifically anarchist conception
of power here; emergence and social systems provide some interesting
directions in that effort for integrating power into the core of our
thinking and work. Power traditionally had been thought of as something
exercised against people (by political science and sociology), or either
ignored or denied beneath economic foundations (by portions of the
Marxist tradition.) Yet as Foucault[110] and indeed many anarchist
thinkers argued,[111] power is something that is as much an ability as
something repressive. We have the power to do things and powers over
others. Most importantly, Foucault argued that power isnât simply
mirrored from the powerful through individuals nor merely exercised
against people, but indeed transmitted as a social relationship across
individuals and groups throughout society. Power within society is an
emergent product of social relationships alongside the institutions and
forms of the State, instead of simply a property of the State itself
(and its police, military, and so on).
Emergence can help us integrate these ideas into a broader framework.
The State can be seen as an emergent product, in part, of power
relations throughout society that maintain institutions and hierarchies
of power, rather than simply being exercised by them. The vast
interactions acted out daily by all of us help reproduce the dominance
of the State in reaction to the Stateâs institutions and actors. The
reach of the State goes beyond its forces of violence, social services,
and propaganda in so far as it is able to be created perpetually out of
the emergent order of our actions.
This also shows a distinct weakness of State powers. If we participate
in the maintenance and construction of power at its most basic level,
itâs both the case that there is a field of struggle (power) and that we
are able to produce different forms of power should the possibility of
systemic change arise through emergent power relationships. Where we
create and sustain State power comes the potential to disrupt. Since the
more obvious displays of State power (police, prisons, and the military)
depend on the reproduction of statist relations, new investigations into
the conditions that help sustain or interrupt power relations could
expose different moments and areas susceptible to liberatory
alternatives and resistance.
Emergence places the power to create and destroy oppressive powers in
our hands, and the ability to construct alternative human organization
for society through emergent social organization. We have then not
merely a theory that explains existing power, but a direction on the
path towards libertarian society. Coming to think with power and
emergence brings additional tools for confronting decisions for how we
move against dominant power, and constructions of proposals for action
in our context.
On a critical note these reflections feed a skepticism towards
revolutionary aspirations for new states. The composition of the ruling
powers will not substantially change the operation of the State itself,
which as an emergent entity is the product of the complexity of forces
producing it, of which its powerful individuals may try to imprint their
will, but ultimately themselves are merely responding to a complex and
adaptive system beyond their total control. Domination is maintained by
ruling elites only through that system in which their will and influence
of course plays a role, but a much more limited one than many believe.
Likewise, this explains how so-called revolutionary states often end up
reproducing exploitation despite changing the people and goals. It is
not enough to merely destroy the State apparatus or its institutions
unless the void of the State can be filled with new forms of emergent
orders that disorganize and replace statist ones. Otherwise the State
will grow from the forces whose activity becomes organized and
coordinated around the functions and relationships of statist power.
Instead, we must destroy both the central organs of repression as well
as the transmission and emergent relationships that stabilize the State
and replace it through new relationships that produce and sustain a
libertarian order. Emergence thus shifts our targets of struggle and
understanding of where the strength of the State lies.
To the connection between emergence and power, we should add a third
concept: cognition. Cognition is where thought and action interact
within the minds of agents. At this point the discussion has largely
been about largescale forces produced by numbers of actors without
delving into the functioning of action. Given the stress on the
maintenance or disruption of order by a multitude of agents, it is
important for our argument to know how individuals come to act in
revolutionary ways, as well as arrive at mental commitment to radical
action. Exploring the connections between cognition, emergence, and
power can offer us a different approach to how liberatory forms of
cognition can emerge. The next sections of this book will explore the
relationships between cognition, action, and power.
In the preceding chapters action, motivation, and mental life were
touched upon. A number of themes are repeated throughout when we look at
human action: ideas, awareness, the conscious vs. the unconscious,
intention, judgements, values, and norms. In specifically political
thought, ideas have always posed a central question: what role do ideas
and ideology play in political action? That is, to what degree do
political ideas motivate? Are they necessary in order to accomplish
political ends? And what function do they play within the causal chains
that produce political action?
There are two pieces to the problem. First, what is the relationship
between simple thought and action? Second, what is the nature of
specifically political ideas? These issues have often been called the
problem of political consciousness. Consciousness here is thought of as
having overt awareness and intention of the political framework that the
person wants to put into place. Within this framing a division was
formed between those who believed that such consciousness was a
prerequisite for action and those who saw such consciousness as
secondary to actions. Realistically, most people fell somewhere in the
middle seeing it either as a product of action, something that gradually
develops, or a back and forth between the two.
This division is most pronounced in the Marxist tradition due to their
focus on the relationship of ideas to capitalism. Leninists
traditionally saw revolutionary consciousness coming from a socialist
minority, if not from the upper classes, who had the free time for the
study of Marxism and would bring these ideas to the proletariat burdened
by the daily routine of capitalism.[112] Conversely, a broad swath of
leftist opposition to official Leninism identified with alternatives to
this model. Martin Glaberman and CLR James, dissident exTrotskyists in
the United States, proposed the transformative potential of action that
precedes shifts in consciousness in the working class. Council
communists emphasized the spontaneous activity of the class that could
lead to radicalization in practice, even asserting that workers were
only potentially radical within the factory walls. EP Thompson argued in
the Making of the English Working-Class that class consciousness is a
process developed across time in experiences rather than a thing or an
ideology one adopts.[113]
This problem in many ways is influenced by issues within the most
popular
forms of Marxism, where the dynamics of capitalism themselves creates
the working class who are given their revolutionary potential by their
position within relations of production. With workers failing to
consistently develop socialist ideas, Marxist thinkers then wrestled
with a series of models for why this happens. Anarchism came at things
from a different angle as its ideas about class and revolutionary
potential were more open. Libertarians saw radicalization as a rather
specific process of the local context of the revolutionary subject and
involving both the conscious cultivation of libertarian ideas and the
transformative potential of struggle within and against capitalism.[114]
The initial framing itself starts off on the wrong foot, however.
Consider a person who believes in the need to abolish the death penalty,
subscribes to a legislative agenda to achieve that end, has all the
resources necessary to start taking those actions, but never in life
takes up the cause. In the sense of thought, the person has political
consciousness concerning the death penalty. There is the awareness,
thinking, ethical elements, and intent. Yet still, the person never
moves to act upon those. This case is not merely speculative, because a
lots of people do live like this. A number of factors can disassociate
someoneâs will to implement their plans: weakness of will, distractions,
alienation, depression, lack of interest, other priorities, feelings of
helplessness, and so on.
In this case, we would not really think that the person has political
consciousness in the strong sense, because they never act on it. The
action validates the mental content of their beliefs, and specifically
their intent and ethical commitments. To will something and think that
itâs the good or right thing to do carries with it some commitment to
action. In extreme cases, if someone never acts at all, it casts some
doubt at least on the depth of belief. It certainly is possible to hold
things one fails to act upon, but political consciousness is a stronger
kind of thing. It is one we expect to have some causal force beyond a
mere speculative commitment. There appears to be an action component of
consciousness.
For these reasons, consciousness is a bad framing of the issue.[115]
Consciousness reduces the role of political ideas to their role as part
of experience as a subject, reasoning, and decisions. Recall that this
is a similar and consistent mistake that came up earlier in our inquiry.
As agents, we come at the world through our experience as reasoning
subjects making choices. Beyond that conscious experience as agents,
there is also an interaction with the world that makes up political
subjectivity.
A better way to approach the problem is thinking of it as a form of
cognition. Cognition is a concept of mental processes. Cognition
involves mentation, but not necessarily always conscious mentation or
awareness. Cognition is likewise connected to behavior. While
consciousness is fundamentally about experiences of phenomena, cognition
straddles the line between thought and thought embodied in the behavior
and activities of agents. Roughly speaking, cognition is a broad enough
concept to let us get at the problem looking at the experiences,
awareness, and activity of agents. Political cognition is a series of
processes both conscious and unconscious (or exhibited) through
patterned activity and mental content. It is the synthesis of internal
life that is acted out.
With the death penalty example, consider now an activist who does
participate in associated activity, such as letters to senators,
rallies, reading publications, and so on. We have a few components.
There are the personâs convictions about what constitutes undue killing,
the role of society and prisons, beliefs about justice, and alternatives
to dealing with criminals. These constitute the normative and ethical
states associated with the ideas. Additionally, there are ideas about
how changes might occur, actions that are warranted, and the beliefs
that make up the implementation of their vision. Lastly, there are the
activities themselves that both reflect the thinking and are themselves
a component of what it means to hold such beliefs and convictions.
Political cognition then is a systematic relationship between thought,
activity, and values in an agent. Here the previous discussion helps us
understand how it develops. In a certain respect it is no different from
how people come to form ideas in general. Taken another way, political
cognition is a very particular sort of facet of mental life. It isnât
simply ethical positions, because within it, it contains both an
analysis of the existing social world and certain practical commitments
to changing it. Likewise, itâs not merely a series of practices because
of the necessary ethical commitments and beliefs inherent. There appears
to be two factors bearing down on the situation.
First, there is mental life and the thinking of the individual.
Reflection on the death penalty certainly has a role to play in bringing
the agent to act, form beliefs, and maintain various desires and
intensions. Reflection can change behavior, alter beliefs, and bring
about new forms of thought and relationships to others. This is evident
in simple ways. If I find myself biting my nails unconsciously, becoming
aware of that fact can allow me to stop my behavior. Itâs also true of
larger scale beliefs. Consider people watching television in the
1950s who witnessed the brutal repression of civil rights activists by
State and mob violence. The overt awareness of brutality and repression
made conscious by the perception of the images of violence led to
changes regarding segregation and racism in some.[116] Conscious beliefs
like âthe world is round,â âcapitalism is wrong,â or âthis world is an
illusion,â can have a deep influence on the course of history. Occupyâs
â1% versus the 99%â certainly had, in whatever complicated scheme we
want to cook up, a causal effect on the events of history. Thoughts can
make things happen. The act of reflection certainly can then have the
power to transform tacit beliefs, values, and ideology alongside
behavior.
Second, there is the force of history acting upon individuals. Our
thinking often is changed not by our conscious reflection, but rather by
the imposition of external forces on our minds. Advertising is a
particularly obvious example of this. Many of the cultural associations
with smoking (relaxation, rebellion, being hip, and so on) are directly
related to the interventions of the industry through advertisement.
Typically, people did not think they would start smoking to be cool.
Unconscious elements can shift peopleâs motivational states without
their awareness. Or consider the role that the illness of a loved one
plays in changing peopleâs beliefs about right and wrong. The TV show
Breaking Bad immortalized this example through the protagonist, who
turns to the underworld of the drug economy to fund his chemotherapy
when he finds no other options. Faced with utter deprivation, many
people come to re-evaluate the morality of using whatever means at their
disposal to help their loved ones, though this is typically not through
issues so explicitly reasoned out.
In the world of politics, a riot is yet another example of these
external forces apparently acting upon cognition rather than the other
way around. Whatever the process is of the readiness to riot, it is
largely facts about the situation and crowd that tell us about a riot,
rather than the explicit conscious reasoning of individualsâthough this
isnât to diminish the role of the deliberate aspect of rioting. In most
riots, the actions of the rioters likely go against whatever conscious
political beliefs the individuals hold. Perhaps some rioters are
ideologically prepared to wage urban warfare for their cause, but for
the majority this is likely not the case except in exceptional
historical moments of prolonged social war. For the purposes of
argument, consider only those who act against their political beliefs
based on the force of the moment to draw a lesson. This is where,
historically, the division has been laid. Is cognition a distraction
while the real forces that move political action are objective facts
about societies in conflict? Without overt cognition will change forever
be displaced by deception, recuperation, and inertia? There is a
parallel gap between social emergent forces and agency in the realm of
political cognition, just as with power, action, and motivation.
Whatever theory we desire should capture these facts then: conscious
reflection can cause political changes in the world, and largescale
forces sometimes act against the apparent thinking of political agents.
The first piece of the puzzle is to question the conceptualization of
thoughts. In much discussion of political ideas, thoughts are considered
as timeless entities that can appear and disappear at will. Thereâs a
logic to this. You can think the same thing Iâm thinking (more or less)
and these thoughts can be thought of whenever we like. I can think, âI
like kittens,â a hundred times over any day of the year I like, and you
can think it too.
This is a limited picture of human thinking, however. Thoughts are not
only passing elements that catch our eye like magnificent clouds that
blow through at random. Thoughts are more like a continuous stream, each
feeding into one another, and all bound together in an enormous thread
stretching back into time. Thoughts have history. My love of kittens is
a complete entity, but it is tied to a number of other thoughts,
experiences, and concrete physical things in the world. There are the
pleasures Iâve experienced, thoughts Iâve had about myself, and the
kinds of things I like, e.g. kittens, books, and so on. Thoughts
themselves reflect facts about the world, my own history, and my
conscious relationship to my memories/experiences/self-conceptions.
Itâs perceivable when we consider the difference between two people in
the 1950sâa Southern white and a foreigner who think âsegregation is
wrong,â that there is a similarity between the two thoughts, yet
relevant to understanding the thoughts in the two people is an
understanding of the history of the person in relation to their thought,
and the relationship of that person to the history of the world they
exist in. The white Southerner came to have that thought in a different
way than the foreigner, and the meaning (both in terms of significance
and literal meaning) of the thought is different.
By understanding thoughts as historical entities, acted upon by physical
and social forces, we begin to dissolve the apparent fork between
thought and action in the political domain. This is because political
cognition is an emergent product of the interaction of individuals with
their political world. That is that the cognitive states of individuals
emerge out of complex systemic interactions between agents, their
biology, and emergent forces in the world on a number of levels
(interpersonal, social, and high level emergent structures). These
thoughts do not stand outside of that causal world, however. Thoughts
themselves create changes within agents that then create shifts in the
world.
The problem with cruder ideas about this is that it is difficult to
conceive how shifts in thinking can have such force. Reflect on the
earlier discussion of people being motivated to follow through with
their ideas. It is clear that there are gaps between thought and action,
internal life and weight of force on our whole beings. Recall the
concepts of disproportionate causation and equilibrium from emergence.
Our naive view of causality is that of billiard balls hitting each other
and creating observable and measurable shifts. Most causation isnât like
this, and especially not our thoughts. Throwing a ball into a hurricane
produces a different trajectory of the ball than on a windless day.
Thoughts likewise have different causal impact based on the total
context they act upon (if they become instantiated). Anti-militarist
actions during World War I had a different context than during the
Vietnam War. Our thoughts are filtered through a specific social context
of action (and the experiences of the agent previously), and have their
effect based on their place both within us and history.
Our thoughts are then emergent products of history, and likewise history
is partly an emergent product of our thoughts. Seeing this as a system
that grows and adapts with emergent properties gets us out of the
chicken or the egg analogy that plagued much thinking on the matter.
People fought segregation both because of changes in their political
cognition and their political cognition changed because of changes
within society (and later with their actions). The concept of cognition
itself helps us understand this by providing a relation between thought
and action. Rather than seeing them as wholly separate entities acting
on each other, cognition shows us the way in which our agency and
consciousness is systemic and constantly changing in parallel with and
as a part of the world. We are responding to the world and at the same
time creating new worlds, with our thinking and action transforming and
representing these facts at the same time. We hold these relations to
ourselves as well as to others and the world.
Note that power is key within this dynamic. In the last chapter, we saw
that power functions as an internal experience, sets of abilities,
relations between agents, and as an emergent force between groups. That
form, powerâs ability to move between levels and spheres, is reflected
in political cognition. Existing channels, networks, and transmissions
of power form roads that our cognition travels down and acts upon. In
many ways, power relationships are the basic building blocks of society,
though fluid ones that are constantly being recreated.
Our mental life flows along these webs of power, changing them,
responding to them, and recreating power both internally and in our
social relations. So people do not support democracy or monarchy because
of timeless abstract considerations. People come to consider such issues
because there are a series of channels that they interact with in
society: people discuss them; there are institutions and organs that
project them; they have experiences with emergent power structures; and
they reflect on the various intersections of these facts in their life.
Power is at the center of political cognition, because it is a force
that shapes and guides the way our thought flows and is the ultimate
underlying field of struggle. There is a key to understanding political
cognition in power.
The problem of political cognition then is ill-framed, placed in a trap
of false dichotomies. Armed with emergence, we see the problem is not
how cognition and ideology have a role in the abstract, but rather what
role? The real problem for libertarians lies in understanding critical
cognition or political cognition applied against the existing order.
Specifically, when looking at a critique not simply of elements of
society, but rather a systemic critique of the fundamental
socio-political order present society is founded on. How is it that such
a society could be dismantled in spite of the fact that an overwhelming
majority of people do not have such political cognition? With people
living and thinking the way they are, how is a transformation possible?
There are many aspects to these issues, but let us take them up from the
perspective of the cognitive element.
It can seem unlikely that the majority of people could become
consciously revolutionary in the present conditions. The world we
inhabit isnât one that pushes people automatically to radically embrace
a fundamentally new social order. The opposite is true. Elaborate and
exhaustive resources are brought to bear on the entire population to
contest and ensure the direction and habits of peopleâs thinking and
actions. The State and capital control information networks, education,
and have massive resources for intervening to prevent the spread of
radical ideas even without directly dictating content or needing to
coerce obedience. Foucaultâs later lectures tried to map out the shift
towards the modern State and techniques of governance along these
lines.[117] The potency of the State stretches far beyond its immediate
functionaries, police, and soldiers through its adoption of large
sectors of social life that previously were provided by the community or
voluntary activity of organizations. State funding and carefully
cultivating relationships of permission, privilege, and punishment for
political opposition penetrate daily life through the organs of
organized social activity. Our schools are built around their
priorities. Churches are regulated and given special status for owning
property and exemption from taxes in the United States, thereby creating
relationships of dependency and implied consequences for
opposition.[118] The media consistently reproduces the limits of debate
in line with the interests of the powerful without needing any central
censure.[119] When there are breakdowns in the unity of social
institutions behind the State, there is infrastructure that puts limited
reforms on the table. The system can repress (and will), but it can also
integrate and internalize oppositions and demands through responding to
the needs of its opponents.
This may seem innocuous. Logically, any society would seek to reflect
and consciously reproduce its values and structural bases. States are
not different. For the critical libertarian thinker, the problem is
different. In broad brush strokes, the critical thinker identifies
exploitation and oppression as the core of systemic critique. Yet it is
precisely authority and hierarchical relationships that are reproduced,
engineered, and guarded by the forces of power acting on society. This
occurs not only through official institutions of power like prisons,
schools, military, police, and political parties, but also through other
institutionalized sites of ideological reproduction like think-tanks,
the institutionalized left and right, academia, hospitals and mental
health facilities, workplaces, and neighborhood organizations.
Workplaces are engineered for social control not only of the behavior of
workers, but also of their thoughts. Media is constructed around the
ideology, finance, and control of the perspectives of the various
factions of dominating power. More than institutions imposing this upon
us, we see immense networks of social relationships that in subtle ways
transmit and reproduce authority, hierarchy, and oppressive social
relationships throughout society. Families, churches, hospitals,
prisons, schools, and daily life are richly decorated with all the marks
of power and ideology being transmitted through our interactions and
thoughts. How we break from this, not just as individuals, but as a
whole society, is a profound problem and proves even more problematic
for people working towards a more libertarian society. That is, how can
huge numbers of people voluntarily shift not only their thinking, but
also come to act against immense powers?
Yet if a majority of people arenât committed to liberatory struggle and
society, it doesnât seem possible (or desirable) that a minority could
impose revolutionary change on an unwilling majority. It is not possible
because society would not be libertarian if it were imposed, and
unlikely simply because dismantling hierarchical power seems to require
a component of intentional collective action. A new society must be
constructed, and the freedom and equality that libertarians seek require
the active creativity and effort that can only come from the dedication
of countless individuals, rather than the watchful labor under gun,
whip, camera, or other means of economic and political coercion. There
is no trick, no institution, nor any daring act that could guarantee
this.
If society must be rebuilt on a freer and more equal basis, it implies a
great deal of thought and voluntary activity. This is the same voluntary
activity that seems so difficult today in light of authoritarian social
relations and ideology. Here we have a tension: the need for
transformation and the emergent social forces working to maintain an
equilibrium in society that prevents the spread of such cognition. This
tension often led people to seek shortcuts through putsches, imposition
of new social orders, or the magical thinking of fate. Malatesta warned
against believing that a mere victory by political activists could bring
about a free society.
We have undertaken the task of struggling against existing social
organization, and of overcoming the obstacles to the advent of a new
society in which freedom and wellbeing would be assured to everybody. To
achieve this objective, we organize ourselves and seek to become as
numerous and as strong as possible. But if it were only our anarchist
groupings that were organized; if the workers were to remain isolated
like so many units unconcerned about each other and only linked by the
common chain; if we ourselves besides being organized as anarchists in a
federation, were not as workers organized with other workers, we could
achieve nothing at all, or at most, we might be able to impose
ourselves...and then it would not be the triumph of anarchism, but our
triumph. We could then go on calling ourselves anarchists, but in
reality we should simply be rulers, and as impotent as all rulers are
where the general good is concerned.[120]
One reply to that tension is to look to ruptures or extreme political
events. Sometimes the course of historical events can sweep up whole
societies, and changes in conditions can open up spaces. Societies in
crisis lose equilibrium, disorder increases, and cognitive space is
available to question fundamental elements of society that were normally
assumed to be functional and necessary. Certainly, some of those
environments may facilitate transformations of some sort or another.
Looking for alternatives as systems lose political credibility could
lead to people seeking out liberatory possibilities. This may be a
partial answer to these issues as it identifies spaces where such
transformations might or might not occur.
Itâs important to recognize other alternative courses. Similar
environments, breakdowns in the ability of ruling powers to rule, also
open space for deeply repressive and authoritarian potentials, or more
innocuously for forms of reformism that reshape society to address
immediate needs, while leaving the fundamental social ills intact. All
the failures of the social struggles of the 19^(th) and 20^(th)
centuries suggest the dangers and limits of history simply delivering
liberatory cognition. Ruptures may provide some special opportunities,
but also may provide dangers without guarantees. Fascism in Germany
arose in the country perhaps with the largest and most organized
socialist left. Likewise, the Great Depression in the United States
built up a long-term momentum to save capitalism via the New Deal and
the Second World War, which created one of the most sustained periods of
capitalist regrowth in history. To avoid dystopian futures or getting
merely channeled into new circuits for capitalism and power, we need to
look further.
Reflect on what a rupture is. A rupture, in political terms, is some
kind of fundamental break or explosion from the dominant order of how
struggles normally happen. We could say more, but the key aspect here is
that a rupture is a sharp shift. Itâs surprising. You go from A to Z in
a sense. Ruptures exhibit emergent behavior in which the situation is
not easily traceable to the individuals in the moment or in previous
moments. If it is discernible, itâs only in retrospect and it is largely
rough and speculative.
A political strategy that relies on waiting for such moments faces an
epistemological problem brought to light by emergence. We donât have a
good way of knowing what leads up to these events, knowing when they
occur (except in more grand exhibitions), or even understanding the
processes within them. Complexity and action at a series of different
levels of analysis limit our thinking as protagonists. Weâre coming at
political struggle as people trying to figure out what to do. Ruptures
do not greet us that way. Ruptures are complex phenomena existing across
different planesâpolitical whirlwinds.
A few things can be taken from both this and the preceding discussion in
this text. We donât know in what way our present actions will or wonât
contribute to any potential situation that might give us opportunities.
This means that there is no neutral position regarding activity outside
ruptures. Waiting for them, trying to create them, or step-by-step
trying to walk towards liberation all have their own outcomes, though
not easily predictable ones. We can make good assessments and plans as
agents from our limited perspective, while recognizing we will not
necessarily be in positions to understand our place in history along the
way. The best way to view this scenario is that we do our best to find
ways to intervene, reflect, and adjust to our environment with humility.
Awaiting ruptures is one form of action; a form that may actually
prevent some ruptures from occurring that might otherwise have taken
place, and can impair us from responding should they occur. That is,
alongside an understanding of potentials from any historical moment
(ruptures or otherwise), we need an active understanding of our agency.
Itâs worth saying that our actions in more difficult mundane situations
carry not only the potential loss of opportunities, but hidden dark
alternatives as well. Failing to take the right course of action
day-to-day may also put us into positions in which when opportunities
arise, we find ourselves organized against them. This is why in many
instances forces of the left, such as many unions, political parties,
and NGOs, find themselves opposed to combative social movementsâhaving
rooted themselves in the power relations of existing capitalism, they
become thrown off balance when the dividing lines shift. That can push
forces for progress into conservative or even reactionary roles in
radical political events. Indeed, the early history of fascist movements
was filled with socialists, Marxists, and some anarchists forming their
first militants in the face of what would become a world revolutionary
wave surrounding the events of 19161921. History is filled with radical
oppositions become ruling tyrantsâa historical hangover that haunts us
today in places like Cuba, South Africa, India, and China.
Next, the inherent dangers within the breakdown of social order mean
that our forces are not merely up against a single unified oppositional
order, but rather they are up against an infinite set of potential
opposing, supporting, and overlapping forces that may or may not be
generated from struggles unfolding. This is different from a conception
of history in which the forces of good do battle with the forces of evil
to set the stage for a new humanity. Actions produce new forces and new
questions that we cannot anticipate based on our position both as
sentient beings and within the complex networks of social systems that
we grow and adapt to. There is not then a linear march against the
present order, nor is there any safety in its destruction. Victory is
uncertain (especially in an era of ecological devastation), and any
belief that we can just go forward and maintain ourselves intact through
small struggles is hopelessly naive. The best we can do is set out
towards the libertarian alternative responding as best we can along the
way.
Another way of conceiving the cognitive transformation necessary for
libertarian society is through shifting conditions for the growth of
libertarian thought. While we may not globally be able to dismantle the
reproduction of authoritarian ideology, this does not mean that there
are not factors (nodes, points, and relationships) that we can contest
and change. Ruptures are examples of largescale openings, but
small-scale ones exist as well and likely are more important in creating
the conditions in which libertarian forces could grow, sustain, and
reproduce. Consider the âI am the 99%â meme where individuals uploaded
photos of themselves with a sign describing their troubles and the
phrase âI am the 99%â. People came to take up, develop, and reproduce
the meme as a series of images linking their experiences with features
of the system. Through relationships of art, social media, design, and
sharing, new forms of cognition were being transformed and transmitted
through huge numbers of people relatively rapidly. In a way, this was
part of a rupture. Yet the example is tangible and proximate in a way
that speaks to more run-of-the-mill questions. That reflection of
othersâ lives that speaks to the experiential reality of millions itself
caused further thoughts and actions as people were carried into the
streets. In infinite ways throughout society the transformations of
ideology occur and lead to shifts that we do have access to.
Ruptures and these transmissions of power and thought then are on a
continuum, but not a linear continuum. Ruptures are emergent out of
countless contestations, reformulations, actions, and reflections. We
lack the comfort of knowing the effect of our actions, and yet there is
also the potential for our actions to have unknown causes, effect that
is far out from where we had anticipated and has at times radical and
disproportionate influence. We live in the realm of those social
transmissions, and within our daily lives and struggles there are
countless places where we may work as political agents to transform our
situation.
Those struggles can give us space for the flourishing of a critical
cognition in a number of ways. In doing so, we put into practice our
politics, and we test it. Additionally, we can develop a praxis through
successes and challenges. Those moments may have an indirect impact that
can resonate in the lives of those involved well beyond the present.
Society is such that seeds planted today in immediate struggles can
possibly become roots that grow forests of liberation. More strongly,
sometimes our contestations can have direct impact on individuals and
groups, and at times facilitate the development of ruptures.
Critical cognition can be thought of as developing through the
interaction
of conscious and non-conscious processes throughout society. This
cognition develops in parallel to activity against the system. Evolving
alongside political action, it emergently produces countless breaks,
transformations, and potentials both at small-scale and large-scale
levels. Thus, the roles of intervention and historical forces are
inherently fused, with agents playing a special, though limited, role in
realizing them. Neither the patient planner can will such changes into
existence, nor can we sit back awaiting that they be inevitably carried
to us.
Fundamentally organized around power as the central plain that cognition
grows around; the task of the radical is to try to root their actions in
their historical moment as agents, while preparing to adapt to an
uncertain and unpredictable future. In this way, we can see that the
problem of liberatory cognition is that of political agency navigating
the tangles of our lives. This poses an alternative to views of history
as being written by a divine playwright versus radicalism as a form of
personal enlightenment.
Looked at this way, the field of liberatory cognition is wide open. We
have much to gain from exploring spaces for the transformation of
cognition. That is, what environments is it most likely to grow in?
Where are places we can challenge the transmission of ideology? Which
actions open up that space? What role can ideas play in interpreting
events and actions?
These are not timeless or universal questions, but rather they are
things to be settled in the lived political struggles of particular
contexts. With an understanding of emergence and power, libertarian
thinkers can set out to open up these channels and create new thinking
and practices around the possibilities for change that stand before us.
Having explored the problem of what revolutionary cognition is and how
it comes to be obtained, other problems present themselves. Setting
aside whether or not someone is engaging in such cognition, we can ask
what it looks like when it comes to have force. How does cognition
translate into action? There is overt conscious cognition, and yet there
are other cases that are more ambiguousâ people who do not consider
themselves militants who break from the inertia of the present order and
take action that sets them against immense forces. There are a number of
cases to consider:
lifetimeâsindoctrination of the evils of such thinking.
theState, and charges into machine gun fire to bring down a regime.
management, the State, and the union despite willingly and
overwhelmingly having signed contracts not to strike.
There are certainly more examples we could consider. Yet there is a
parallel here between the cases. At their core they involve a specific
type of motivation in their actions. Liberatory political motivation is
a motivation of a specific sort. It is not the motivation to merely act,
but rather to act against the present order (and potential future
orders) in spite of the weight of history, the mechanisms of order of
the present, and the ill consequences of the present towards a better
potential future. In these instances, the actions of the participants
also weigh against common sense of their day and even the normal reasons
for acting.
Action itself seems quite simple, but explaining what exactly it is and
its function has created puzzles that have sustained philosophers for
millennia. To understand how it is that radical situations can come to
have motivational force for actors, we need to understand both
motivation and action.
The first relevant distinction is between actions and events. Consider
the act of urination. On the one hand, someone getting up and urinating
in a toilet is a clear action. Now consider incontinent people who
urinate on themselves. This is not an action. Why is that? It may be an
action in the sense that someone does it, but it is no more an action
than other things that happen to us. No one would argue that my liver
processing sugars is an action I carry out, since it happens whether or
not I like it. Happenings to us may be external like rocks falling on
us, or internal like losing control of our bladder muscles and having an
experience of incontinence. The difference between incontinence and
urinating is that someone does the latter and not the former.
What distinguishes (in part, or at its simplest) action from events is
that there is someone, an agent, who intends to do something or another.
A lot of ink has been spilt to distill the correct formula that captures
only actions and not events, but a rough-and-ready distinction like that
is fine for our purposes.
The common way of explaining actions appeals to peopleâs intentions and
things about the world. This is enshrined in the joke âWhy did the
chicken cross the road? To get to the other side.â It is a joke because
itâs obvious that if the chicken crossed the road, it in some sense
intended to do so. Actions have intentions and reasons to act.
Consider further distinctions. Though all action is intentional, not all
action is consciously intentional. In other words, if I unconsciously
increase my speed on a bicycle in the rain, the fact that I was not
aware that I did so does not change the fact that I, as an agent,
intentionally did so. By accelerating in the rain, I sought to get to my
destination and out of the rain more quickly, and the acceleration
brought me my aim. Conscious awareness of action then is not necessary
for us to act.
Similarly, itâs possible for us to act against our conscious reasons for
acting, and to do so intentionally. Think about the weak-willed cheater
who wishes to remain faithful to a partner, but sleeps with someone in
spite of consciously willing instead to go home. The act of infidelity
exhibits the agentâs intention to have sex, in spite of consciously
willing otherwise. Conscious intentional action is then only a smaller
subset of action, and many psychologists believe it is perhaps even a
small minority.
There are a number of problems that contradict the intuitive idea of
action. First, consider groups. If we understand action via the
intention and reasons of an individual, then how do we understand
groups? Groups carrying out acts together would have to be understood in
some way as the product of the intentions of individuals in combination.
The problem becomes that there is no distinction between a group, as in
a cohesive band of individuals acting in concert, and a collection of
individuals who happen to share an intention.
Take the example of a group stuck in traffic after an interminable
wreck. Imagine one scenario in which there is a group of drivers who all
decide to honk in unison and express their collective rage. Now think of
another scenario in which the same drivers independently honk, and
happen to honk in unison. What are the differences between these two in
terms of agency? One could say that part of the difference is that
groups intend to act together. You could try to stipulate that
intentions involve the method by which theyâre achieved. Still this
fails to capture the difference between a group of drivers who honk
together, and a collection of individuals honking. An organized honking
group is one thing. Individuals who happen to honk together or who join
in honking out of anger are different. That is, the group agency has
different forms, and those forms are not just facts about each
individualâs intentions. There seems to be something more to being a
group than the sum of intentions of individuals. Group agency is
emergent and takes different forms based on different processes.
Taking the point further, reflect on the fact that group agency is
supposed to derive from the intention of individuals since this is what
agency is supposed to be about. Yet, often, groups acting consciously in
concert have contradictory intentions. People in the course of the group
act come to take part in a group action, but contradict the group
intention in the midst, and yet remain a part of the group and the act.
For example, consider a band of kidnappers who set forth to hold some
unlucky person ransom. Different members of the band have their
respective roles, but one kidnapper gets cold feet and questions his
role. He is assigned to shoot the bodyguard to facilitate the grab. The
kidnapper then fails to shoot the bodyguard and laments his role in the
act, vowing to have no part of the bounty or take any part in the
aftermath. The robber still engaged in the kidnapping with the band, and
though he lost his intention to hold the person ransom, ended up being a
part of a kidnapping. Setting aside the judgment of the kidnapper (who
would be culpable nonetheless for the crime), we see that it is still
the case that this band, of which the kidnapper was a part, did in fact
take such an action. This shows that group agency can permit
contradictory intentions. This is true to some extent, though we can
imagine that if enough individuals fail to intend to complete the act,
such actions would fail. Still, this case shows how group agency is not
a matter of simply the collection of individual intentions, since
contradictory intentions are permissible. Group agency is an emergent
force that is greater than the sum of individual intentions, and takes
on its own behavior beyond the intentionality of its constituting
members.
The second problem with the intuitive account understanding of action
arises from our understanding of our mental states. Remember that action
was proposed to be about beliefs, desires, and intentionsâmental states
of an agent.
There are clear supporting reasons for this. When grabbing a glass of
water, we do need to understand a desire to drink, beliefs about what it
would take to drink such water, and facts about beings that can will
something to be so and carry it out. Part of what group agency raises
points to another lingering issue though: the way in which things
outside ourselves, external matters, relate to our intentions. Take the
cases of the two groups of honking people. Relevant to understanding the
differences between an individual intending to honk, a collection of
individuals honking, and a group honking in concert are not merely facts
about the internal mental life of the individuals, but also occurrences
and context in the world outside those individuals.
If group agency is in fact more than the simple sum of the intentions of
the individuals contained in the group, then likewise the account of the
actions of such groups is more than the sum of their mental states. At
the very least we can say that in some instances we must appeal to
external context as an explanation of action in order to make sense of
it. Or in other words, the mental states of individuals are incomplete
(though necessary). Part of the content of the individualâs mental
states are things in the world. This was indicated by the account of
cognition in the previous chapter. Thoughts are mutually constitutive
states of mental states, relationships, and features of the objective
context that make up the world of the agent. In group agency, the states
of the individuals define the action of the group in a complex and
dynamic fashion not wholly understandable in terms of facts about the
individual alone. Thoughts themselves are emergent, and the feedback
between agency and action in societies produces new emergent forms of
agency.
To clarify we can introduce a number of distinctions to clarify the
cases. Imagine that the same group of people honking in traffic instead
happen to accidentally honk at the same time. We might call this an
unintentional group event, as it is not an action in the sense that no
one intended to do anything as a group. In the situation in which
individuals honk together intentionally out of frustration, the group
action is done unconsciously (without identification with the group).
This would be a form of unconscious intentional group action. When the
honkers act as a group, perhaps a coordinated honking flash mob of rage,
this could be called conscious intentional group action.
In summary, intuitive ideas about action fall short on a few accounts:
mental states are insufficient to explain actions, and understanding
agency requires looking not only at individuals, but also at more
complex configurations such as groups. Recognizing the shortcomings of
the intuitive account yields some points to reflect on. First, action
concerns agents and their mental states, but is not reducible to those
facts. Second, groups can have agency that is greater than the agency of
the individuals. Third, the relationship between awareness, intention,
and successfully completing an action depends greatly on the situation
(the agent, context, and other agents). Without proposing a theory of
action itself, which would take us far from our task, we can assert that
agency is relative, that there are emergent products of the interaction
of individual agents with the world and other agents, and that nonmental
facts are necessary to understanding the actions of agents.
Now let us return to motivation. Given a rough sense of action, what
bearing do these issues have on motivation? Like the intuitive account
of action, the intuitive understanding of motivation runs into some
problems. Similarly, we typically think of motivation as being a product
of reasoning and determined by our mental lives. We can contemplate this
as part of a naive psychology of our lives as subjects, wherein the
conscious mind is the driver and our mental life is the core of our
personhood, actions, and decisions. These ideas are not totally crazy.
Many of the most important things that happen in oneâs life do fit this
picture. Yet with motivation there are again some key things missing.
Unconscious motivations are fairly obvious. Advertising certainly uses
techniques aimed at motivating agents to act without their awareness of
having been motivated by outside forces. Indeed, when we are so moved,
we feel as though we motivated ourselves to seek out whatever they are
trying to sell us.
In fact, the problem is deeper. The line between what is a conscious and
unconscious motivation to act is extremely blurry. For instance, sex is
one area where such forces are notorious difficult to pull apart. There
are clear cases of unconscious motivation towards sex, such as people
being manipulated into acts because of instinctual sexual desires they
are unaware of. People use flirting to influence decisions in unrelated
matters like when people dress sexy and flirt to land jobs or seek
non-sexual favors from people they know are susceptible. Likewise, there
are conscious sexual motivations in which agents think to themselves
that they ought to do some act in order to attain sex. At what stage is
sexual motivation about conscious thoughts and intentions versus
unconscious ones? Our conscious ideas about someone else influence our
perception of their sensuality. That appeal becomes an unconscious
force, which in turn can influence our thinking and motivation about
that person. The line in practice is quite fluid.
Or take a more mundane example: do depressed people who binge on ice
cream do so by unconscious or conscious motivation? From the conscious
side, depressed people likely do have the thought, âI want to eat ice
cream,â and are motivated by its pleasing aspects in some broad sense or
another. Yet, surely unconscious elements are at play here as well.
Depressed people seeking gratification have connections to such activity
through socialization related to food and eating, advertising and group
behavior associated with ice cream and sweets, and even chemical
processes perhaps incentivizing behavior on some level. In practice the
gap between the thoughts that motivate eating the ice cream and
unconscious forces that push the agent towards the thoughts are hard to
pull apart. This is because those unconscious forces are the kinds of
things that make us who we are.
Our dispositions and motivations as agents are clearly shaped by our own
internal mental processes. Yet at the same time, it is our relationship
and reaction to the world that intrinsically shapes those thoughts in a
feedback cycle. This is true first because the nature of our thoughts
refer to and are partly defined by external things and relations. It is
also true because unconscious elements in our mind may influence
conscious elements, and vice versa. The causal chains between conscious
mental activity, unconscious mental activity, and the world are complex.
They exhibit, in sum, emergent properties that produce motivations and
actions of the individual in a complex and adaptive manner.
This bucks how we normally think about our actions. We donât think about
the sum context upon which our decisions and drives are produced. One
could speculate this is largely connected to our awareness of our
experiences as agents having made such decisions. It feels as though we
arrive at decisions and act on our own somehow. Of course, there are
counterexamples, such as when we fail ourselves by doing against our
best intentions what we decided not to. Emergence gives us an out
though, because at the level of organization of an agent, it may be true
that our experience of mental life is valid as such, while likewise
being constituted by external factors that mutually produce those
experiences. Emergence should be taken not just in terms of levels, but
also as showing that particular decisions of individuals, motivations,
or courses of action coevolve in the environment in which they occur and
in the relative context leading up to that event.
Such a discussion clearly parallels concepts of free will. While getting
into that mire would take us far afield, itâs worth recognizing that
however we understand it, similar concepts are involved. There does
appear to be on some level a will that has causal power. People have a
mental life that, for all intents and purposes, does seem capable of
causing actions to occur. Likewise, those actions are understandable in
terms of some complicated account of the total of causes that made any
particular action occur. And with emergence those causes must be
understood as producing novel properties, such as wills that are both
causally bound by the world, and containing an experience of what it is
like to be an agent. This debate can become torturous and ultimately a
distraction. The argument here merely requires acceptance of both will
and the causal chain that determines our actions.
Let us summarize then. Typically, we think of motivation as largely a
conscious reasoned process determined by our mental lives. Our decisions
based on motivations are thought to be relatively context neutral,
arising from our decisions and dispositions. In the above arguments this
view has been problematized, and an alternative understanding proposed.
In political thinking specifically, we see variants of these views. On
the one hand, it is proposed that people act and are motivated
politically by use of their reason or rationality. On the other hand,
there are suppositions that base instincts and interests drive political
action. Based on the above account, any such distinction should be
questioned thoroughly. The division between conscious and unconscious
motivations is untenable in practice from a political perspective. If
itâs not easily distinguishable how much rational versus arational
processes motivating us contribute to action, any theory that bases a
political program for action on such distinctions will be prone to
getting it wrong.
Next, consider the context relativity of motivation. The death of a
loved one can make some acts, self-destructive behaviors, motivational
that otherwise wouldnât be. Likewise, politically, it is actually quite
profound that motivations should be relative. This speaks to situations
in which people become swept up into political action when they might
not have otherwise, both in terms of the possibility of such acts and
their limitations.
Taking a concrete example, think of popular attacks on police stations
following the killing of a community member. While conscious reason may
play some role, the interplay between perception, conditioned
experiences with power and police, reactions to the responses of others,
and the scope of political participation all interact to produce a
complex (emergent) situation. Here group agency, emergent behavior,
novel forms of power, and cognition interact to produce situations that
may not have existed earlier and that are not reducible to any of the
individual components. Such examples illustrate the insufficiency of the
intuitive account, and the role of power, emergence, and an emergent
approach to cognition and motivation in helping us to make sense of the
intervention of political forces within concrete circumstances.
Motivation then reflects both the historical context of the actor, the
power relationships that the actor stands in, and the emergent forces
acting upon the agent. At the same time, the agent is bound within a
system with recursive feedback wherein the actions of the agent
themselves can change those power relationships and the context for
action. There can be said to be a complex interrelation between the
motivation of agents, their actions, and the political context.
Traditional political thought, including most of the historic left,
tends to reduce these questions to intention, leadership, and morals, or
negate them altogether. However, the social, individual, and objective
context are relevant for the unconscious and conscious decisions made by
political actors.
Here we can return to the fundamental question of how it is that radical
acts, breaks, and ruptures can come to have motivational force for
political agents. More importantly, how is it that people in general can
come to act in a liberatory manner against the dominant order, whether
in a rupture or otherwise? Like the answers to similar quandaries
throughout the book, the framework laid out shifts the problem from
universals to the specificity of our biological and historical moments.
Motivational states are relational. They reflect processes both
conscious and unconscious within a broader social systemic context. As
cognition is built upon the latticework of power relationships in social
systems, motivation traces the curves of action through the paths of the
mind of the actor, constantly redefining itself and acting within the
social world. Motivation is not then a matter of raw force or raw will,
but rather a matter of history.
Motivation is emergent from the mind of the agent, but comes to be so
only relationally through the reference and power of forces outside the
individual. These features interact, shift, and influence each other in
a constant process. Motivation is not fixed then, but constantly
changing us, changing our actions, and being changed by our experiences.
Utilizing a theory of power and emergence, we can understand such
situations in terms of the social relationships of the agent, their
abilities and the abilities of those they stand in relation with, a
physical-historical context of action, and (emergent) agency produced
via the interaction of agents with the world and each other. Such events
are understood in terms of agents, context, emergent properties, and
power. In one way, we could question altogether why it would be that
motivation would be a problem at all. If we seek motivation to act on
liberatory lines, the problem is not how any such motivation is
possible, but rather how motivation to do this or that act can be.
Emergence and power provide maps that lead us out of determinist and
reductionist thinking and that situate motivational problems within the
concrete forces and moments they occur.
The solution to the role of motivation in liberatory acts is then a
matter of the relation of the act to the actors in the context of the
trajectory of history and struggle. We do not have abstract formulas for
this. Just as with liberatory cognition, the work of the radical in
terms of motivation is to look to the struggles, acts, and actors for
answers. The complexity of living systems bars us from creating
off-the-cuff blueprints for, say, revolutions or even post-capitalist
societies. Still, looked at from this perspective, theories can be
created that help us better understand how people can act against
dominant orders. In what context might immigrant communities in the US
take up struggle directly against immigration authorities? How could
factory seizures become motivational for the mass unemployed in this
country today? Can ghettoized communities repel the effects of prison
society and drug organizations to create a collective neighborhood
order? With a theory of motivation, the steps to take up these questions
within the spaces we find ourselves in are in front of us.
These conclusions came from the investigation of motivation to act that
was broken down into thought and action through cognition. Non-mental
factors and unconscious mental life have a strong role in the production
of motivational states of actors. Motivation then arises out of the
emergent relationship between will, context, and unconscious mental
states within the agent. From a liberatory perspective, motivation to
engage in radical acts does not come from indoctrination, pure reason,
or generalities, but instead is a feature of different contexts and
populations responding to the world they are adapting and responding
within. Here the theory returns to the beginning of the arguments.
Agency and action are activity shaped by the interdependence between an
individualâs role and social forces that are at the same time forming
and formed of our actions.
Viewed in reverse, the arguments of this book begin with the proposal of
agency that is constantly defining and defined by a complex and adaptive
social system mutually constituted. Mental life is built not only out of
conscious thought and reasoning, but in reference to things and forces
outside us, our profound unconscious internal processes, and the back
and forth between these elements. We experience this process over time
as historical beings aware of our existence, and recorded in ever
changing memories that are set against our identities and altered in
light of our acts and thoughts. Inherently connected to the thoughts and
actions of others in human societies, relationships of power permeate
our mental lives and make concrete the constantly forming social order.
Power bridges our cognition and the social world in action, becoming
institutionalized in perpetual habits reproduced collectively. Modern
forms of power are built upon this older human foundation, of which the
State and capitalism represent a tiny fragment of our common history.
Emergence provides a view to comprehend and strategize for action within
this global system of living beings from the smallest element to the
totality of social systems.
There are elements of these issues that I didnât consider until years
after these arguments were already solidified. Some of them have already
arisen or been hinted at in the course of the reasoning that led me down
the path to more extensive consideration. Time is central to the
arguments given in the book because of the role of time in the formation
of cognition. Our experience of acting as creatures in time, and with
time limits imposed by our mortality, underlies the discussion of
cognition, for example. Social rituals and concepts of time are also
emergently produced, reflecting both the dominant powers of their day
and struggle against such. Connected to time is change. Our perception
or ignorance of change shapes how we come to act and how we respond to
the flow of time in societies marked by struggles over power and the
broader human pursuit of better lives.
As with any discussion of liberation, ethics also was latent within
these issues. Liberatory ethics has been underexplored sometimes with
disdain from the Marxist tradition for so-called moralism and desires to
keep a distance from liberal morality. Still the outlines of ethical
issues that could be fruitfully explored are within the text, especially
concerning how motivation connects with values, what role values have in
cognition, and exploring how emergence does or doesnât impact our values
and their implementation. These are issues Iâve since begun to address
in the years that followed starting my initial manuscript.
While the focus here has been on theory, its worth will only be showed
through it being able to aid work by helping people to navigate the
situations that unfold in coming years. The best that theory can do is
give words to things that were fragmented and on the tips of the tongues
of many, and in doing so deepen tendencies and give them a more coherent
and organized form. The production of theory itself is emergent in the
same way as other forms of human thought and activity, and defined by
the debates, history, and actions of human community and those of us
within it fighting for libertarian society. As we are writers stealing
time away from our jobs and social obligations, the best legacy for a
work such as this is to spur others to solidify their ideas and
experiences within their own perspectives.
Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich. Bakunin on Anarchy. Edited and
translated by Sam Dolgoff. New York: Vintage Books, 1971. Accessed
February 2, 2016.
.
âââ. The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism. Compiled
and edited by Grigorii Petrovich Maksimov. London: The Free Press, 1964.
Barclay, Harold B. The State. London: Freedom Press, 2003.
Barret, Daniel. Los Sediciosos Despertares de la AnarquĂa. Buenos Aires:
Libros de Anarres, 2011. Accessed April 27, 2016.
laturbaediciones.files.wordpress.com
.
Beam, Louis. âLeaderless Resistance.â The Seditionist 12 (1992): 12â13.
Accessed April 27, 2016.
â.
Bedau, Mark A. âDownward Causation and Autonomy in Weak Emergence.â
In Emergence: Contemporary Readings in Philosophy and Science, edited by
Mark A. Bedau and Paul Ed Humphreys, 155â188. Cambridge, Massachusetts:
MIT press, 2008.
âââ. âWeak Emergence.â NoĂ»s 31, s11 (1997): 375â399. Accessed May 7,
2016.
.
Bookchin, Murray. The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution
of Hierarchy.
Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire Books, 1982. Accessed May 7, 2016.
Cappelletti, Angel J. La IdeologĂa Anarquista. Buenos Aires, Argentina:
Libros de la Araucaria, 2006.
Carlyle, Thomas. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. New
York: Frederick A. Stokes & Brother, 1888. Accessed April 27, 2016.
.
Chomsky, Noam. âNotes on Anarchism.â In Daniel Guerin, Anarchism: From
Theory to Practice. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970. Accessed May
8, 2016,
.
Chomsky, Noam and Herman, Edward. Manufacturing Consent: The Political
Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon, 1988.
Clastres, Pierre. Society Against the State: Essays in Political
Anthropology. New York: Zone Books, 1987.
Coletivo Maria Tonha. âFundador do MPL Fala Sobre o Movimento, as
Jornadas de Junho e o Tarifa Zero.â Brasil De Fato, July 25, 2013.
Accessed January 14, 2016.
.
Corning, Peter A. âThe Re-emergence of âEmergenceâ: A Venerable Concept
in Search of a Theory.â Complexity 7, no. 6 (2002): 18â30. Accessed
April 27, 2016.
v=1&t=injrzjnu&s=24031294b897aaa50d42864ed8b06ff4ef857bae.
Correa, F. âCrear un Pueblo Fuerte.â In Anarquismo y Poder Popular:
TeorĂa y PrĂĄctica Suramericana. BogotĂĄ, Colombia: Ediciones Gato Negro,
2011.
Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection:
Or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life and the
Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex New York: Modern
library, 1872.
dâEspagnat, Bernard. On Physics and Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2006.
Dolgoff, Sam, ed. and trans. Bakunin on Anarchy. New York: Vintage
Books, 1972.
Dugatkin, Lee Alan. âKropotkinâs Adventure in Science and Politics.â
Scientific American, September 13, 2011. Accessed February 16, 2015.
.
Fabbri, Luigi. âEl Concepto Anarquista de la RevoluciĂłn.â In Dictadura y
RevoluciĂłn. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Ediciones Libertad, 1921. Accessed
May 8, 2016.
folletoslibertad.angelfire.com
Fabbri, Luce. El Camino: Hacia un Socialismo sin Estado: En Cada Paso la
Realidad de la Meta. Montevideo, Uruguay: Editorial Nordan-Comunidad,
2000.
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Ropley,
Hants, UK: Zero Books, 2009.
Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the
CollĂšge de France 19771978. Vol. 4. Translated by Graham Burchell. New
York: Picador, 2009.
âââ. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the CollĂšge de France,
1975â76. Translated by David Macey. New York: Picador, 2003.
Gelles, David. âAt Zappos, Pushing Shoes and a Vision.â New York Times,
July 17, 2015. Accessed December 28, 1015.
.
Glaberman, Martin. Wartime Strikes. Detroit, MI: Bewick Editions, 1980.
Accessed December 28, 2015.
.
Goldman, Emma. Anarchism and Other Essays. New York: Mother Earth
Publishing Association: 1911. Accessed April 27, 2016.
.
Gordon, Daniel. A State of Mind. DVD. Directed by Daniel Gordon. 2004.
New York: Kino International, 2005.
Graeber, David. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly
Paradigm Press, 2004. Accessed April 27, 2016.
.
Gramsci, Antonio. Prison Notebooks: Three Volume Set. New York, Columbia
University Press, 2011.
Grosz, Elizabeth. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the
Untimely. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.
GuillamĂłn, AgustĂn. Ready for Revolution: The CNT Defense Committees in
Barcelona, 1933â1938. Translated by Paul Sharkey. Oakland, CA: AK Press,
2014.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2001.
Herman, Edward S. and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent. New York,
Pantheon, 1988.
Hirsch, Steven and Lucien Van der Walt, eds. Anarchism and Syndicalism
in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870â1940: The Praxis of
National Liberation, Internationalism, and Social Revolution. Leiden,
the Netherlands: Brill, 2010.
James, W. âGreat Men, Great Thoughts, and the Environment (Lecture
Delivered before the Harvard Natural History Society).â Atlantic
Monthly, October, 1880. Accessed January 1, 2015.
.
Johnson, Steven. Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities,
and Software. New York: Scribner, 2002.
Holland, John H. Emergence: From Chaos to Order. Cambridge, MA: Perseus
Books, 1998.
Industrial Workers of the World. âWork-to-Rule: A Guide.â Edited by the
Libcom Collective. 2006. Accessed April 27, 2016.
.
Kant, Immanuel. Practical Philosophy. Translated and edited by Mary J.
Gregor. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Kaplan, Robert D. âThe South China Sea is the Future of Conflict.â
Foreign Policy, August 15, 2011. Accessed December 28, 2015.
.
King, Michael and Christopher J. Thornhill. Niklas Luhmannâs Theory of
Politics and Law. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003. Accessed April 27, 2016.
Klein, Naomi. âHow Science Is Telling Us All to Revolt.â New Statesman,
October 29, 2013. Accessed December 28, 2015.
.
Korsch, Karl. âThe Marxist Dialectic.â Translated by Karl-Heinz Otto.
The Marxist Internet Archive, 1923. Accessed January 4, 2015.
.
âââ. âA Non-Dogmatic Approach to Marxism.â Politics, May, 1946. Accessed
April 27, 2016.
.
âââ. âTen Theses on Marxism Today.â TELOS 26 (Winter 1975â1976).
Accessed April 27, 2016.
.
Kropotkin, Peter. Encyclopedia Britannica, 11^(th) ed., s.v.
âAnarchism.â New York, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1910. Accessed January
14, 2016.
âââ. The State: Its Historic Role. London: âFreedomâ Office, 1898.
Accessed May 8, 2016.
.
Lagi, Marco, Yavni Bar-Yam, and Yaneer Bar-Yam. âUPDATE July 2012âthe
Food Crises: The US Drought.â July 23, 2012. Accessed April 27, 2016.
.
Lagi, Marco, Karla Z. Bertrand, and Yaneer Bar-Yam. âThe Food Crises and
Political Instability in North Africa and the Middle East.â September
28, 2011. Accessed April 27, 2016.
.
Laursen, Eric. The Peopleâs Pension: The Struggle to Defend Social
Security since Reagan. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2012.
Leval, GastĂłn, Juan GĂłmez Casas, and Florentino Iglesias. El Estado en
la Historia. Cali, Colombia: Zero, 1978.
Lewes, George Henry. Problems of Life and Mind. London: Trubner & Co.,
1874. Accessed April 27, 2016.
.
Lewontin, Richard. The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Lewontin, Richard and Richard Levins. Biology under the Influence:
Dialectical Essays on the Coevolution of Nature and Society. New York,
Monthly Review Press, 2007.
Lih, Lars T. Lenin Rediscovered: What is to be done? in Context.
Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008. Accessed April 27, 2016.
.
LukĂĄcs, Georg. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist
Dialectics. Translated by R. Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1971. Accessed April 29, 2016.
.
Mahmood, Saba. Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Malatesta, Errico. Anarchism and Organization. Marxist Internet Archive,
1897. Accessed Aril 26, 2016.
.
âââ. Anarchy: A Pamphlet. 1891. Accessed February 2, 2016.
. âââ. Errico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas. Edited by Vernon Richards.
London: Freedom Press, 1984.
Marx, Karl. Preface and Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique
of Political Economy. Pekin: Foreign Languages Press, 1976.
Mason, Paul. Why Itâs Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global
Revolutions. New York: Verso Books, 2012.
McLaughlin, Brian. âThe Rise and Fall of British Emergentism.â In
Emergence or Reduction?: Prospects for Nonreductive Physicalism, edited
by Ansgar Beckermann,
Hans Flohr, and Jaegwon Kim, 49â93. New York; Walter de Gruyter, 1992.
Mill, John Stuart. A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive. New
York: Harpers and Brothers Publishers, 1882. Accessed April 27, 2016.
.
Nappalos, Scott Nicholas. Towards Theory of Political Organization for
Our Time. 2011. Accessed April 27, 2016.
.
âââ. The Anarchosyndicalist Contribution to the Theory of Revolutionary
Consciousness. 2009. Accessed February 15, 2016.
.
âââ. âDitching Class.â In The Accumulation of Freedom: Writings on
Anarchist Economics, edited by Anthony J. Nocella, Deric Shannon, and
John Asimakopoulos, 291â331. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2012.
Nocella, Anthony J., Deric Shannon, and John Asimakopoulos. The
Accumulation of Freedom: Writings on Anarchist Economics. Oakland, CA:
AK Press, 2012.
Pepperell, Nicole. âDisassembling Capital.â PhD diss., RMIT University,
2010. Accessed April 27, 2016.
.
Proudhon, JP. Property is Theft!: A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology.
Edited by Iain McKay. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2011.
Purchase, Graham. Anarchism and Ecology. Montreal: Black Rose Books
Limited, 1997.
âââ. âPeter Kropotkin: Ecologist, Philosopher and Revolutionary.â PhD
diss., University of New South Wales, 2003. Accessed February 15, 2016.
Reclus, Elisée. Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: Selected Writings of
Elisée Reclus. Edited and translated by John Clark and Camille Martin.
Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013.
Rocker, Rudolf. Nationalism and Culture. Translated by Ray E. Chase. New
York: Covici-Freide, 1937.
Ruder, Cynthia Ann. Making History for Stalin: The Story of the Belomor
Canal.
Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998.
Russell, Bertrand. Power: A New Social Analysis. London: Routledge,
2004.
âââ. Wisdom of the West a Historical Survey of Western Philosophy in its
Social and Political Setting. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959.
Sawyer, Robert Keith. Social Emergence: Societies as Complex Systems.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Shaer, Matthew. âThe Boss Stops Here.â New York Magazine, June 16, 2013.
Accessed December 28, 2015.
.
Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come
Together. New York: Penguin, 2008.
Spencer, Herbert. The Study of Sociology. New York: D. Appleton and
Company, 1896. Accessed January 1, 2015.
.
Stoljar, Daniel and Nic Damnjanovic. Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, Fall 2014 ed., s.v. âThe Deflationary Theory of Truth.â
Accessed April 27, 2016.
.
Tarski, Alfred. âThe Semantic Conception of Truth: And the Foundations
of Semantics.â Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 4, no. 3 (1944):
341â376.
Thompson, Edward Palmer. The Making of the English Working Class. New
York: Pantheon Books, 1963.
U.S. Department of Defense. âNational Security Implications of
Climate-Related Risks and a Changing Climate.â July 23, 2015. Accessed
April 27, 2016.
.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. âCrisis of the Capitalist System: Where Do We Go
from Here?â The Harold Wolpe Lecture, University of KwaZulu-Natal,
November 5, 2009 . Republished in Monthly Review Zine, November 11,
2009. Accessed January 24, 2016.
.
Weber, Bruce H. âWhat is Life? Defining Life in the Context of Emergent
Complexity.â Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres 40, no. 2
(2010): 221â229.
Winn, Peter. Weavers of Revolution: The Yarur Workers and Chileâs Road
to Socialism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Chichester, West
Sussex, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2010.
[1] Elisée Recluse, Anarchy, Geography, and Modernity, trans. and ed.
John Clark and Camille Martin (Oakland: PM Press, 2013), 233. Taken from
the last chapter, âProgress,â of his magnum opus, Man and the Earth
(1905).
[2] Ălvaro GirĂłn Sierra, En la mesa con Darwin: evoluciĂłn y revoluciĂłn
en el movimiento libertario en España (1869â1914) (Madrid: Consejo
Superior de Investigaciones CientĂficas, 2005), 66.
[3] Peter Kropotkin, âModern Science and Anarchismâ in Roger N. Baldwin
ed., Anarchism: A Collection of Revolutionary Writings (Mineola, New
York: Dover Publications, 2002), 15556.
[4] William Archer, The Life, Trial and Death of Francisco Ferrer (New
York: Moffat, Yard and Co., 1911), 22.
[5] JosĂ© Ălvarez Junco, La ideologĂa polĂtica del anarquismo español
(1868â1910) (Madrid: Siglo veintiuno editories, 1976), 316.
[6] Ibid., 50.
[7] Ibid., 161; Ferran Aisa, La cultura anarquista a Catalunya
(Barcelona: Edicions de 1984, 2006), 78; GirĂłn Sierra, En la mesa con
Darwin, 63.
[8] For an in depth account from a worker-theorist who participated, see
Martin Glaberman, Wartime Strikes: The Struggle against the No Strike
Pledge in the UAW during World War II (Detroit: Bewick Editions, 1980),
accessed December 28, 2015
.
[9] Focusing on cotton workers in Santiago, Peter Winn presents that
narrative arc of the Chilean experience during that period in Weavers of
Revolution: The Yarur Workers and Chileâs Road to Socialism (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1987).
[10] AugustĂn GuillamĂłn, Ready for Revolution: The CNT Defense
Committees in Barcelona, 19331938 (Oakland: AK Press, 2014), passim.
[11] The last chapter gives a short overview, but some background may be
found throughout Steven Hirsch and Lucien Van der Walt eds., Anarchism
and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870â1940: The
Praxis of National Liberation, Internationalism, and Social Revolution
(Leiden, Netherlands: Brill publishers, 2010).
[12] Daniel Barret, Los Sediciosos Despertares de la AnarquĂa (Buenos
Aires, Argentina: Libros de Anarres, 2011), passim.
[13] For overviews, see: John Holland, Emergence: From Chaos to Order
(Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Helix, 1998); Peter Corning, âThe
Re-emergence of âEmergenceâ: A Venerable Concept in Search of a Theoryâ
Complexity 7, No. 6 (2002): 18â30; Richard Lewontin, The Triple Helix:
Gene, Organism, and Environment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2001); and Steven Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of
Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (New York: Scribner, 2002).
[14] A succinct account of emergence within the social sciences is found
in Richard Sawyer, Social Emergence: Societies as Complex Systems
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
[15] Marco Lagi, Karla Z. Bertrand, and Yaneer Bar-Yam, The Food Crises
and Political Instability in North Africa and the Middle East (2011),
accessed April 27, 2016,
.
[16] U.S. Department of Defense, National Security Implications of
Climate-Related Risks and a Changing Climate (July 23, 2015), accessed
April 27, 2016,
.
[17] Robert D Kaplan, âThe South China Sea is the Future of Conflict,â
Foreign Policy (August 15, 2011), accessed December 28, 2015,
.
[18] Reported in Naomi Klein, âHow Science Is Telling Us All to Revolt,â
New Statesman, October 29, 2013, accessed December 28, 2015,
. Original paper by Brad Werner, âIs earth F**ked? Dynamically Futility
of Global Environmental Management and Possibilities for Sustainability
via Direct Action Activism,â American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting
2012,
.
[19] David Gelles, âAt Zappos, Pushing Shoes and a Vision,â New York
Times, July 17, 2015, accessed December 28, 2015,
. Matthew Shaer, âThe Boss Stops Here,â New York Magazine, June 16,
2013, accessed December 28, 2015,
.
[20] Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History
(New York: Frederick A. Stokes & Brother, 1888), accessed April 27,
2016,
[21] Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology (New York: D. Appleton and
Company, 1896), passim, accessed January 1, 2015,
.
[22] William James, âGreat Men, Great Thoughts, and the Environment
(Lecture Delivered before the Harvard Natural History Society),â
Atlantic Monthly, October, 1880, passim, accessed January 1, 2015,
.
[23] Particularly look to Chapters one, two, and six of Michael King and
Christopher J. Thornhill. Niklas Luhmannâs Theory of Politics and Law
(Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003),
accessed April 27, 2016,
[24] Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, Biology under the Influence:
Dialectical Essays on the Coevolution of Nature and Society (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2007), passim.
[25] See Clay Shirkyâs Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When
People Come Together (New York: Penguin, 2008); and Paul Masonâs Why
Itâs Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions (New York: Verso
Books, 2012) for examples of these uses of emergence.
[26] Graham Purchase, Anarchism and Ecology (Montreal, Canada: Black
Rose Books Limited, 1997), 33â74.
[27] Ibid., 111â135.
[28] Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The
Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 1988).
[29] This is not helped by the lack of original sources or historical
exploration due to institutional hostility to the tradition.
[30] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2001).
[31] Bertrand, Russell âWisdom of the West a Historical Survey of
Western Philosophy in Its Social and Political Settingâ (Garden City,
NY: Doubleday, 1959), 7.
[32] Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
[33] Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks: Three Volume Set (New York,
Columbia University Press, 2011), passim.
[34] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. (Chichester,
West Sussex, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2010), section 109.
[35] Those interested for an overview may see Daniel Stoljar and Nic
Damnjanovic, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2014 ed., s.v.
âThe Deflationary Theory of Truth,â accessed April 27, 2016,
.
[36] The classic elaboration of this is Alfred Tarski, âThe Semantic
Conception of Truth: And the Foundations of Semantics,â Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 4, no. 3 (1944): 341â376.
[37] For an accessible overview of some of these issues, see Bernard
dâEspagnat, On Physics and Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2006).
[38] Iâm isolating philosophyâs contribution here, whereas in reality it
is a consistent back and forth between all the elements and disciplines
of cognitive science driving forward these questions.
[39] Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Mother Earth
Publishing Association: 1911), 62, accessed April 27, 2016,
.
[40] Though it is an interesting twist in the story that Karl Korsch
himself came to critique the idea that a coherent Marxist method exists
and Marxismâs role in the failures of the Russian revolution and Germany
post-WWI in his worthwhile texts âA Non-Dogmatic Approach to Marxismâ
Politics, May, 1946, accessed April 27, 2016,
and âTen Theses on Marxism Todayâ TELOS 26 (Winter 1975â1976), accessed
April 27, 2016,
.
[41] Karl Korsch, The Marxist Dialectic, trans. Karl-Heinz Otto (1923),
accessed January 4, 2015,
.
[42] Whether or not science is fundamentally about predictions or
whether it is adequate to give better accounts of the past/present and
potential predictions does not affect my argument either way, so I
proceed with this most simplistic notion of science for argumentâs sake.
[43] There were certainly other methods such as magical or religious
methods which sought knowledge through appealing to spiritual beings in
rituals, prayers, etc.
[44] Georg LukĂĄcs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist
Dialectics, trans. R. Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971),
accessed April 29, 2016,
.
[45] Ericco Malatesta, Errico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas, ed. Vernon
Richards (London: Freedom Press, 1984), 104.
[46] Peter Kropotkin, Encyclopedia Britannica, 11^(th) ed., s.v.
âAnarchismâ (New York, 1910), passim, accessed January 14, 2016,
. See also the discussion of an anarchist method to post-capitalist
society in Wayne Priceâs essay âThe Anarchist Method: An Experimental
Approach to Post-Capitalist Economicsâ in eds. Deric Shannon, Anthony J
Nocella II, and John Asimakopoulas, The Accumulation of Freedom:
Writings on Anarchist Economics (Oakland: AK Press, 2012).
[47] The best of dialectics uses it as a way of looking at problems.
There are some similarities with a more fluid and libertarian approach
to dialectics with emergence. This is not the place to address the good
and bad of dialectics, but emergence could be seen as a possible tool
for people who do think dialectics is useful and want a more rigorous
and usable form of that kind of thinking. All of this line of thinking
reinforces the misuse of the concept of method in some circles.
[48] Determinism was perhaps the manifest destiny of the official
Marxist-Leninist ideologues and states.
[49] Noam Chomsky, âNotes on Anarchism,â in Daniel Guerin, Anarchism:
From Theory to Practice (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), accessed
May 8, 2016,
.
[50] The length of this quote is instructive and worth repeating because
it is a strong example against this kind of thinking. Louis Beam,
âLeaderless Resistance,â The Seditionist 12 (1992): 12â13, accessed
April 27, 2016,
â.
[51] For the history of this current of thought see Brain McLaughlin,
âThe Rise and Fall of British Emergentismâ in Emergence or Reduction?:
Prospects for Nonreductive Physicalism, eds. Ansgar Beckermann, Hans
Flohr, and Jaegwon Kim (New York; Walter de Gruyter, 1992), 49â93.
[52] John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
(New York: Harpers and Brothers Publishers, 1882), 246, accessed April
27, 2016,
.
[53] George Henry Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind (London: Trubner &
Co., 1874), 369, accessed April 27, 2016,
.
[54] Mark A. Bedau, âWeak Emergenceâ NoĂ»s 31, s11 (1997): 375â399,
accessed May 7, 2016,
.
[55] Mark A. Bedau, âDownward Causation and Autonomy in Weak Emergenceâ
in Emergence: Contemporary Readings in Philosophy and Science, eds. Mark
A. Bedau and Paul Ed Humphreys (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT press,
2008), 155â188.
[56] This position is supported by rapidly increasing examples of
artificial life models being able to predict otherwise indescribable
phenomena like the path of weather, diseases, birthrates, traffic, etc.
Research increasingly shows the validity of such models for making
predictions and learning about the systems themselves. We can engineer
models that can do calculations and follow paths that our minds cannot.
[57] Though not relevant to the purposes of this text, assessing the
relevance of social and political emergence, there are varieties here we
are skipping. Some forms of emergentism reject both reducibility and
physicalism (the idea that the world is exclusively physical). There are
non-reducible variants of physicalism, reducible physicalism (in matter
not thought), and irreducible non-physicalism (amongst other positions).
At stake here is both what the universe is made of, how high-level
things relate to lower-level things, our explanations of the world and
sciences, and how we understand it. An adequate exploration of these
themes would take us well outside our domain. An excellent resource for
these debates is found in the collection of philosophical and scientific
articles within Bedau and Humphreys, Emergence: Contemporary Readings in
Philosophy and Science (2008).
[58] Corning âThe Re-Emergence of âEmergenceâ: A Venerable Concept in
Search of a Theory,â 18â30.
[59] This is distinct from the discussion of whether properties of salt
can be reduced to a robust chemical explanation of such, which indeed is
more plausible with salt than other examples of reported emergence. It
would not, however, likely explain our experience of salt or the
emergent responses of living systems to salt even if you can reduce
saltâs properties to a combination of sodium and chlorineâs collective
natures.
[60] Charles Darwin, The Origin of the Species, (1872), quoted in
Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 49
[61] Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely,
46â61.
[62] We could make any number of lists here (adaptation, evolution,
self-organization, reproduction, etc.). This is mostly incidental to the
following arguments, but worth studying for those with interest. From
the emergentist perspective, see Bruce H. Weber, âWhat is Life? Defining
Life in the Context of Emergent Complexityâ Origins of Life and
Evolution of Biospheres 40, no. 2 (2010): 221â229.
[63] Lewontin and Levins, Biology under the Influence: Dialectical
Essays on the Coevolution of Nature and Society, 223.
[64] A more robust account of the physics of moving an object would also
complicate the example I gave of course.
[65] With the case of salt, we could probably produce a sufficiently
robust chemical explanation of its chemical properties based on the
atomic and molecular facts. Still the example is illustrative, so it is
worth keeping.
[66] The failure of those attempts is covered in Erik Laursen, The
Peopleâs Pension: The Struggle to Defend Social Security since Reagan
(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2012).
[67] See Sawyer, Social Emergence: Societies as Complex Systems.
[68] For an overview from the sciences, see Lee Alan Dugatkin,
âKropotkinâs Adventure in Science and Politicsâ Scientific American,
September 13, 2011, accessed February 16, 2015,
.
[69] Graham Purchase, âPeter Kropotkin: Ecologist, Philosopher and
Revolutionaryâ (PhD diss., University of New South Wales, 2003), passim,
accessed February 15, 2016,
[70] Reclus, Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: Selected Writings of Elisée
Reclus, 178.
[71] Ibid., 217.
[72] Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Property is Theft!: A Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon Anthology, ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2011), 655.
[73] Ibid., 661.
[74] Ibid., 663.
[75] Rocker, Nationalism and Culture, 28.
[76] His collection of writings here gives a good overview: Purchase,
Anarchism and Ecology.
[77] See for example Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom: The
Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy (Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire Books,
1982), accessed May 7, 2016,
.
[78] Lewontin and Levins, Biology under the Influence: Dialectical
Essays on the Coevolution of Nature and Society, 183. The authors here
however mean a more specific type of reductionism that would negate
emergence conclusions. This is not necessary for the argument that
follows.
[79] For example, look at Immanuel Wallerstein, âCrisis of the
Capitalist System: Where Do We Go from Here?â The Harold Wolpe Lecture,
University of KwaZulu-Natal, November 5, 2009, republished in Monthly
Review Zine, November 11, 2009, accessed January 24, 2016,
.
[80] These ideas are most explicit in Nicole Pepperell, âDisassembling
Capitalâ (PhD diss., RMIT University, 2010), accessed April 27, 2016,
.
[81] See their collection of essays, Lewontin and Levins, Biology under
the Influence: Dialectical Essays on the Coevolution of Nature and
Society.
[82] A few examples of such are Scott Nicholas Nappalos, âDitching
Class,â in The Accumulation of Freedom: Writings on Anarchist Economics,
eds. Anthony J. Nocella, Deric Shannon, and John Asimakopoulos,
(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2012), 291â331. Also see the three-part essay
Towards Theory of Political Organization for Our Time (2011), accessed
April 27, 2016,
.
[83] Marco Lagi, Yavni Bar-Yam, and Yaneer Bar-Yam, âUPDATE July
2012âthe Food Crises: The US Droughtâ (July 23, 2012), accessed April
27, 2016,
.
[84] Industrial Workers of the World. âWork-to-Rule: A Guideâ ed. Libcom
Collective (2006), passim, accessed April 27, 2016,
.
[85] An extended history of such is contained in Cynthia Ann Ruder,
Making History for Stalin: The Story of the Belomor Canal (Gainesville,
FL: University Press of Florida, 1998).
[86] Fisherâs describes the history and situates it well as a more
general phenomenon in Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No
Alternative? (Ropley, Hants, UK: Zero Books), 2009.
[87] The documentary, A State of Mind, provides an interesting look into
this phenomenon in contemporary North Korea. Daniel Gordon, A State of
Mind, DVD (New York: Kino International, 2005).
[88] Lewontin and Levins, Biology under the Influence: Dialectical
Essays on the Coevolution of Nature and Society, 183.
[89] Coletivo Maria Tonha. âFundador do MPL Fala Sobre o Movimento, as
Jornadas de Junho e o Tarifa Zero,â Brasil De Fato, July 25, 2013,
accessed January 14, 2016,
.
[90] Marxism coined its own version of materialism as meaning a very
specific thing linked to the ideas of Marx. However, here I am using it
in the more general sense that philosophers have used it outside of
Marxist circles.
[91] Michel Foucault ties the rise of the state to the theater of
governing that distinguishes it from prior means of governance. See
Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the
CollĂšge de France 1977â1978, vol. 4, trans. Graham Burchell (New York:
Picador, 2009), 265â278.
[92] Rocker, Nationalism and Culture, 21â41.
[93] Famously in Karl Marx, Preface and Introduction to a Contribution
to the Critique of Political Economy (Pekin: Foreign Languages Press,
1976).
[94] Luigi Fabbri, âEl Concepto Anarquista de la RevoluciĂłn,â in
Dictadura y RevoluciĂłn (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Ediciones Libertad,
1921), accessed May 8, 2016,
folletoslibertad.angelfire.com
.
[95] Reclus, Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: Selected Writings of Elisée
Reclus, 122â123.
[96] Ericco, Malatesta, Anarchy: A Pamphlet (1891), accessed February 2,
2016,
.
[97] Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin, âOn Representative Government and
Universal Suffrage,â in Bakunin on Anarchy, ed. and trans. Sam Dolgoff
(New York: Vintage Books, 1971), accessed February 2, 2016,
.
[98] Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin, The Political Philosophy of
Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism, comp. and ed. Grigorii Petrovich Maksimov
(London: The Free Press, 1964), 253.
[99] Rocker, Nationalism and Culture, 28.
[100] Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis (London: Routledge,
2004), 4.
[101] Luce Fabbri, El Camino: Hacia un Socialismo sin Estado: En Cada
Paso la Realidad de la Meta (Montevideo, Uruguay: Editorial
Nordan-Comunidad, 2000). 53.
[102] Clastres was a French anarchist anthropologist who broke from
Marxism to argue that the State is the creator of class and that some
primitive societies are organized against the emergence of the state.
[103] Angel J Cappelletti, La IdeologĂa Anarquista (Buenos Aires,
Argentina: Libros de la Araucaria, 2006), 18. Translated by the author.
[104] Proudhon, Property is Theft!: A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Reader,
654â662.
[105] Ibid., 663.
[106] Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the CollĂšge
de France, 1975â76, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003),
passim.
[107] Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, 340â346.
[108] Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchy.
[109] A series of anarchists have attempted to answer these questions
historically and anthropologically including Harold B. Barclay, The
State (London: Freedom Press, 2003); Pierre Clastres, Society Against
the State: Essays in Political Anthropology (New York: Zone Books,
1987); David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Chicago:
Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004), accessed April 27, 2016,
; Peter Kropotkin, The State: Its Historic Role (London: âFreedomâ
Office, 1896), accessed May 8, 2016,
; and Gaston Leval, Juan GĂłmez Casas, and Florentino Iglesias, El Estado
en la Historia (Cali, Colombia: Zero, 1978).
[110] For example, Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the
College de France 1975â1976.
[111] See Felipe Correa, âCrear un Pueblo Fuerte,â in Anarquismo y Poder
Popular: TeorĂa y PrĂĄctica Suramericana (BogotĂĄ, Colombia: Ediciones
Gato Negro, 2011).
[112] Some admirers of Lenin dispute this today and are invested in a
textual exegesis project such as that of Lars Lih in his 2006 Lenin
Rediscovered: What is to be done? in Context. Chicago: Haymarket Books,
(2008), accessed April 27, 2016,
. But in some ways that speaks to the large scale political shifts
created by the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the integration of
libertarian if not anarchist ideas such as rejection of
institutionalized political elites, direct democracy, and a critique of
power within the radical left mainstream today.
[113] Edward Palmer Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1963), passim.
[114] For my account of such, see Scott Nicholas Nappalos, The
Anarchosyndicalist Contribution to the Theory of Revolutionary
Consciousness (2009), accessed February 15, 2016,
.
[115] On the more semantic side, consciousness carries with it spiritual
connotations in popular speech, which may unintentionally encourage
overly intellectual takes on the role of ideas. Framing is only so
important, but it is worth a mention.
[116] This has been often overstated relative to the role of social
struggle however.
[117] For example, Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures
at the CollĂšge de France 19771978.
[118] An interesting analysis of the secular Stateâs role in religious
organization is found in Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular
Age: A Minority Report, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2015).
[119] Chomsky and Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy
of the Mass Media, passim.
[120] Ericco Malatesta, Anarchism and Organization (1897), accessed Aril
26, 2016,
.