Post-Anarchism and Marxism

Simon Choat

Power and Subjectivity: A Critique of Post-Anarchism

Prominent post-anarchists include Todd May, Saul Newman, and Lewis Call: they argue both that there is a continuum between classical anarchism and post-structuralism and that the latter can radicalize and reenergize the former. It is claimed by post-anarchists that whereas Marxism is economically reductionist and places its faith in the notion of a vanguard party of the industrial proletariat, both classical anarchism and post-structuralism advance a more subtle analysis of power in its own right, irreducible to the economy, and place their faith in resistance from below, opposing all forms of hierarchy. Classical anarchism is nonetheless criticized for retaining an essentialist concept of the human subject and for focusing too much on the power of the state. It is argued that post-structuralism, with its decentering of subjectivity and its deepening of the critique of power beyond state and capital, can here act as a corrective, leading to a postanarchism — or post-structuralist anarchism — that can act as an alternative to the authoritarian and anachronistic discourse of Marxism.

This paper challenges some of the assumptions of post-anarchism, arguing that post-anarchists have been too quick to marginalize Marxism. Post-anarchists are correct to claim that the classical anarchist critique of Marxism is valuable — but they are also correct to highlight the naivety of classical anarchism’s assumptions about subjectivity and power, and it is precisely here that it is beneficial to turn to Marx. Whereas classical anarchism remains reliant on a conventional concept of human nature, Marx anticipates post-structuralism by analyzing the ways in which different forms of subjectivity are produced. Similarly, while classical anarchism tends to view power as purely repressive and confined to the state, it is Marx who widens the scope of power, examining relations of domination beyond the state and conceptualizing power as productive (of subjectivity) rather than merely repressive. I conclude that a contemporary politics informed by post-structuralism can best succeed if it draws on the insights of both anarchism and Marxism.

In this paper I offer a critique of what is sometimes called ‘post-anarchism,’ focusing on its reading of Marx. I shall argue that post-anarchists have been too quick to marginalize Marxism. My aim is not to prolong or revive the dispute between anarchists and Marxists that now stretches across three centuries, but rather to stake a claim for the importance of both anarchism and Marxism to contemporary political thought. I shall begin by offering some brief definitions, before outlining post-anarchist views on both classical anarchism and Marxism, and then going on to present my own arguments about the continuing relevance of Marxism.

Post-anarchism is a broad current within anarchism rather than a unified doctrine or practice of its own: there are numerous disagreements among thinkers within this current. Not the least of these disagreements is about what it should be called. Probably the three most prominent authors in this area are Saul Newman, Todd May, and Lewis Call, each of whom have written book-length studies of the topic: Newman writes of post-anarchism, May of poststructuralist anarchism, and Call of postmodern anarchism. These different labels are not insignificant, in that they reflect different influences: Newman draws upon Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, and Lacan; May upon Lyotard, Deleuze, and Foucault; Lewis Call upon Nietzsche, Foucault, and Baudrillard. Without ignoring or trivializing these differences, it is nonetheless possible to identify common threads, and thus to speak of a coherent, if loose and flexible, movement. For purposes of consistency I shall refer throughout this paper to post-anarchism and post-structuralism.

The crucial common claim that post-anarchists make is that post-structuralism can be understood as a radicalization of classical anarchism: this means both that post-structuralism is in the tradition of classical anarchism — there is ‘an ethical continuum’ between them, to use Saul Newman’s words[603] — and that post-structuralism can act as a remedy to the faults and flaws of classical anarchism without betraying its spirit and aims. Post-anarchism thus posits poststructuralism as both a rereading of classical anarchism and as a development within the tradition of anarchism. Classical anarchism here refers to the work of nineteenth-century thinkers like Bakunin, Kropotkin, Proudhon, and so on, but can also cover twentieth-century anarchists like Murray Bookchin. Post-structuralism is a more problematic term. Rather than trying to develop my own definition of post-structuralism here, what I am interested in is how post-anarchism understands and uses this term. We have already seen the kinds of thinkers who are covered by term: Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, and so on. Post-anarchism identifies two key characteristics that are shared by these thinkers, which justify grouping them together in the first place and form the focus of post-anarchism’s interest. First, post-structuralism is anti-humanist: rather than taking the human subject as something that is given, it reveals the textual and material practices that constitute the subject. As Todd May puts it: ‘If poststructuralist political thought could be summed up in a single prescription, it would be that radical political theory, if it is to achieve anything, must abandon humanism in all its forms.’[604] Secondly, it is argued that post-structuralism rethinks the concept and analysis of power: the aim is no longer to establish the legitimate boundaries of power, placing limits between the individual and the state, but to demonstrate that power is coextensive with social relations, acting not merely to suppress a preexisting subject but also and more fundamentally to constitute subjects in the first place.. Analysis of these two concepts — subjectivity and power — is going to frame my argument.

With these brief definitions out of the way, we can now focus on how classical anarchism is interpreted by post-anarchism. Classical anarchism is praised by post-anarchists above all for its understanding of power: wary of the concept and practices of representation, classical anarchism offers a bottom-up analysis of power — meaning both that it recognizes that power invests the entire social field rather than emanating from a single central source and that it privileges political action from below. Characterized in this fashion, classical anarchism is contrasted favorably with Marxism. It is argued that whereas Marxism is economically reductionist, viewing all power as merely an expression of class domination, classical anarchism correctly saw that power must be analyzed in its own right: irreducible to the workings of the economy, power relations exist throughout society and need to be analyzed in their specificity, without reference to a uniform model of domination. By isolating a single site of power in this way, Marxism also privileges certain political actors. Just as power emanates from a single source, so there is only one agent capable of resisting and overthrowing this power: the industrial working class is identified as the sole possible instrument of genuine political change, because of its unique place within the only kind of power relations that really matter for Marxism, namely the relation of exploitation between labor and capital. In contrast, classical anarchism does not limit revolutionary potential to a single class, instead supporting agents dismissed by Marx, such as the peasantry and lumpenproletariat. Finally, Marxism not only privileges a particular revolutionary actor, but also a particular path to revolution, supporting an authoritarian party and proposing a dictatorship of the proletariat. In contrast, classical anarchism consistently opposes all state forms and all hierarchies, including those of the party. So far, these are standard anarchist criticisms of Marxism, centered on its supposedly reductive analysis of the political situation and its authoritarian organizational structures. The novelty of post-anarchism lies in its linking of classical anarchism to contemporary post-structuralism. The claim is that the classical anarchist view of power as a decentered field of struggle which refuses to privilege any single political agency or model anticipates post-structuralist views on power. Classical anarchism and post-structuralism are thus seen as united in their opposition to Marxism, which is dismissed as an anachronistic discourse whose diagnoses and prognoses are not merely mistaken but dangerous.

Classical anarchism is, however, not uncritically endorsed or appropriated by postanarchists. It is seen as suffering from some of the naiveties common to most modern political theories, including Marxism. As Saul Newman puts it: ‘Anarchism remains buried within an Enlightenment political paradigm.’[605] There are two central and related charges. First, classical anarchism relies on an essentialist concept of human nature, positing a rational, unified subject in possession of stable and immutable characteristics. This concept of a human essence is then used as a standard with which to critique and resist forms of power. Opposed to the naturality of the human subject within an organic community is the artificial power of the state. This leads to a second naivety within classical anarchism: its view that power is repressive and centered mainly in the state. Although it is commended for deepening and broadening the analysis of power, classical anarchism is simultaneously rebuked for not going far enough in this direction. There is an equivocation in classical anarchism between, to use Todd May’s terms, a tactical approach which recognizes a plurality of irreducible but intersecting sites of power and a strategic approach that assumes that there is a single site of struggle and therefore a single goal (namely overthrowing the state).[606] While it avoids the economic reductionism that has been imputed to Marxism, it is argued that anarchism remains too focused on the state as the prime agency and site of power in society. In accordance with its conceptualization of political agency in terms of an essential human nature, anarchism understands power only as a suppressive force, constraining and limiting the natural powers and capacities of the human subject. The goal of political practice is therefore to overthrow this repressive force in order to liberate our essential qualities as human beings. These two elements of classical anarchism are thus intimately linked: the target of power is human nature, and it is human nature that makes possible criticism of and resistance to power.

Post-anarchists argue that it is here in particular that post-structuralism has something to offer anarchism. Post-structuralism’s challenge to traditional theories of the subject undermines the notion that there is a unified human essence. The subject is rethought as the product of competing forces, and the focus of interest shifts to the mechanisms through which the subject is constituted. Correspondingly, power is conceptualized not merely as repressive but as productive: it is practices of power that constitute the subject. Hence as in classical anarchism the themes of power and subjectivity are in post-structuralism intimately linked, but in a very different way: power is constitutive of a subjectivity that is never merely given but is always the result of historically contingent practices.

Although the current of post-anarchism has generated some lively discussion, this discussion has so far largely been confined to the anarchist community. Critics have thus tended to concentrate on post-anarchism’s understanding and interpretation of classical anarchism. A number of commentators have argued that the anarchist tradition has been unfairly and misleadingly represented: anarchism, it is argued, is a far more varied tradition than postanarchism claims, and is far less beholden to essentialist and humanist philosophies. This leads to the conclusion either that anarchism already has more in common with post-structuralism than has been acknowledged, or that post-structuralism might have something to learn from anarchism.[607] Because the responses to post-anarchism have so far come mainly from within the anarchist community, its criticisms of Marxism have largely been ignored — not because they are deemed to be of no relevance or interest, but because they are taken as self-evident truths that need no further discussion.[608] I am going to bracket the question of the accuracy of postanarchism’s representation of classical anarchism — not because I think it is accurate or because I think it is not an interesting question, but because I would like to pursue a different line of inquiry: I would like to claim that it is Marxism that has been unfairly and misleadingly represented by post-anarchism. This is not to say that its criticisms of Marxism are wholly without justification or merit. Rather, it is to claim that Marxism has more to offer than has been acknowledged. In fact if we are looking for forerunners of post-structuralism then Marxism seems a far more convincing candidate than anarchism. At the very least Marxism deserves more than the cursory dismissal it has received at the hands of post-anarchism. Post-anarchism has argued that classical anarchism provides naive analyzes of power and subjectivity — but it is precisely in these areas that it is beneficial to turn to Marxism, which is what I would like to do now. Rather than drawing from the entire history of Marxist theory I suggest we turn to Marx himself. Anarchists and post-anarchists alike have tended to conflate Marx and Marxism, seeing the failures of Marxist regimes in the twentieth century as confirmation of the failings of Marx’s own work, and characterizing Marxist theory after Marx as little more than a perpetual and necessarily hopeless attempt to justify the unjustifiable.[609] The distinction I want to make between Marx and Marxism is not a desperate attempt to save Marx or absolve him of responsibility. The aim is not to effect a return to a truer Marx, untainted by the events undertaken in his name, but to turn to Marx as the most original thinker and potent resource in the Marxist tradition. It seems to me that this approach is far more in the spirit of post-structuralism than is the repudiation of Marx undertaken by the post-anarchists: thinkers like Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze consistently and repeatedly distinguish between Marx and Marxism — not as a way of effacing the connection between Marx and Marxism, but as part of an insistence that any connections must be studied in their specificity and with care, and a recognition that Marx still has much to offer.

A central claim of post-anarchism is that post-structuralism undertakes a decentering of subjectivity and offers a subject without metaphysical grounding, which contrasts favorably with classical anarchism’s conventional notion of human nature. It is clear that to an extent Marx shares with classical anarchism this conventional notion of human nature. The concept of alienation, which is present throughout Marx’s work, certainly seems to rely on the idea that there are certain essential human attributes. But alongside this conventional view, there is something much more novel in Marx: in contrast to his anarchist contemporaries, Marx fatally undermines the concept of human essence. As early as the ‘Theses on Feuerbach,’ he displaces ‘the essence of man’ into ‘the ensemble of the social relations’: in effect, there is no human essence, because what was taken as essential is shown by Marx to be mutable and historically contingent.[610] Some post-anarchists have argued that the anarchist Max Stirner might be seen as a forerunner of post-structuralism ideas about subjectivity: in arguing that the concept of ‘Man’ is nothing more than a form of power, an abstraction that enslaves the individual, Stirner completely rejects the idea that there is a fixed human essence. This reappropriation of Stirner is not wholly convincing, however. As Marx points out in his lengthy critique of Stirner in The German Ideology, Stirner sees the concept of ‘Man’ — along with those of God, emperor, fatherland, and so on — as nothing more than an abstraction, and as such believes that one need only personally decide to rid oneself of this abstraction in order to be free. He thus commits the error that Marx attributes to all Young Hegelians: believing that the world is ruled by ideas, Stirner thinks that one need only combat these ideas in order to achieve liberation. But as Marx argues, if one destroys the idea of the emperor, one still has the real, actually existing emperor to deal with. Likewise, if we rid ourselves of the concept of Man, we will still be left with the actual social relations that underlie this abstraction.

For Marx the aim of criticism is not merely to refute abstraction but to explain its genesis: to show how abstract ideas are related to material conditions. It is this argument that aligns Marx rather than Stirner or any other anarchist with post-structuralism. As Saul Newman correctly argues, whereas structuralism tended to dissolve the subject into a determining structure, the novelty of post-structuralism is that it shows that the subject is not merely determined but constituted at the intersection of various relations and practices.[611] This is precisely what Marx seeks to do: rather than simply dissolving the subject, making it the empty, shifting center of a network of social relations, Marx demonstrates how the subject is produced. A substantial part of volume one of Capital is dedicated to this aim. The central chapters of that book show that the individual is not simply an abstraction, as Stirner thinks: the individual is not merely the invention of liberal ideology or the ideal precondition or result of the exchange process; the individual is produced in a series of concrete material operations that Marx catalogs in some detail. Marx is clear that in order to maintain the exploitation of labor, it is not enough to rely on ‘the silent compulsion of economic relations’: capitalism needs individuals who have been disciplined and molded so that they fit into the production process like cogs in a machine.[612] Marx thus describes the production of what Foucault calls ‘docile bodies’: bodies augmented in economic force but diminished in political force.[613] This explains why Foucault explicitly and repeatedly cites Capital Volume One in Discipline and Punish, and why certain passages in both books are practically interchangeable.

Related to this rethinking of subjectivity, there is in Marx a reconceptualization of power. Just as Marx continues to rely on conventional notions of human nature, so to an extent he remains caught within a traditional way of theorizing power. The classic definition of political power that is found in the Manifesto — where it is characterized as ‘merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another’[614] — clearly remains indebted to the kinds of naiveties that poststructuralism seeks to expose and undermine. It suggests that power is the property of a single group, emanating from a single source and operating solely through repression. But in the same way that Marx undermines the very notions of human nature that he simultaneously continues to rely upon, so too does he destabilize the conventional view of power that he appears committed to. When Marx details the operations through which the capitalist mode of production produces the kinds of individuals that it needs to function he is describing operations of power: a power which is productive more than it is repressive. Post-anarchists sometimes argue that there is an equivalent naivety in Marxism and anarchism here: just as Marx reduces power to the economy, so classical anarchists tend to reduce all power to the state. But Marx’s move is quite different from that of anarchism. Marx agrees with post-anarchism that classical anarchism focuses too much on the state. (This is one of the accusations that he levels against Bakunin, for example.) By demonstrating that the apparently free and equal exchange between worker and capitalist sustains and is predicated upon relations of domination — and that it relies upon practices of power that are productive of different subjectivities — Marx is not offering a reductive view of power in which the political field of power relations is reduced to the economy and power is given secondary status with respect to economic relations. He is instead expanding the analysis of power, demonstrating both that power cannot be reduced to a single institution and that it permeates relations previously thought to be outside power. In classical political economy the economic realm is one of natural and spontaneous order and harmony to be left largely free from the artificial political constraints and interferences of the state: Marx’s novelty is to demonstrate that this supposedly neutral field of interaction is in fact invested with relations of domination. This is not a reduction of the political to the economic but a politicization of the economic, and thus the imbrication of politics and economics, creating what Etienne Balibar has called a ‘short-circuit’ between the two.[615] It is not Marx who reduces politics to economics, as both anarchists and post-anarchists have suggested: on the contrary, what Marx shows is that capitalism itself reduces politics to the economy, as it constantly undermines traditional political institutions and transforms all relations into mere economic transactions.[616] This is what Deleuze recognizes in Marx when he claims that capitalism functions through an axiomatic instead of through coding or overcoding.

We thus find in Marx an analysis of power not unlike that found in post-structuralism: power not as a possession used by one social group to repress another, but power as a field of conflictual social relations that is productive of different subject positions. Necessarily connected to this rethinking of power, we find in Marx a new way of thinking about subjectivity that anticipates post-structuralism. It might be objected that while it may be possible to find these things in Marx and therefore characterize Marx as a forerunner of post-structuralism, we can only do so if we ignore much else that is in Marx, picking and choosing from his work and discarding parts that we do not like. Two points can be made in response to this objection. First, the nature of Marx’s work makes it inevitable that this approach is used whether we like it or not: the forms and content of his work are so varied that we cannot help but be selective; any reading of his work will always be a partial interpretation. Marx himself does not offer his work as some kind of grand, unified system, and explicitly criticizes those who view his writings as some kind of ‘master key’ that can unlike the secrets of all societies regardless of geographical or historical context.[617] Secondly, this selective approach to Marx is no different from the approach that postanarchism itself takes toward classical anarchism: rejecting the residual essentialism in classical anarchism, post-anarchism nonetheless finds much else that is valuable in this tradition. This approach is inspired by post-structuralism, and indeed we find that post-structuralist thinkers themselves read Marx in this way: Derrida, for example, is insistent that there are many Marxes to choose from, and hence that any reading of Marx must be an ‘active interpretation’: ‘a critical, selective, and filtering reaffirmation.’[618] It seems to me that in its dismissive attitude towards Marxism, post-anarchism risks not only contravening the spirit of post-structuralism but also placing itself in a rather strange position whereby it values classical anarchism in spite of classical anarchism’s failure to recognize the productivity of power and the decentering of subjectivity, while simultaneously rejecting Marxism even though Marxism does recognize these things.

In post-anarchist theory, Marxism acts as a foil: it is both used as a contrast to highlight the strengths of anarchism, and at other times aligned with classical anarchism to be contrasted with the sophistications of post-structuralism. The effect is to render Marxism irrelevant to our contemporary situation, exposed and surpassed by the advances of post-structuralism but unlike classical anarchism incapable of redemption. My purpose in eliciting certain connections between Marxism and post-structuralism is to challenge this view not by simply reversing it and demonstrating that it is Marxism that has contemporary relevance and anarchism that should be condemned as an anachronism. Rather I have tried to show that Marxism deserves an equal hearing alongside anarchism. This is not an uncritical endorsement of Marxism in which we take it as it is and incorporate its insights as they stand. On the contrary, just as it has been argued that post-structuralism can offer a rereading of anarchism, so it is to be hoped that Marxism can be transformed by an encounter with post-structuralism. It is one of the many merits of poststructuralist thought that consideration of the questions it raises may initiate and facilitate the development of a more productive relationship between Marxism and anarchism.

<http://info.interactivist.net/node/2471>, last accessed 31 July, 2009; the second conclusion is reached by Allan Antliff, ‘Anarchy, Power, and Poststructuralism,’ SubStance 36(2) (2007), 56–66. A slightly different viewpoint, with criticisms of post-anarchism from a position much more sympathetic to poststructuralism, is provided by Michael Glavin, ‘Power, Subjectivity, Resistance: Three Works on Postmodern Anarchism,’ New Formulation 2(2) (2004) <http://www.newformulation.org/4glavin.htm>, last accessed 18 August, 2009.