​Despite postmodernism’s rejections of utopian ideologies, there’s always the seduction of the old class line. The red banner of world revolution and the fight against the unitary systems of oppression; the state and capital.

 

There’s comfort in the politics of ‘us and them’; a sense of belonging, shared identity and even a self-pitying, self-perpetuating victimhood. 

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Marxism offers us liberation as a historical inevitability.

 

It’s a cozy set-up whereby a dialectic of opposing forces pushes us forth towards our communist destiny. The proletariat, as a uniquely revolutionary social category, is fated to usher us into an epoch of social harmony after the resolution of its antagonisms with the bourgeoisie, via world revolution and a transitory stage of socialist dictatorship.

 

 

Well isn’t that lovely? It has the same morbid attraction of organized religion; the promise of a utopian future, of a linear progression of time with a teleological end, of salvation through sacrifice to a philosophical abstraction.

 

Marxism has solved all the quandaries. It has all the answers. It has reduced the irreducible multiplicities and struggles into a war between the bourgeois and the proletariat, identifying capital as the unitary source of concentrated power from which all domination emanates. Simple – it’s them and us. Eliminate them, and all will be well. Eliminate the base, collectivize the means of production, and all else – the whole intricate superstructure of power; its techniques, subtleties and flows – will fall into place.

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This leads to an arrogance that allows the various Marxist parties to declare themselves ‘the vanguards’ of the proletariat. Just as a religious sect anoints itself as the key to redemption while damning all the other sects to hell, the Marxist parties promote themselves as the keepers of the keys of proletarian revolution. They accuse rival Marxist-acronyms of being petit-bourgeois, reformist, sectarian, ultra-left, idealist, or even Zionist/Imperialist stooges.

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Onwards to the ‘transitional phase‘, as the Central Committee see to it that the state withers away as quickly as possible. Everything surrendered to the workers’ state, the benevolent managers and the administrators, in the promise of communism tomorrow, the next generation, or one after, just as soon as we get around to solving all those ‘class antagonisms’.

 

Marxist consequentialism and Hegelian historicism crushed the rebellion at Kronstadt, the Makhnovist army in Ukraine and the workers’ councils of Spain, all for the greater good, for a warped utilitarian ethic where everything can (and was) sacrificed for the higher ideal, for the realization of the Marxist prophecy, for the forward march of history and for the proletarian dictatorship.

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Anarchism by contrast embraces a prefigurative politics; one where means is not subordinated to ends and theory is not separated from practice. Direct action by ad hoc groups of individuals takes precedence over struggles mediated by representational hierarchies and rigid organizational structures. But anarchism does not usually refuse the delineation of the world into two economically-determined camps – 1% vs. 99%, and it has not abandoned the illusory goal of an flourishing human paradise on earth – one without anxiety, antagonism and struggle. It still cherishes the end target of total social harmony.

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Primitivists have tried to convince us that before civilization, before The Fall, there was a paradise akin to the Elysian wonderland of the naked Adam and Eve of the Western creation myth, in which people and nature were one, in which property and class were anathema and humanity shared in abundance. Zerzan eulogizes a lost existence; an unalienated, unmediated and unworried life.

 

Who knows if it ever was? What can an anarchist anthropology offer in this regard? In our current situation, we have to drop this quasi-religious faith in a coming nirvana and regressive nostalgia for an age we have never lived. 

 

We have to drop this creed of optimism in a remote heaven. Stop romanticizing an ever-illusive working class identity.

 

Realize revolution as a perpetual process, a constant becoming and not an end to be achieved absolutely.

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Embrace multiplicity and difference with a politics of desire, not duty and self-sacrifice. “I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires.”

 

 Initially attractive as an alternative to the dreariness of the Marxist left, anarchism was about doing things in the here and now, not waiting in vain for The Crisis and pushing papers, waving the flag, listening to speeches for a the approaching revolution or the hotly-anticipated resolution of social strife.

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So there’s a class war on, dickhead, pick a fucking side. We can reconcile our wishy-washy-posty-moderny tripe with this simple statement anytime we like: When we see police beating rioters, when the young looters are locked up for years while bankers are rewarded handsomely for their thievery, when millionaire governments strip away the livelihoods of vulnerable and disenchanted people.

 

When benefits that were won by the struggles of the multitude are attacked, we see no contradiction in fighting on the side of ‘the oppressed’, but we do so without any illusions.

 

We’ll not deny the existence of class, but we’ll accept it as something dynamic and unstable, with no fixed or homogenous identity.  

 

We’ll confront economic oppression as one of a myriad of oppressions. We won't idealize the proletariat as some uniform bloc of subdued charity-cases, while opiated with nostalgia for the salt-of-the-earth pickets and the struggles of times gone by.

 

Rhizomatic power is pushing in all directions and across class boundaries. There is no center of power, no simple, neat pyramid, only intersecting practices of power. We can’t reduce everything down to the bourgeois/proletarian dialectic.

 

It is possible to refuse and resist economic oppression without falling prey to the dogma of  ‘historical agents’ and ‘proletarian awakenings.’ It can be called taking the side of the workers if you like, or taking the side of the exploited. If there’s a hypocrisy in this position then fine, we’ll embrace the inconsistency.