Links:
- Polity-form (external constitution)
- Anarchy 101 [category feed]
This is not one of the posts specifically intended for use in the Reddit “Anarchy 101” forum, but it is at least similar enough in purpose to link to those posts.
I can’t say that I pay a great deal of attention to the anarchist content on YouTube, and that relationship has been largely mutual, so it’s always a novelty when I find that some of the work here has been found useful there — as in Andrewism’s excellent “How Anarchy Works” — or become a focus for criticism / new anarcho-culture wars content — as in these recent remarks by Anark. Check out the latter at your own risk, as it’s a little unclear how much familiarity with the post on “Polity-form (external constitution)” was actually involved. The notion is attributed to someone else, the blanket dismissal becomes an occasion for accusations of “veiled anti-organizationalism” among mutualists, and the position presumably refuted doesn’t look particular familiar to me. I’m just going to take the event as an indication that I’m probably overdue for a return to this particular question.
Let’s start with what kind of analysis this particular invocation of the polity-form really is. It’s part of the same 21st-century synthesis as my writings on “a schematic anarchism,” the recent Anarchy 101 posts, etc. The goal in all of this is one particular sort of “anarchism without adjectives,” conceived as a shareable account of an anarchy-centered anarchism. While I fully expect the work to be rejected by members of various anarchist factions, it is at least offered in the belief that it does not pose any obstacles to application not dictated by the nature of anarchy itself and the embrace of anarchy as a goal of anarchist practice.
I don’t know that you can approach anarchist theory with more benign intentions than that, but I’m not kidding myself that I’m not still picking a fight in proceeding in this way. So it’s important that steps like the definitions of terms are not themselves too controversial. Where possible, I’ve tried to keep the sense of key terms quite close to accepted definitions — for which I generally consult the digital edition of the Oxford English Dictionary — and the etymological cues. There is obviously nothing truly definitive about either, as meaning is worked out in use, but this approach seems to at least introduce fewer distractions than some others.
Fortunately, in the case of polity, there simply aren’t many ambiguities. The current definitions all cluster around the idea of a society organized as a political unit. The rare and obsolete definitions are more complicated — in the sense that they bring in elements of policy, politics, police, etc. — but without changing the focus much. The only real difficulty is that, with so many of the related terms being essentially indistinguishable in at least some of their uses, the move from, say, polity to politics doesn’t necessary clarify things greatly. By the time we have added policy and police, it at least becomes hard to deny the fundamentally governmental emphasis. Ultimately, the shared Greek and Latin roots point us to citizenship — which is really just the individual understood as a political unit.
The polity-form, then, in its simplest sense, is the form given to social collectivities when they are accounted for, explained, “realized” (in the language used by Louis Blanc in 1849-50), etc. by a transformation into political units. In this process, individuals — participants in the social relations that give rise to these social collectivities — are reimagined as citizens, subjects, members of the political unit, with rights, duties, privileges, etc. granted or imposed as a result. This governmental relation seems inescapably hierarchical — although in certain instances of extensive, stable consensus that hierarchy might be considered more or less “voluntary” (if only because there is no occasion for enforcement.)
The hierarchical quality or the polity-form may need some clarification, although the argument is one that I have made in various other contexts, including the debate about democracy. In the original post on the subject, one of the references was Proudhon’s description of the political State as “the external constitution of society.” Now, “external constitution” is perhaps a bit ambiguous. The governmental transformations of society are not ultimately accomplished by forces really external to society, but — as is the case with all of the operations of authority — we do have to recognize, I think, that the citizen has qualities not present in the individual, the State has qualities not present in the society it presumes to “constitute,” etc. There is a doubling that takes place, with the political element generally elevated about the social elements.
Anarchists have tended to recognize and reject this sort of doubling in some cases. Faced with the notion of self-ownership, for example, it has been common to observe that “I own myself” involves an unnecessary detour through the realm of property rights. We can recognize the circumstances — the critique of chattel slavery, for example — in which asserting self-ownership was something of an advance, at least in terms of rhetoric. There have been similar rhetorical advantages, it seems to me, in constructions such as self-government or even the citizen-State / State-citizen balance proposed by Proudhon late in his career. But, if we are simply focused on clear anarchist theory, it is not at all clear what we gain from imagining each individual as simultaneously ruler and ruled, when the anarchist standard has so often been to be neither ruled nor rulers. Ideally, we’re simply clear enough about this stuff that we can use these self- constructions in circumstances where the analysis demands that we address existing hierarchies and abandon them when we’re talking about anarchy, but that obviously requires a certain amount of clarity that is perhaps not always there.
But what are the consequences of this hierarchical doubling — particularly in the “best” cases, where it appears alongside relations that might appear to us as voluntary, radically democratic, based in consensus, etc.? One of the charges leveled against apolitical organization is that it is “inefficient” — presumably to the point where that accusation of “veiled anti-organizationalism” makes sense — but I’m not sure that it’s a charge with much sense behind it. The critique of the polity-form is not really a critique of any aspect of organization except the recourse to hierarchy and governmental structures. Neither the extent nor the persistence of the associations formed is in question, nor is their formal, informal or emergent character. It is entirely a question of structural qualities — and specifically of recourse to the apparatus of authority.
Let’s go back to Proudhon’s conception of the non-governmental State — the account that I have talked about in terms of a “citizen-state.” Proudhon believed in the existence of collective beings or collective persons, which are manifestations of human activity on scales — both of duration and extent — beyond those of individual human beings or the more intimate, personal sorts of interactions. These entities are not “externally constituted,” but are instead expressions of complex interactions that we might consider “internal” to them. Some may be the result of explicit association, mutual agreement, with some degree of codification regarding practices, while others will be informal and “emergent,” in the sense that the social environment will be altered by the ensemble of smaller-scale negotiations, compromises, etc. It’s easy to imagine that some of the large-scale, more-or-less “emergent” forms social collectivity might well be perpetual in their duration — if we recognize that their perpetuity is a matter of constant development, shaped by the interplay of association of other sorts, at other scales. There will be global entities to be accounted for — in those contexts where it might make sense to account for global entities: Humanity, Nature, etc. The names are pretty badly beat up from past usage, but we live in a world where crises of a global character, developments on a global scale, complicate many of the most intimate, personal of our relations.
The question, in this particular context, is knowing when and how we might want to account for these entities on the largest scales. One approach would be to begin with them, to take them as the clearest indications of divine or natural “intent” and make them sources or demonstrations of authority regarding what would then be other, subordinate scales. That doesn’t seem to be a viable option for anarchists, however, and the sort of clear understanding that we can gain about things at those limits of our experience seem least likely to provide us useful guidance in either narrowly personal relations or social relations at various more expansive scales. We can’t, it seems to me, be blind to the existence of these large-scale “entities.” (The word is a bit unsatisfactory, but at least intelligible in context.) But action at those sorts of scales seems to be the least intelligible and the least subject to direct control of any sort.
It appears that if we are going to talk about conscious, anarchistic organization — self-organization, a term that may still split the human agent a bit artificially, but with which we’ll try to live for now — we have to start somewhere closer to the human individual (without, in the process, embracing any particular sort of individualism.) The recent criticism of our attempt to do so without recourse to political forms and language includes some insistance that the apolitical character of the approach would itself entail a kind of legislation — prohibitions and “demands” — attempting to govern voluntary interactions. At the same time, there’s an insinuation that perhaps what is being proposed is simply a shifting of the dominant polity from the political realm into the economic realm, with the firm emerging as the dominant form. I want to be particularly clear about the second suggestion, recalling the short list of examples in the earlier post, “including the governmental state, the capitalist firm, the patriarchal family, ‘the People’ within a democracy, the commune in some descriptions of communism, the individual in the context of some forms of individualism, etc.” If there is an extremism lurking in the analysis I’m working through, it is not one that “demands” breaking down “general bodies” into specific ones, but one that is sorely tempted to dispense with this talk about “bodies” altogether — including those we find in Proudhon’s work, the 1849-50 debates, etc. — emphasizing instead the complex flows of materials and the will to association itself within societies understood in strictly anarchic, horizontal terms. After all, even in the best-rendered accounts of social relations among unity-collectivities, we’re going to always, I think, run up against a fuzziness in the boundaries between individuals. Property does not seem to be a problem with any single clear solution.
For now, however, let’s stop short of launching ourselves into an examination of society as a “body without organs” — as amusing as that might be — and stick to questions of organ-ization. Let’s focus in particular on what practices might be “forbidden” to practitioners of a consistently apolitical form of anarchist social organization.
The intent in all of this fundamentally synthetic work is to leave open to anarchists every practice that seems consistent with the establishment of anarchy and the application of anarchist principles. It’s very much not a question of dictating certain practices. As you might expect from someone who has spent a long time in the debates about what is and is not consistently anarchistic, I have high standards for what counts meaningfully as voluntarity — and I have yet to see a model of “voluntary hierarchy” that appears both truly persistently voluntary and genuinely hierarchical — but I am, in theory, open to a very diverse range of arrangements, including some considered by at least some of their proponents as hierarchical. In particular, I am increasingly interested in exploring the ways in which caring and tutelary relations, by which individuals supplement the agency of others by accepting responsibility for some aspect of their care, might be generalized to some extent in social relations where we move beyond considerations of political equality to really embrace and address the specific, at times profound differences that exist among human beings — and then between human beings and the various other objects of ethical concern that we might recognize.
As far back as the 2017 “Mutual Exchange on Anarchy and Democracy,” I was beginning to explore the terms under which so-called “democratic practices” might be recuperated outside the sphere of governmentalist democratic principles. (“Antinomies of Democracy” contains those first explorations.) It doesn’t seem of particular interest to me if people take a vote, draw straws, work up complex “rules” for the operation of their formal associations or whatever — provided that, when the issues at stake are serious enough to inspire rebellion in the ranks, no one attempts to enforce the “will” of that particular collectivity on the recalcitrant. I am neither unaware of or indifferent to the kinds of harm that might occur when genuinely voluntary systems break down, but strongly prefer a system in which no form of harm can be authorized in advance as a result of the existence of a political unit to those in which “crime” and its “punishment” are normalized.
The thorny question always seems to be how to draw the line between archic and anarchic arrangements. If you start from the archic side, it appears comparatively easy to find analogies to familiar political units in what might otherwise appear to be non-political contexts. Friends deciding on what movie to watch becomes an instance of face-to-face, small-scale “democracy.” Individuals are “sovereign,” etc. We constantly see in these discussions how the language of archy — hierarchy, authority, politics, government, etc. — has been normalized, extended, metaphorized and used to describe relations of a very different sort. But maybe the divide is easier to spot if we begin on the side of anarchy. Presumably, if there is a point at which, as has been claimed, the emergence of a polity is inevitable, then there ought to be a moment when the friends discussing moving options become citizens of some collectivity that decides things together generally, as a collectivity, and will for the foreseeable future, with some body of norms and practices emerging, becoming binding on the citizens, constraining specific dissent in the ways that presumably involve general citizenship, etc. If relations are truly voluntary, if no enforcement of norms is required, if the polity is not in any sense elevated in a hierarchical manner above the citizens, then perhaps “the line” is just as hard to distinguish — but then what is the function of this polity, which must be in these respects very different, and in so many ways, from nearly all, if not all, of the political bodies we encounter in archic society?
We know that at least some of the nominally anarchist defenders of democracy make that defense precisely because they believe that it is sometimes necessary for majorities to impose on minorities or, among the defenders of specifically consensus democracy, for minorities to constrain majorities. In those circumstances, I don’t think that there is any doubt that there is a hierarchical, governmental relation in place, with which the citizens may choose to go along, perhaps perpetually, without changing its structural character. Assuming that a persistent voluntarity prevents the looming crisis from ever manifesting itself, we still don’t have anarchy — although what we do have may be better, in various ways, that a lot of the alternatives.
I find my differences with the majoritarian would-be democratic anarchists at least easy to conceptualize, even if the debates with them are often not a lot of fun. I guess I can’t say the same about those on the other side of this polity-form debate, since I am not yet really clear what substantive elements separate us — however clear some of the more general sectarian differences may be. For now, I suppose the best I can do is to make these new attempts to clarify my original analysis.
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