"Sketches of a Post-Foucauldian Anarchism"

Fing

The majority of anarchist literature I read seems to
have yet to absorb the analytics of power left as the
legacy of the French historian Michel Foucault. A
brilliant philosophical scholar, Foucault left us not
with a system of analysis, but rather a series of
critiques and suggestions that ultimately demolish all
systems of thought.

He presents two lines of thought that I'd like to
develop here, for their relevance to anarchism. First
is to deepen the understanding of power, an
understanding that is frequently lacking among
anarchists. The other is to counter claims made by
some anarchists to be recovering some fundamental
aspect of human nature by clearing away authoritarian
or heirarchical institutions that impede the
expression of an anarchic, nonauthoritarian true human
nature. Human nature does not exist indepedent of the
cultural institutions and practices that construct it:
as anarchists our goal might better be described as
instituting practices that create humans as anarchic.
We are growing a collection of fluid and free
institutions and organizations that will replace those
institutions (such as the corporation and the
nation-state) which produce persons as obedient
workers and obedient masters.

Often the anarchist position is spoken of as "speaking
truth to power." In speaking truth to power, we will
dispel the myths which power uses to keep people
enslaved. Sometimes our struggle is framed as a
confrontation with "The Power," a loosely defined
enemy but certainly includes corporate executives,
heads of state, leaders of restrictive churches, in
short, any political, economic, or social elite. We
thus identify with the "powerless." Our language
suggests that power is a thing that some people hold
or have or own, and others don't. Power is a
commodity, that can be exchanged or seized or donated;
or it is a position one can have in society.

The first thing to consider, then, is that power is
none of these things: power is not a thing one can
have, power is not a position, nor is it control over
particular institutions. What is it, then? Consider a
conception of power not as a thing, but as a
relationship. Further, consider that *any* human
relationship can be seen as having power relations as
a component. This relationship may be symmetrical,
with both parties dominating and submitting to a
roughly equal degree (as between friends); or one
person may clearly dominate another (as the employer
dominates the employee). Power is not outside our
relationships: it is part of our relationships.

We must replace this concept of The Power. All too
often, we forget that there is no secret cabal of
powerful people meeting and intentionally plotting to
maintain poverty and hunger. The activities of
organizations like the IMF or the WTO clearly result
in an increase of poverty and a greater concentration
of wealth, which tempts us to be suspicious of their
claims to have the elimination of poverty as a goal.
But we should be sure to be suspicious of our
suspicions: I find it more likely that the delegates
of the WTO or IMF earnestly and honestly want to help,
but are constrained both materially (for example, by
corporate interests) and intellectually (for example,
by thinking as capitalists, with fundamental ideas
like the "creation of wealth" which are taken as
absolute truths or facts). In fact, we all know that
there is no cabal, yet our language may often be
mistaken as though we think there is. This is partly a
consequence of our employment of institutional
analysis, a mode of analysis that ignores the
individual, personal actors within the institution and
instead considers the institution itself as an actor
with interests and strategies.

Let us replace this concept of The Power with
Foucault's notion of the "infra-power." He writes of a
power infrastructure, composed by the state, the
hospital, the asylum, the corporation, the factory,
the prison, the school, the family. Power is implicit
in every one of our relationships: there are local
centers of power, like the parent/child or
employer/employee or teacher/student. The asymmetries
of domination in these relationships add up to the
global power structures, which may be given names like
The Establishment or The System. In using those names,
we forget that these systems of domination are not
imposed upon us by some elite, rather they are
implicit in the arrangements of our relationships.
Viewed in these terms, the goal of anarchism shifts
from the elimination of power to the redistribution of
power; from the eradication of The Power to the
re-organization and re-arrangement of social relations
so that power relations are symmetric.

The System is composed of our personal interactions.
It is something like the sum total or composite of
every one of our relationships. This fact has been
known to anarchists for some time, and is the impetus
for "civil rights" movements such as the feminist or
anti-racist causes. We understand that "the personal
is the political," and that the first step towards
building an anarchist society is to examine our own
personal relations for asymmetries in domination. This
is not easy: a single relationship between a
particular man and a particular woman, embedded in a
global sexism, requires great care in order to be
locally egalitarian. The global power structure
reinforces local power relations. The good news is, of
course, that local power relations reinforce global
power structures as well, so if a man and a woman to
achieve equality in a sexist society, that society is
ever so slightly less sexist. It becomes more
difficult when interacting in an institution like the
employer/employee relationship: this relationship has
been structured so that the employer cannot help but
be exercising power over the employee.

.oOo.

The other point I'd like to elaborate is the
conception of human nature. Humans are naturally
competetive, the capitalists insist, and they claim
capitalism best expresses human nature. No, the answer
comes from various economic philosophers opposed to
capitalism, human nature is naturally cooperative, and
capitalist or statist institutions impede the
cooperation humans naturally seek. Both of these
beliefs rest on a basic fallacy: the independence of
"human nature" from the social institutions.

To whatever extent we can speak of human nature (that
is, to whatever extent a particular society allows us
to collect certain human behaviors and declare them to
be "human nature" and talk about this object thus
defined), this human nature is constituted by social
relations. Whatever capacities may be available to us
biologically, our understanding and use of them is
determined by society; this means the social,
political, and economic institutions.

People born and raised in capitalist society are
naturally competetive. And people born and raised in
the state find themselves placed within a network of
relationships of domination and submission. Our goal
as anarchists is not to destroy those institutions
that impede the expression of cooperative creativity
that is our true nature; our goal as anarchists is to
create new practices and organizations (I hesitate to
use the word "institution," hesitate to connect the
coming anarchy to the fossils that are raping our
world) that constitute new human beings, create new
human natures. As people leave the power structures of
the capitalist state, and work their way into the
power structures of anarchist groups (like Food Not
Bombs or an Indymedia Collective, for example), they
leave behind their competetive natures and are
transformed. They learn new habits--habits of sharing,
habits of neither being submissive or dominating.

My vision, as an anarchist, is that these groups that
re-create persons into sharing, loving beings will
grow; that eventually they will offer an attractive
enough alternative to the people currently plugged
into the great state machine that those people will
disconnect, and let themselves be transformed.

Perhaps these notes were obvious. Perhaps I've wasted
your time. In any case, thanks for your time.

Love, Fing

austin.indymedia.org/