Monthly Archives: February 2019

Individualist Perspectives

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This essay was first published in Bulletin de SIA (Toulouse), 1957; this translation by Richard DeHaan first appeared in Views and Comments, Number 25, New York.

The anarchist individualists do not present themselves as proletarians, absorbed only in the search for material amelioration, tied to a class determined to transform the world and to substitute a new society for the actual one. They place themselves in the present; they disdain to orient the coming generations towards a form of society allegedly destined to assure their happiness, for the simple reason that from the individualist point of view happiness is a conquest, an individual’s internal realization.  

Even if I believed in the efficacy of a universal social transformation, according to a well-defined system, without direction, sanction, or obligation, I do not see by what right I could persuade others that it is the best.  For example, I want to live in a society from which the last vestige of authority has disappeared, but, to speak frankly, I am not certain that the “mass,” to call it what it is, is capable of dispensing with authority.  I want to live in a society in which the members think by and for themselves, but the attraction which is exercised on the mass by publicity, the press, frivolous reading and by State-subsidized distractions is such that I ask myself whether men will ever be able to reflect and judge with an independent mind.  

I may be told in reply that the solution of the social question will transform every man into a sage.  This is a gratuitous affirmation, the more so as there have been sages under all regimes. Since I do not know the social form which is most likely to create internal harmony and equilibrium in social unity, I refrain from theorizing.  

When “voluntary association” is spoken of, voluntary adhesion to a plan, a project, a given action, this implies the possibility of refusingthe association, adhesion or action.  Let us imagine the planet submitted to a singlesocial or economic life; how would I exist if this system did not please me?  There remains to me only one expedient: to integrate or to perish.  It is held that, “the social question” having been solved, there is no longer a place for non-conformism, recalcitrance, etc; but it is precisely when a question has been resolved that it is important to pose new ones or to return to an old solution, if only to avoid stagnation.  

If there is a “Freedom” standing over and above all individuals, it is surely nothing more than the expression of their thoughts, the manifestation and diffusion of their opinions.  The existence of a social organization founded on a single ideological unity interdicts all exercise of freedom of speech and of ideologically contrary thought. How would I be able to oppose the dominant system, proposing another, supporting a return to an older system, if the means of making my viewpoint known or of publicizing my critiques were in the possession of the agents of the regime in power?  This regime must either accept reproach when compared to other social solutions superior to its own, or, despite its termination in “ist,” it is no better than any other regime.  Either it will admit opposition, secession, schism, fractionalism, competition, or nothing will distinguish it significantly from a dictatorship.  This “ist” regime would undoubtedly claim that it has been invested with its power by the masses, that it does not exercise its power or control except by the delegation of assemblies or congresses; but as long as it did not allow the intransigents and refractories to express the reasons for their attitude and for their corresponding behavior, it would be only a totalitarian system.  The material benefits on which a dictatorship prides itself are of no importance. Regardless of whether there is scarcity or abundance, a dictatorship is always a dictatorship.  

It is asked of me why I call my individualism “anarchist individualism”? Simply because the State concretizes the best organized form of resistance to individual affirmation. What is the State?  An organism which bills itself as representative of the social body, to which power is allegedly delegated, this power expressing the will of an autocrat or of popular sovereignty.  This power has no reason for existing other than the maintenance of the extant social structure.  But individual aspirations are unable to come to term with the existence of the State, personification of Society, for, as Palante says: “All society is and will be exploitative, usurpacious, dominating, and tyrannical.  This it is not by accident but by essence.”  Yet the individualist would be neither exploited, usurped, dominated, tyrannized nor dispossessed of his sovereignty.  On the other hand, Society is able to exercise its constraint on the individual only thanks to the support of the State, administrator and director of the affairs of Society.  No matter which way he turns the individual encounters the State or its agents of execution, who do not care in the least whether the regulations which they enforce concur or not with the diversity of temperaments of the subjects upon whom they are administered.  From their aspirations as from their demands, the individualists of our school have eliminated the State.  That is why they call themselves “anarchists.” 

But we deceive ourselves if we imagine that the individualists of our school are anarchists (AN-ARCHY, etymologically, means only negation of the state, and does not pertain to other matters) only in relation to the State – such as the western democracies or the totalitarian systems.  This point cannot be overemphasized.  Against all that which is power, that is, economic as well as political domination, esthetic as well as intellectual, scientific as well as ethical, the individualists rebel and form such fronts as they are able, alone or in voluntary association.  In effect, a group or federation can exercise power as absolute as any State if it accepts in a given field all the possibilities of activity and realization.  

The only social body in which it is possible for an individualist to evolve and develop is that which admits a concurrent plurality of experiences and realizations, to which is opposed all groupings founded on an ideological exclusiveness, which, well-meant though they may be, threaten the integrity of the individual from the moment that this exclusiveness aims to extend itself to the non-adherents of the grouping.  To call this anti-statist would be doing no more than providing a mask for an appetite for driving a herd of human sheep.  

I have said above that it is necessary to insist on this point.  For example, anarchist communism denies, rejects and expels the State from its ideology; but it resuscitates it the moment that it substitutes social organization for personal judgment.  If anarchist individualism thus has in common with anarchist communism the political negation of the State, of the “Arche,” it only marks a point of divergence. Anarchist communism places itself on the economic plane, on the terrain of the class struggle, united with syndicalism, etc (this is its right), but anarchist individualism situates itself on the psychological plane, and on that of resistance to social totalitarianism, which is something entirely different.  (Naturally, anarchist individualism follows the many paths of activity and education: philosophy, literature, ethics, etc; but I have wanted to make precise here only some points of our attitude to the social environment.) 

I do not deny that this is not very new, but it is taking a position to which it is good to return from time to time.  

False Messiah

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Jesus of Nazareth presents himself as a very obliging figure; he’s prepared to be whatever you want him to be.  World teacher and avatar; anarcho-Zealot revolutionary or proto-anticapitalist rebel (“Jerusalem Slim” the IWW hobo “Wanted for Sedition”); Apollo or maybe Dionysus; assemblage of holy relics (and sixteen foreskins); Docetic phantom or Gnostic magician; humble carpenter and Hellenistic philosopher; Middle Eastern dying-&-resurrecting fertility-deity archetype or homosexual; magic mushroom; even very God of very God and divine Savior.

Jesus seems willing to act as Roman Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, Method-ist, Nestorian, Monophysite, Arian, Holy Roller, Ranter, Anabaptist, Southern Baptist, Pentecostalist, Chaldaean, Russian or Greek Orthodox, Hindu Avatar, Islamic Prophet, Taoist sage, or even a Jew.

He’s the Prince of Peace, or else he wields a sword.  He’s pro-family, or else orders you to spurn your father and mother and follow only him; he’s for icons or against them; he loves organ music or detests it; he upholds the Law or preaches antinomianism; he serves alchemical wine with the bread and roast lamb, or he sticks to prosaic grape juice and vegetables; he practices and enjoins strict chastity or he marries Mary Magdalen; he died and rose again, or else emigrated to Kashmir (where his tomb is still to be seen), or maybe Southern France.

I have to admit that for a long time I found none of these versions of Jesus totally convincing—all equally persuasive but also unpersuasive—until a few years ago when it occurred to me one day to think of him as a failure.  A failed messiah.

Suddenly he became attractive to me.  All at once he came to life.  I could take him seriously at last.  Perhaps even “believe in him.”

Jesus promised his disciples he would “come again while some of ye yet live”—but 2000 years have gone by and there’s no sign of him.  Assuming he was actually crucified—or that he secretly conquered the world and is reigning in glory over the Eschaton—there exists no evidence of his resurrection and ascension into heaven (which is where exactly?)—and in fact there’s no hard evidence that he ever really existed at all.  (The paragraphs concerning him in Josephus were obviously forged by later Christian apologists.

It seems unlikely that he intended to found a new religion, but if he did we can say confidently that the result left a lot to be desired.  Instead of universal peace, love, tolerance and care for the poor, the movement turned to holy war, murder of heretics, dissidents, pagans, sinners, Jews and witches; paranoid self-loathing and smug righteousness; and theological justification for usury, feudalism, imperialism, colonialism, nationalism and capitalism.

Of course some religious art and music have been produced over the centuries. If only the Church had restricted itself to stained glass and polyphony, they’d be no reason not to love it. Instead it has meddled with morality and dwelt morbidly on sin, guilt, hell and damnation.  How much nicer it all sounded in Latin, which no one could understand, especially when sung in four-part counterpoint.  The Catholics were, I believe, quite correct not to translate the Bible into vernacular tongues.  Have you ever actually read the Old Testament?  Shocking!  Smite the Amalekites, indeed!  And the Gospels are chock full of contradictions and obfuscations.

Jesus takes on a new luster, for me anyway, when contemplated as an existentialist (anti)hero, a sort of crypto Nietzschean bohemian drop-out preaching the will to powerlessness, a forerunner of Thomas JJ Altizer’s “God is Dead” movement, a hopeless advocate of Flower Power, a Rastafarian ganja-head, the original hippy peacenik.  I don’t need to believe in his miracles, just in his good intentions—and besides, neither really worked.  The savior who couldn’t even save himself…I can grok it.

Having considered all this, I next realized that Jesus was not only a Failed Messiah, he was probably also a False Messiah.  I trust my readers are familiar with Gershom Scholem’s masterpiece on Sabbatai Sevi, the false Messiah who converted to Islam in 1666 whose followers still exist as a Jewish-Sufi-Antinomian-Freemasonic sect in Turkey called the Dunmeh.  Sevi in turn inspired another wild False Messiah, Jacob Frank of Poland, who converted to Catholicism.  The Frankists (who may now be extinct, though I hope not) seem to have practiced an even more extreme form of antinomian excess, a kind of heretical magical tantra. Some of his followers were involved in the French Revolution, and there’s a rumor that Sigmund Freud’s ancestors were Frankists.

The true role of the False Messiah is to proclaim the esotericization and abrogation of the Law.  As the Ismaili leader Hasan II, the Assassin Qa’im(a sort of Messiah) of Alamut put it, “The Chains of the Law have been broken.” If “the Kingdom of Heaven is within you,” then you are (in potentia) already “perfect,” and all that you desire is holy.  Thus Moslems can drink wine, Jews can eat pork, Christians can achieve erotic bliss, having all become “as gods.” This theosis, to use the technical term, constitutes the esoteric message of the False Messiah.  The predicted “end of the world” always seems to be a flop, but in truth the world of compulsionhas indeed ended and the disciple of the messiah becomes the messiah, the liberated child of God, an angel of light.  In effect the False Messiah becomes Blake’s Satan, not the embodiment of evil but of the Divine Imagination, “beyond good and evil,” the Nietzschean free spirit, the one who overcomes the merely human and realizes the true alchemical self.  In short, in the eyes of the world, a dangerous criminal.

This messianic project, as we’ve already explained, is a failure.  It doesn’t matter however.  What counts is the “gratuitous act” of self-liberation, the assault on Heaven, the glorious defeat, the legacy of infamy.  Now we can say that Jesus was an anarchist, a queer, a magician, a mushroom, etc—and it will have some resonance.  All this will constitute a real Faith, one which we can be proud to claim as our own.

It’s been proposed that Christianity is an “impossible” religion.  Now we can admit that this is true, and that explains why we might want to practice such a farrago of surrealist nonsense.  Credo quia absurdum est—but it’s not the doctrine of the Trinity that’s absurd, nor the “scandal” of resurrection, nor the transubstantiation of bread and wine, nor the injunction to be “perfect.” The absurdity is Jesus himself, and that is why we can at last embrace him.

Control /and/ Decontrol

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My project is oriented towards decontrol.  I write and theorize on the nature of control, as well as hopefully implement tactics in resistance to control machines. Control is the collective totality of structures, institutions, and practices which interlock to form a larger system of hegemony.  This includes obvious forms of repression, such as police and prisons, but also less obvious forms such as domestication and recuperation.  The control system is vast and ever present.  There are no aspects of life which it does not touch. Unlike older and cruder forms, it is not merely an external authority.  Control is a social discourse inscribed and conditioned within individuals, who then replicate and perpetuate it.  We are all in on the plot, we are all victims and victimizers.  When I write, I attempt to tease out some view of how these systems function.  For this reason the text must be decentered, expansive.  The subject matter is diverse, but this theme reads through all of it.

It is difficult to find techniques of resistance.  Many popular resistance strategies involve self-sacrifice, which merely perpetuates ideologies of the totality.  Many other resistance strategies, such as protest and organizing, perpetuate hegemonic structures.  These become alternative management strategies, loyal oppositions, which can step in to save authoritarian structures.  This leaves tactics based on the affinity group principle and autonomous insurrectionary actions.  The affinity principle is difficult to realize because anti-authoritarian community is so weak and many individuals are so far gone that they function as unconscious agents.  Autonomous insurrectionary actions can be problematic because many of the effective ones are taken from the realm of military action.  Thus, they may ultimately put bystanders in danger. This is problematic.

Clearly, at this point, I stand suffering from false consciousness.

But, if we were able to decide that rather than a direct conflict it could be possible to adopt an alternative strategy—an asymmetrical war of every everyday life, guerrilla ontology.  On the macro level the totality is impossible to confront.  But on the micro level there are nearly an infinite number of chances for resistance and refusal.  Structures of control are embedded all through our daily lives.  Rather than create a social program, resistance could come in the form of becoming a glitch in the cybernetic system.  If the totality is ever present, then sites of resistance are rendered ever present too.  As the system of control is spread over the entire world the localized control structure is rendered weak and fragile.  As each of these are interlocking, when the part is damaged, so is the whole.

Benjamin Tucker American Mutualist, Addendum: Tucker Did Not Advocate Voting in Businesses

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In the articles Benjamin Tucker American Mutualist, Parts 1 & 2, it was suggested that voting by both employers and employees in a business could be one way to retain the labor theory of value within the Capitalist system.  It was just one potential option as a temporary measure to have non-exploitative employers in businesses within a Capitalist economy.  As alluded to in the previous articles, if the business was in an individualist anarchist market rather than a capitalist economy, voting by workers to receive their full value would no longer be needed as the market itself would decide the wages.[1] This series aims to present the ideas of Tucker in an accurate fashion, so this article will focus on how Tucker himself believed businesses should be operated.

 Within the American Mutualist economic system of Tucker, voting would not be needed as the market itself would decide the average wages for a particular job.[2]  This goes back to the days of Josiah Warren. In Men Against the Stateby James Martin, it is noted that the people living in the American Mutualist town of Utopia traded labor for labor upon the ‘cost principle’ by letting the market itself decide the wages and prices of goods without capitalist rent, interest, or profit.[3]  Tucker himself stated that, following the labor theory of value (the cost principle), wages would not need to be voted upon as the competitive market itself would decide the average labor time and prices of occupations and goods.

Tucker states regarding the Cost Principle:

“For my part, I do not believe that it is possible or highly important to realize it absolutely and completely.  But it is both possible and highly important to effect its approximate realization.  So much can be effected without compulsion,—in fact, can only be effected by at least partial abolition of compulsion,—and so much will be sufficient.”[4]

Therefore, while Tucker was not opposed to voting in businesses (ie, the co-ops of Proudhon) Tucker himself preferred a business with employers and employees where both received their wage amounts depending on the going wage rate at the time on the competitive market.[5]

Tucker opposed capitalist rent, interest and profit, which he believed to be a result of state intervention within the market which allowed one class of people to live without working while another class of people had to work for wages less than their full value.[6]  Tucker believed that state-enforced privilege allowed employers to extract a portion of the employees’ pay that would have been the employees’ had there been equality of opportunity on the market.  The lack of equality of opportunity on the market leads employees to accept lower wages just to live and hence employers can pay lower wages to their employees and they receive a wage less than the full value of their labor.[7]

Tucker believed the solution would be Mutual Banks. With Mutual banks that offered credit with interest at less than one percent, anyone could go into business for themselves and hence employers would raise their wages to their full value on the market to entice workers to work for them.  As a result, the class of people that made money without working for it (the Capitalist class) would disappear and employers would pay their employees the full value of their labor.[8]

Capitalism is an economic system where a class of employers make money without working for it while another class of people (employees) are paid less than their full value. Marx states:

 “The working day of 12 hours embodies itself, eg, in a money-value of 6 shillings. Either equivalents are exchanged, and then the labourer receives 6 shillings, for 12 hours’ labour; the price of his labour would be equal to the price of his product.  In this case he produces no surplus-value for the buyer of his labour, the 6 shillings are not transformed into capital, the basis of capitalist production vanishes.  But it is on this very basis that he sells his labour and that his labour is wage-labour.  Or else he receives for 12 hours’ labour less than 6 shillings, i.e., less than 12 hours’ labour.  Twelve hours’ labour are exchanged against 10, 6, &c, hours’ labour.  This equalisation of unequal quantities not merely does away with the determination of value.  Such a self-destructive contradiction cannot be in any way even enunciated or formulated as a law.”

The unearned income generated by paying workers less than the full value of their labor is called Surplus Value.   Markets do not equate to capitalism which is why different market systems like market socialism and mutualism exist.[9] 

Tucker’s way of organizing a business would be similar to that of a capitalist business with employers and employees.  However, the difference between a capitalist business and Tucker’s Individualist Anarchist business would be that in Tucker’s Individualist Anarchist way of doing business, employers and employees would be paid the full value of their labor depending on the going rate of the occupation on the Individualist Anarchist market at the time, and the Individualist Anarchist market would have equality of opportunity in the market due to the Mutual Banks.[10]            Tucker agreed with Marx on his theory of surplus value which can be seen in his article ‘Karl Marx Friend and Foe.’[11]  It is Tucker’s opposition to economic exploitation that led him to call his system Anarchistic Socialism.[12]For more information, see Tucker’s article State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree and Wherein They Differ.

[1]Evans, Nicholas. ‘Benjamin Tucker American Mutualist Part 1’. Anarchistnews.org. 2017. Available online at: https://anarchistnews.org/content/benjamin-tucker-american-mutualist; Evans, Nicholas. ‘Benjamin Tucker American Mutualist: Mutual Banking Part 3 and Final Conclusion Part 4’. Anarchistnews.org. 2017 Available online at: https://anarchistnews.org/content/benjamin-tucker-american-mutualist-mut…

[2]Tucker, Benjamin.  Instead of a Book.  Forgotten Books.  2012. Pp 3-18.

[3]James J. Martin.  Men Against the State.  Ralph Myles Publisher Inc, Colorado Springs. 1970.  Pp 57-64.

[4]Tucker, Benjamin.  Instead of a Book. Forgotten Books.  2012. Pp 332.

[5]Ibid. Pp 3-18.

[6]Ibid.

[7]Ibid.

[8]Ibid.

[9]Please see: Edwards, Stewart (Editor) Selected Writings of P.-J. Proudhon.  Garden City, New York: Anchor Books.  1969.     P 64; and Marx, Karl. Capital Volume 1.  England: Penguin Classics (reprint).  1990.  Pp. 676. And see also The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx.

[10]Tucker, op cit. Pp 3-18.

[11]Ibid. P 477.

[12]Ibid.

Knowledge v Education

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Against the intelligentsia and skilled craftsmen of the proletariat, there lurks an invisible hand. This hand sorts men, and in doing so, lifts some up whilst holding others down, not according to their knowledge, nor their abilities, but to the singular prerequisite of an imperialist education.  As a result, those possessing pieces of paper, signifying that all of which they know has been learnt under the auspices of one of these “hallowed” institutions, occupy a class of men who take precedent over those who have garnered their knowledge through experience, through blood and sweat, through natural talent and innate intelligence, or through a prodigious passion for their craft.

Ask yourself: which holds more practical value, knowledge or education? For all intents and purposes, it’s knowledge.  So why is it that society favors the educated over the knowledgeable? Because an education can be controlled; it can be molded and shaped to keep information in its preferable context.  An education is simply information input management, minimizing independent thinking to maintain a status quo.  It’s knowledge, however, that breeds change and births progress, because when there is no filter on the input of thought, then there is none on the output either.  That is the fundamental difference between the two: that one comes already assembled, and one you have to put together yourself.

Are Those Tulips in Your Wooden Shoes?

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So you’ve been politicized during college, by the Green party.  But now you’re more radical than that, you call yourself an anarchist now!  But you don’t have to quit the Green party.  Of course not, you can even run for local office while distributing CrimethInc literature.  You’ve learned all the new rules: add collective to the end of the name of anything and you can claim it’s anarchist.  Your wage slave job might someday be a People’s Labor Collective. Why not a Police Collective?  Or an Internment Camp Collective?  A task nobody wants to do?  Then everybody does it.  Don’t question production, you need to be respectable if you’re ever going to trick the masses into not being tricked.  Keep marching forward.  You do voluntary social work for people who’d rather be left alone.  Someday they’ll appreciate you.  The highest ethical value is: get shit done!  That’s why you are working with non-profits and lobbyists. You need to work within the system if you want to get things done, make progress, fix the system (strengthen the system).  Maybe you can work to end prisons by getting a job as a correctional officer?  Maybe you can fight racism by joining the Klan? We’re within the system, right?