What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more”... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine”… The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight.
— FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, The Gay Science 192
The riots ain’t over.
— #SUCKAFREE on Twitter, The 2015 Baltimore Uprising 193
Revolution can have many meanings. Despite the unbridgeable chasms between them, when John Locke, Edmund Burke, and Karl Marx wrote of revolution, they had a familiar and classical conception in mind: Revolution occurs when a critical mass of insurrectionary social forces confronts existing powerholders and takes over the apparatus of the state. In the classical conception, there was an inevitable violence to revolution, so Locke preferred reform, Burke blamed the revolutionaries for the violence, and Marx blamed the counterinsurgent capitalist state. This basic view of revolution was common from the 17th century through the 19th, although some peculiar alternatives were proposed.
The most notable of the unconventional ideas of revolution, I think, is Henry David Thoreau’s concept of “peaceable revolution” as described in his essay “Civil Disobedience.” 194 This concept of revolution is notable for a number of reasons, starting with the fact that it was published in 1849, one year after The Communist Manifesto. Thoreau defines revolution as the culminating force of a critical mass of civil disobedience, which he proposes as tax resistance. We might ask, however, if what Thoreau calls “revolution” isn’t really a misnomer, since he is arguing for an end to the North American war on Mexico and the abolition of slavery. He says himself that he is not calling for “no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.” 195 In this way, Thoreau’s “revolution” is more about improving the existing society through changes in domestic and foreign policy, much like Burke’s suggestion that “the change is to be confined to the peccant part only” so that we can avoid a revolution.196 According to the position taken in the present book, civil disobedience can indeed participate in revolt and typically does, even though Thoreau’s notion of “peaceable revolution” is problematic.
Marx understood a revolutionary confrontation with the state to be inevitable in almost any case, but that does not mean he was a “statist.” He insisted that communism is “not a stable state which is to be established,” but rather that communism is “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” 197 Set within Marx’s theory of historical materialism, this meant that communism consists of the antagonistic forces that transform society and politics on an ongoing basis, never leaving the present state of things as it is for too long. There are many places where Marx expresses his critical view of the state, where he calls the state “merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another.”198 Marx rejected the notion that communism could or should be wielded by states, perhaps most fundamentally, because he understood that capitalism was already global, already beyond the reach of any one nation-state, and that therefore any revolution against capitalism must also be global (in principle and in practice beyond the borders of nation-states). He dealt with the global imperative in many places too.199 Also, Marx understood revolution as coming from underneath state power, from civil society, and passing through the state only at critical necessary moments.
While it is true that Marx insisted, unlike his anarchist critics, on the necessity of instrumentalizing the state for the purposes of revolution, it is also true that he simultaneously insisted that such purposes were transitory — like crutches necessary to regaining one’s ability to walk — useful only until one is up on her own legs. Instead of an uncritical enthusiasm for state power, Marx remained cautious and concerned about the use of state power, understanding and warning against the dangers of abuse. After all, he saw how useful a tool the state was for capital. Despite this, many (certainly not all) anarchists have been as idiotic as Glenn Beck in confusing Marxism with statism, or the other peculiarity, in confusing Karl Marx with Joseph Stalin. As a social and political force of historical materialism, revolution comes from below, not from above, and for Marx, the insurrectionary activity of revolt is precisely where revolution begins. Marxists and anarchists today (and not only them) would do well to remember this.
But this point is necessary to properly calibrate our thinking about revolution, so that we continue to work with the idea of revolution as a process that is dangerous to the existing state of affairs, which also includes real danger to existing political states. Marx wrote more about the abolition and overthrow of the state than he did of its takeover.200
Although he was not the statist his opponents claimed him to be, we must acknowledge that Marx’s theory of revolution does vigorously defend passage through the state against anarchist criticism. Indeed, Marx’s contention that revolutionaries must be willing and able to recognize the necessity of seizing state power for defensive, organizational, and transitional purposes was his biggest disagreement with anarchists like Michael Bakunin (who beautifully recounts this dispute with Marx in Statism and Anarchy).201 Marx felt that his position was vindicated in the experience of the 1871 Paris Commune.202 Yet, Marx’s insistence on the indefinite use of state power was not only unacceptable to the anarchists, but also proved catastrophic in some of the most infamous abuses of state power in the 20th century.
And there have been other ways of thinking about revolution. Errico Malatesta and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon focused on social revolution instead of political revolution. Malatesta argued that revolution works “to change social conditions in such a way as to produce a change of will in the desired direction.” 203 Malatesta argued that if we could radically transform society from within itself, there would be no need to wield the power of the state.
Much later, Michel Foucault answered an interviewer’s question about whether or not prisoners — those who were most on the losing end of power — should make a revolution and take over the disciplinary system’s apparatus. “Oh yes, provided that isn’t the final purpose of the operation. Do you think it would be much better to have the prisoners operating the Panoptic apparatus and sitting in the central tower, instead of the guards?” 204 What Foucault meant by this was that we should indeed confront and even take power, but never merely to operate its formal institutions. Instead, Foucault provided what we might consider a more nuanced and philosophical version of Malatesta’s position, that there is power in all social relations, in the family, in the community, there is power in between us, and that we can make revolutions without passing through the state. While Foucault never discounts the importance of the state, radical transformations within the field of human relations are ultimately more important than the reallocation of institutional powers.205
More recently still, Enrique Dussel has made some useful distinctions, pointing out that in the leftist tradition, “it was understood that if an activity was not ‘revolutionary’ then it was ‘reformist.’” 206 Dussel argues that the real opposition is between “reform” and “transform.” He points out that revolution is only one mode of transformation, but that there are other ways as well. With this, Dussel combines (inadvertently) all of the above theories of revolution, and allows for many more as we might be able to imagine or develop them.
The above constellation of thinking about revolution is far from exhaustive. It is a miniscule smattering of some of the many different prominent conceptions.
Let us consider a general formulation: Revolution consists of the diverse processes of the radical transformation of the existing state of affairs, working from “what is” toward “what ought to be.” The term “radical transformation” indicates the abolitionist and structuralist content of revolution. Revolution works against the existing state of affairs and toward some conception of what ought to be. Who answers the question of “what ought to be?” Who decides the better possible future that we should aim to create? Revolutionaries have different answers. Some revolutionaries have no answer to this question, for they only know that the present state of affairs is immoral and/or intolerable and must be opposed. In some cases, even in the streets of actual upheavals, the participants themselves give different answers side by side. But the question of who decides what ought to be conceals the fact that the past, present, and future are already determined and will continue to be determined by some peoples’ conception of what ought to be. Human history and society are shaped by effective human action. So, even if the answer to the question of what ought to be is “to be determined,” shouldn’t everyday people with real grievances claim a role in that determination? If they don’t, others will.
Instead of faulting diverse revolutionary aspirations for failing to unanimously identify a single ideal end-state, we can defend revolution as an open-ended process of transformation that can address its own failures through further transformation. Revolutionary activity does not require agreement on an ideal end-state. This contention can be juxtaposed to the short-sighted and reactionary demand in the US — widespread in October 2011 — that the Occupy Wall Street contingent and solidarity occupations across the country should say exactly what they want and should articulate a specific platform for the consideration of those in positions of power. The same demand for itemized demands has more recently been made (by media commentators and liberal/ conservative critics) to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in 2014 and to the protestors at the University of Missouri in 2015. The purported expectation of the very targets of the protest takes the form: “if they want something, they should tell us what they want.” The anxiety surrounding this frustrated expectation can rather easily be given expression: Those watching the occupations and protests want the unruly elements to establish a dialogue with powerholders, which both reassures and reifies the relationship of the actors to powerholders in a familiar, paternalistic way, as the rebellious child in a clear standoff with a mother or father. Clearly, specific demands would reduce complexity, making the expressions of revolt both easier to discuss and easier to dismiss in a simple way. If, for example, the child demands a higher weekly allowance, the request can be rejected as inappropriate. But if the child expresses general unhappiness with the basic features and arrangements of her home life, the parents are at a loss.
Unspecified disaffection creates an impasse for the conciliatory efforts of power — it is difficult to reconcile or to placate a multifarious aversion that cannot be easily diagnosed. The occupiers knew why they should continue to respond to the invitation for a particular agenda with a joyful silence, because they could see that generalized disaffection cannot be refuted in logical or ideological terms. This is why every itemized list of demands ever put forth by Occupy X contingents has been fraught with contention and rejection.207
It is also clear that the recommendations to articulate a platform come originally from outside the uprisings themselves, and that the presence of an internal impetus for enumerated demands mainly reflects an interest in gratifying external criticisms, or the presence of liberal/conservative tendencies from within the movement. These were some of the biggest threats to the Occupy X movement. It would be unwise to conclude, in agreement with the general consensus, that the occupations movement is totally finished. We are talking about a generation of young people who were radicalized by the occupations, young people who felt their collective power with great intimacy and a historical urgency, people who are still everywhere around us, watching what is happening in the world today, watching new revolts in Ferguson, MO and Baltimore, MD, and participating wherever possible. Whether or not the US-based occupations movement will feed into future insurrectionary activity remains to be seen, although some of the same social energies animate Black Lives Matter, and certainly, all those unruly energies will not be fully channeled into procedural politics and election cycles. Even though the occupations have dissipated, their reemergence on the horizon is far from unthinkable. They were, after all, in many ways themselves a reemergence of scattered occupations in solidarity with the Greek uprising of 2008, and were undoubtedly inspired by insurgent elements of Middle Eastern and North African and European civil societies. What seems less like a prediction, and more like a settled fact, is that such expressions of disaffection cannot be fully gratified (and thereby pacified or extinguished) within the limits of the capitalist present.
Those who were asking with feigned concern for the purposes of the occupations would never be gratified with a clear answer. They did not really want one. Their questioning did not come from a position of solidarity or even basic agreement, for they preferred to point out the absence of a plan, or to have a plan only in order to reject its “impracticality.” Critical to the caricature of the occupations were the vacillating claims that no-clear-agenda-means-incoherence and that any-radical-agenda-is-irrational. Media commentators could not understand that such clarity of purpose is not desirable from the insurrectionary perspective. The insurrectionary energies of everyday people, when they fracture the repressive conditions of everyday life, are not meant to be clearly grasped, but rather, to be dangerously beyond anyone’s grasp. This is indeed precisely what makes a world haunted by specters of revolt so frightening to the administrations of social control (i.e. law enforcement, political power): Revolt is only revolt when it is out of their control.
Let us take this particular virtue of revolt farther: We should not conceive of, propose, and defend ideal end states. There are many reasons for this, some historical, some matters of principle. For now, let’s just observe that every state of affairs can be better, and to dream of an ideal end is to dream of the end of revolution. Let us dream of the beginnings, and not the ends, of revolution.
We established in Chapter 3 that we are thinking more about insurrection, and less about revolution, because insurrection is the actual exercise of revolutionary activity today. Revolutionary theories must therefore shift a bit from their historic and defining subject in order to make insurrection the central focus. As we have discussed, insurrections move in the direction of revolution and work through its possibilities, without themselves being effective revolutions in any conventional sense of a world-historical structural transformation. But, at the same time, this confesses an enduring interest in and commitment to revolution, despite past failures and present impasses. Why revolution?
In June 2015, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) published a report acknowledging that the fundamental premises of neoliberal capitalism are now demonstrably false.208 The report, entitled “Causes and Consequences of Income Equality: A Global Perspective,” documents not only growing inequality around the world, but also that this inequality is a basic feature of the unbounded freedom of capital. The old lie about the rising tide that lifts all boats has finally been recognized as such in IMF research. “Specifically, if the income share of the top 20 percent (the rich) increases, then GDP growth actually declines over the medium term, suggesting that the benefits do not trickle down.” 209 Over 165 years ago, Marx made a similar claim in The German Ideology, that the impoverished proletarian, “within his own class, has no chance of arriving at the conditions which would place him in the other class.” 210 Marx understood that trickle down and upward mobility were cherished and important lies of a capitalist mythology designed to keep the poor more hopeful and patient than disaffected and revolutionary.
And now, after decades of ideological resistance, in a slow crawl to catch up with the basic insights of the young Marx, the IMF appears to be losing faith in its own religion of upward mobility. Unfortunately, this research epiphany breaks through after more than seventy years of the IMF’s imposition of neoliberal policies attached to conditional loans that have contributed to the very problems they study. But maybe it is better late than never, and perhaps we should be happy for all the radical reforms, indeed, for all the total reversals in global banking policy to come. Think again. The June 2015 research is prominently stamped with a disclaimer announcing that the IMF researchers’ conclusions do “not necessarily represent IMF views or IMF policy.” 211 And, although it was both researched and published by the IMF, the research “should be attributed to the authors and not to the IMF, its executive board, or its management.” 212 While that may be a refreshing bit of honesty, it highlights the difficulty, if not the egregious naiveté, in placing faith in any international consortium of bankers, policy-makers, and capitalists to address growing problems of inequality and poverty, among other things. The fact is that so many critics of capital remain loyal to it nonetheless, as could also be seen in Thomas Piketty’s book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.213 After over four hundred and sixty pages of documenting that capital has reliably generated (and cannot help but to generate) growing global inequality and consolidated existing inequality, Piketty concludes with a call for the same regulated capital and social democracy that has fought and lost against the logic of capital for two hundred years. The IMF is just as clear that their new research, which agrees with the research of Piketty and the Paris School of Economics, is not meant to interfere in their work, and so it functions only as a ghost that haunts (one hopes, at least) the good conscience of liberals. How does this help answer the question, why revolution?
I have mentioned some of the basic features grounding a basic premise: revolutionaries object to the existing conditions and want to see them radically transformed. We have an understanding of the macroeconomic reality, which is increasingly bleak for most of the world’s people, and we understand the alienation and delirium of everyday life, among other problems (including but not limited to racist, ecological, and sexist issues). Revolution is the aspiration that follows this critical phase and rests on the frustration and failure of reform.
Nonetheless, and despite meaningful differences that I have insisted (and will continue to insist) upon, the old leftist question of reform versus revolution should be abandoned. Both sides of the question have been conceived such that neither side appears as a satisfying answer to the problems of the present. Very generally, reform appears as not enough, whereas revolution often appears as too much. Revolution, it is often worried, cannot promise not to create new problems just as big as the ones it opposed. “Reform” has meant changing laws and policies, changing certain attitudes and valuations, leaving the very structures (social, political, economic, and cultural) more or less intact. And, newer definitions notwithstanding, “revolution” has mainly been mistaken to mean overtaking the law-making powers directly, the state being the target par excellence.
Dissatisfaction with a choice between reform and revolution has led to proposals for “radical democracy.” Some of the key proponents of this school have been Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Jürgen Habermas, and Andrew Arato and Jean Cohen.214 What does “radical democracy” mean? Essentially, “radical democracy” argues that elections are merely a procedural piece of democracy, and do virtually nothing to help ensure a vibrant democratic culture full of critique and contestation. The theorists mentioned above are interested in seeing a more substantive and contentious form of democracy — one that does not wait for elections and the good will of politicians. Radical democracy requires a democratic culture that is ongoing, that takes place in between elections, often in the streets, in the occupation of streets and buildings, in civil disobedience. Radical democracy includes uprisings and social upheavals, taking place somewhere in between reform and revolution, or perhaps, beyond both. The idea of a politics beyond procedures is a step in the right direction.
But there is one persistent problem with theories of radical democracy: Radical democracy is possible within, and ultimately compatible with, the capitalist organization of life. It is true that Laclau and Mouffe see radical democracy as the centerpiece of socialist strategy, and their conception of socialism does not implicate an antithetical externality to capitalism. If capital trends against democracy, and we work to deepen and expand democracy, then the socialist antithesis works from the inside. Yet, this approach recommends a democratization of capital, which capitalist societies can accommodate within certain limits. A philosopher like Habermas, as well, does find a potentially disastrous tension, but not a total contradiction, between capital and democracy. While Habermas recognizes that capital disfigures and diminishes existing democracy, he ultimately claims that it is possible to satisfactorily democratize the global economy within the limits of capital. Habermas’ view is much better than John Rawls’ contention that it is perfectly possible to create a “fair capitalist society,” which Rawls’ calls “justice,” and thinks is essentially achievable through reformist measures with strong liberal commitments.215 But both Habermas and Rawls share a general disregard for a revolutionary politics, old or new.
Capitalists have been speaking of “fair capitalist society” at least since the 18th century, when industrialization was getting up on its legs and already needed active apologists for every setback of “free labor.” With more than two centuries of hindsight, and growing disparities globally, it is time to acknowledge the possibility that all meaningful conceptions of fairness will either impede or directly contradict the very logic of capitalism: to accumulate capital.
Certainly, fairness exists in gradations, and there is more or less fairness in different capitalist societies, even in different parts of the same capitalist society. Can we not establish without controversy that we want to maximize fairness? Such a thin humanism — lost more on politicians than young children — scarcely needs argument. But if we work toward optimal fairness it is only a matter of time before we run up against the logic of capital directly. Endless accumulation follows a different logic (growth and private wealth) than the logic of fairness (equality of opportunity, a common wealth). But let us not make the same mistakes of earlier socialists who hijacked and deformed the good name of socialism to mean nothing more than capitalism regulated by some sense of fairness. Government cannot guarantee fairness, and the seizure of state power must never again be the goal of a revolutionary politics. Georg Lukács understood this well in 1920, and warned against the fetishistic obsession with the state that was prominent among communists he called “pseudo-Marxist opportunists.” Lukács argued that “by viewing the state as the object of the struggle rather than as the enemy they have mentally gone over to bourgeois territory and thereby lost half the battle even before taking up arms.” 216 Of course, revolution is no guarantee of fairness either. Revolution may not succeed, but it is the necessary basic framework for contesting and transforming the existing conditions we object to. Consider Emma Goldman’s observation vis-à-vis Oscar Wilde that “it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to, and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish.” 217
A revolutionary perspective is indispensable because it does not only observe the catastrophe of existing conditions, and it does not only condemn such conditions, like the IMF and Piketty. Rather, a revolutionary perspective insists on abolishing such conditions through human action.
Some of the newer revolutionary perspectives pointing out new avenues, attempting to move beyond the old classical formulations of the Marxian milieu, lead to dangerous dead ends. I have already treated primitivism as just such a dead end in Chapter 2, but I revisit it here for different reasons. A lot of the insurrectionary theory of our times has a certain neo-anarchist character that trends toward atomistic individualism and holier-than-thou (or, more-radical-than-thou) moralizing. Here, I want to briefly touch upon some of the other problems with that tendency, and to insist that an insurrectionist and autonomist theory of revolt need not abandon politics, class analysis, the critique of capital, and collective action.
Primitivism, as introduced and criticized above, has appeared as a kind of touchstone of contemporary radicalism, as the outermost reach of the radical milieu. After all, what could be more radical than opposing the entirety of human civilization? Mixed into this “totally revolutionary” perspective are ultimate solutions to the ecological crisis, to patriarchy, power, and capital. There is nothing reformist in this categorical position, and so from its location, everything else appears as insufficiently revolutionary, as basically reformist. From a critical consideration of primitivism, it is clear that we should beware all positions that put their comparative radicality forward as an argument in their own defense.
Primitivism has helped to impoverish anarchism and to absorb revolutionary energies more than any other influential development in recent years. While primitivists often make very important points that we should heed with serious attention, the ultimate problem is that primitivism condemns human agency and collective action while denying that it does so.
John Zerzan speaks frequently of direct action, of rebellion, providing a laudatory weekly inventory of “action news” on his radio show. He has written about the need for “a conscious turn against the symbolic and civilization,” and yet, his work invalidates all forms of action.218 Behind Zerzan’s expressed interest in direct action hides a decisive position against human action, one which fundamentally makes primitivism a kind of “post-agency” theory.
As summarized in Chapter 2, the primitivist critique of civilization entails: (1) accepting the premise that all highly technological societies evolve toward their own collapse; and (2) looking forward to that collapse as an emancipatory transition to a sustainable and primitive future.219
The first premise is more convincing than the second contention. The first premise may well be a simple statement of fact. We cannot assume the infinite perpetuity of the Anthropocene. If a socio-geological epoch of human life is unsustainable and must come to an end, then we will know that when it’s actually ending in catastrophic ways. For as long as the proverbial “end of the world” remains on the horizon, it remains merely a future possibility. And even if it is not a distant future, there are observable social and psychological reasons why humans will not act as if the end of the world is happening until it is indeed happening in immediate and existential ways. Countless disaster movies have depicted this part fairly well. What the primitivist premise means, then, in practical terms, is that while we may discuss the imminence and reality of the end of the world with great seriousness — with geological and ecological science, for example — we must mostly wait and see.
In any case, the concerted human action of a subset of the world population cannot reverse the end of our Anthropocene epoch any more successfully than the dinosaurs could have organized against the Cretaceous extinction. Even if the dinosaurs had our beloved human reason, what could that mental faculty have done against asteroids, comets, or violent volcanic explosions? Humanity has a long speciesist history of overestimating its distinguishing faculties. It is hard to make political oppositions against tornadoes, tsunamis, and earthquakes, so we are left with a politics of monitoring the disturbances. It is in exactly such a manner of monitoring disturbance that Zerzan counts up all of the illegal acts that indicate, from his point of view, civilization’s inexorable march toward its end.
Zerzan observes: “To many, it seems there will be no escape from the dominant reality, no alternative to an irredeemably darkened modernity as civilization’s final, lasting mode. We are indeed currently trapped, and the nature of our imprisonment is not subject to scrutiny.” 220 Thus, on the one hand something is going to happen, as Zerzan reliably asserts in his claim that civilization has entered its “final mode,” while on the other hand, the situation remains inescapable and “not subject to scrutiny.” He claims: “The deep malaise and melancholy of modernity, its dreariness and distancing, have spread everywhere; there is less and less room for escape.” 221 From a primitivist perspective, as well as from the perspective of much Anthropocene theory, it would appear that we are positioned for the end times much like the dinosaurs were, but with one unfortunate distinction: We may consciously expect the end of our human epoch, equipped with an awareness of our impending end, yet not with any political response, or sufficient collective human action. Revolt is certainly not a meaningful response to the end of the human epoch — it is too social, too small, merely a symptom of a catastrophic problem we cannot touch.
In this way, the primitivist position — a purported acme of radicalism — is an acknowledgement of a possible catastrophe accompanied by a desperate hope for a “good” outcome. Zerzan’s idea of an emancipatory catastrophe contains much from the Christian faith in the lake of fire or kingdom of heaven. Indeed, Zerzan observes property destruction and miserable adolescents who shoot up schools and movie theaters as evidence of the end times for this civilized world. There is even a peculiar pleasure taken in finding such fatal “evidence” that a possible better future is nigh.
This religious dimension of primitivism partly explains why Zerzan has been embraced by the “Jesus Radicals,” a network of Christian anarchists who read both the bible and Zerzan for eschatological theses on the end times.222 In light of this, the insurrectionary direct action of anarchists expresses a certain nobility, like that of the fighter who cannot possibly win (who will not be raptured) but who makes the stand on principle.
I revisit primitivism here because it very precisely exemplifies the central problem with the neo-anarchist insurrectionary thinking that we must both reject and distinguish our present theory from: Revolt and insurrection, for the neo-anarchist primitivist, is merely symptomatic, and is not capable of addressing, let alone of solving, any of the pressing problems of our time. Insurrection is thus merely an outburst that indicates a problem, like a telltale pain in a body at the terminal stage. Not for us. I claim that revolt and insurrection are activities of the general intellect at work, producing not only real theory and analysis, but also new forms of action, exploring new possibilities for revolution in the context of its time. As in the case of the Zapatistas, an uprising aims not only to reconfigure thinking, but living too. It is not an alternative to collective action, but an open, experimental, and creative modality of collective action. In its fragmentary ways, that is the real and necessary power of insurrection.
Meanwhile, so much of Zerzan’s writing is a catalog of misery, crime, and dire psychological downturns, leading to increasing suicides and growing rates of depression. For Zerzan, this whole catalog — which includes riot, revolt, and insurrection — is the writing on the wall: the system is doomed by its own designs. Human action is dwarfed by the long, deeply rooted history of a human civilization that will do itself in (even if we do nothing). Nonetheless, primitivism is no less self-assured of its defining prediction than Marx was of his. Indeed, in all of Zerzan’s hostility toward Marx, he is the more deterministic of the two, the more susceptible to religious optimism, and the more dismissive of human agency.
It was easy to predict the primitivist trope on the spree of North African uprisings that has been referred to as the “Arab Spring,” and one can easily guess the primitivist take on the occupation movement in the US. Like all social upheavals and acts of rebellion, these uprisings are reliably interpreted to indicate impending final problems of civilization. In this way, the primitivist trope preserves too much of the ideological strategy employed by the socialists of the International Socialist Review, who always interpret every uprising as evidence of disaffection with capitalism, even when there are young businessmen in the streets.
In pursuit of revolutionary alternatives to revolution, and in light of a history of revolutionary aspiration and failure, we seek new forms of creative activity, human agency, and sustained, collective engagement. A theory that views revolt as a superfluous symptom of an already-doomed system has no need for revolt. We must not follow the preachers of catastrophism who espouse the radicalness of waiting around for the plate tectonics of civilization to rearrange our world and to address our problems at their roots. To the contrary, I argue that revolt is a critical activity necessary to transforming relations and understandings in the world; indeed, necessary to remaking the world. Revolt is not only a practice, but a philosophical activity from below, which activates and expresses the organic intellect of insurrection. We have much to learn from revolt, and we need it.
We have no need for a theory that has no need for revolt.
At this juncture, I would like to recommend both an antagonistic and agonistic politics of revolt. Antagonistic means a politics of opposition and contestation, which involves the identification of some objectionable power, and active modalities of going against it. Agonistic means that we do not act alone, for there are ways of acting together, which in agonistic terms means voluntarily, cooperatively, and with some common cause. Through antagonistic and agonistic activity, we seek to combine negation and affirmation, to combine being-against with being-for. And we do so recognizing that we cannot confront the wretchedness of the world alone. There is, inevitably, a communist comportment to the antithetical (antagonistic) and associative (agonistic) commitments of this formulation. Indeed, there is always some communist content in an insurrection.
There is a long history of pointing out that state power was capitalist even when various ideologues called it “communist.” Cornelius Castoriadis observed in 1949 that the mode of production in Russia was fundamentally capitalist, that the Soviet Union was state capitalist, whereas the US was free-market capitalist.223 Guy Debord attacked the Russian and Chinese bureaucracies as pretending to represent the impoverished and marginalized while abusing those populations in actual fact.224 And Solidarity, a working-class organization in Poland, came together to oppose the working-class government of Poland.225 Numerous other cases, notably in Hungary (1956) and Romania (1989), but also elsewhere in the 20th century, provide evidence of “communist states” opposed by communist activity in civil society. This was a communism by way of an antagonistic and agonistic politics from below. Hence, even when world politics was ideologized as a grand stand-off between communists and capitalists, it was widely held that the so-called communist states were no less a betrayal of everyday people than were the capitalist ones. We know this from a rich documentary record of a communist politics from below that opposed itself to both capitalist and so-called communist government.
And now, well over twenty years after the Cold War came to an end, it should finally be noncontroversial to observe that most (indeed, all, to varying degrees) of the world’s official institutions of governance are capitalist. In the 1990s, there was some debate about the socialism of the former Yugoslavia, and in early millennium, there have been more or less “socialistic” leaders in Latin America and Europe, but these states are only more or less cooperative with a logic of capital they ultimately accept. Today’s “socialist” regime only exercises some amount of democratic socialism, which distinguishes itself by not allowing the market logic of capital to decide every last question.
In any case, we can no longer pretend that capitalism has nothing to do with present global miseries. As cited above, not even the IMF can pretend to do this in light of their own research today. Yet, ideological analysis of the economic crisis in the United States persists, despite the fact that Occupy Wall Street interrupted dominant discourse with a temporary return to the question of capital. When the capitalist economy breaks down, ideological analyses maintain that the breakdown has nothing to do with capital. They do this primarily by ignoring the question of capital altogether. Some even blame the global economic crisis on one, two, or three men, Barney Frank, Ben Bernanke, Barack Obama, etc. The central and most difficult task is making and sustaining a critique of capital, instead of personal villains. Such a critique must not be academic. Such a critique may take the form of revolt, and would do well to heed the aesthetic and imaginative insights discussed in Chapter 3. That is, to make and sustain a critique of capital today, the critique will have to be artistic, visual, sonic, funny, sexy, disruptive, pervasive, and expressed in a million different ways. This is the task of insurrection. The critique of capital is far better when it comes from a collectivity of everyday people in public, joyful, riveting, provocative, and often dangerous and illegal interruptions of everyday life — from the Greek uprising of 2008, for example, or from the occupation movements of present and past generations, or from the mountains of Chiapas.226
And, while the Egyptian uprising of 2011 was too heterogeneous to articulate any ideal end state, the resounding content of the message coming from the streets of Cairo was that the existing state of affairs must end, igniting imaginations of the possible over and against the actual. Immediately, we heard too much worry from the West about the “results” of the popular insurrection in Egypt. Discourses that pathologically fixate on the end result as the ultimate measure of success or failure must be rejected. Let us propose instead that the uprisings — as a rejection of the old and effective lie that existing society is the only one the people could ever have — are already a successful realization of the power of revolt.
Political questions, especially those that are interested in collective action and revolution, will find little guidance in the works of Nietzsche, although the rebel will surely find solace and inspiration. Hence, the quote from Nietzsche that opens this chapter may appear strangely out of place, or misfit altogether. The quote comes from the famous passage # 341 in The Gay Science, one of the places where Nietzsche considers eternal recurrence, a meditation on the possibility of an eternal return and what that means for living human action. To plunder the eternal recurrence for political theory, we might pose it as follows: For how long must we bear the ongoing and growing anxiety and material insecurity of the world, while waiting patiently for some tremendous historic breakthrough? Such breakthroughs always leave much to be desired. If we cannot find any real solution in politics, and we have to bear it all over again, would the insurrection be the dreadful part of life, the part to make us gnash our teeth? Or perhaps, is the everyday life in between each uprising the part that is the nightmare for far too many people? And isn’t insurrection precisely the tremendous moment or breakthrough when human societies define themselves against the eternal return of the existing state of affairs? Human history reveals insurrection as a global event that societies seem to desire once more and innumerable times more.
Of course we don’t want to see a military regime in Egypt. The good news is that the problematic results of an uprising can be addressed through another uprising. Of course, we like to see the people of Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, the United States, the UK (and elsewhere and hopefully everywhere) enter into emancipated spaces of transition. Of course, we want to see insurrections capable of sustaining a serious structural critique of capital that can open up concrete possibilities for transformation. The insurrectionists are not decisively or overwhelmingly communist or anarchist, and they are obviously not primitivist. But inflexible identifications don’t matter or help much here. As discussed in Chapter 2, we do not look forward to the ends of insurrection because we understand that the ends of insurrection are never the end of insurrection as a transformative social force.
This last point is the main one. It is necessary in the 21st century to oppose any revolutionary eschatology. Thus, we look forward to the beginnings of insurrection everywhere.
Revolution betrays its own logic when it claims to have reached the end.
192 Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Gay Science With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), pp. 273-274.
193 The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary (New York: Research and Destroy, 2015), no page numbers.
194 Thoreau, Henry David, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays (New York: Dover, 1993), pp. 9-10.
195 Ibid., p. 2.
196 Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), p. 19.
197 Marx, Karl, “The German Ideology” in The Portable Karl Marx (New York: Viking Penguin, 1983), p. 179.
198 Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party” in The Portable Karl Marx (New York: Viking Penguin, 1983), p. 228. See also the concluding paragraphs of Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: Prometheus Books, 1995).
199 See “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” op. cit., and Critique of the Gotha Programme (New York: International Publishers, 2002).
200 See, for example, “The German Ideology,” op. cit., p. 179 and especially p. 195.
201 Bakunin, Michael, Statism and Anarchy, trans. Marshall S. Shatz (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 177-181.
202 Marx, Karl, The Civil War in France (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1966).
203 Malatesta, Errico, At the Café: Conversations on Anarchism, trans. Paul Nursey-Bray (London: Freedom Press, 2005), p. 83.
204 Foucault, Michel, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. 164-165.
205 See Parts 6 and 8 in Power/Knowledge, op. cit.
206 Dussel, Enrique, Twenty Theses on Politics (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 111.
207 I use the term “Occupy X” to refer to the wave of occupations following and inspired by the Occupy Wall Street activity in New York in September of 2011. The term “Occupy X” is intended to name the particular period of international occupations, general assemblies, and protest that began with the targeting of growing inequality and poverty, coupled with diminishing opportunity in the US, on Wall Street in 2011. Of course, as expressed in the many discussions throughout this book about May 1968 in France, the Mexican Zapatistas, the “Arab Spring,” and other global uprisings and anti-austerity protests throughout Europe, I do not claim that the occupations movement is somehow cut off from earlier revolt, or even distinctly American. Indeed, in many ways Occupy Wall Street comes from outside the US. Nonetheless, by “Occupy X” what I intend to capture is the fact that the disparate wave of Occupy Wall Street protest activity was not anchored to the physical location of Wall Street in New York.
208 International Monetary Fund (IMF) June 2015, “Causes and Consequences of Income Equality: A Global Perspective,” accessed January 6, 2016, http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2015/sdn1513.pdf.
209 Ibid., p. 4.
210 Marx, “The German Ideology,” op. cit., p. 195.
211 IMF, op. cit., p. 2.
212 Ibid.
213 See Part Four of Piketty, Thomas, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 2014).
214 See, for example, Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe, Chantal, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London and New York: Verso, 1985); Habermas, Jürgen, “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: The MIt Press, 1992); Arato, Andrew and Cohen, Jean, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge, MA: The MIt Press, 1992).
215 See Parts II, III, and IV of Rawls, John, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 2001).
216 Lukács, Georg, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: The MIt Press, 1988), p. 260.
217 Goldman, Emma, Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover, 1969), p. 49.
218 Zerzan, John, Twilight of the Machines (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2008), p. 55.
219 I consider the basic theory of primitivism to have been best laid out in Zerzan, John, Future Primitive and Other Essays (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1994). The underlying theoretical groundwork is more rigorously worked out in Zerzan, John, Elements of Refusal (Columbia, MO: Columbia Alternative Library Press, 1999). In many ways, Elements of Refusal is the better of the two, but Future Primitive provides the clearer articulation of the primitivist position.
220 Zerzan, John, “Paradigms,” Fifth Estate, Vol. 50, No. 2, #394, Summer 2015, p. 13.
221 Ibid., p. 14.
222 See the group Jesus Radicals, accessed January 6, 2016, https://www.jesusradicals.com. See also the journal of anarcho-primitivism and Christianity, In the Land of the Living, accessed January 6, 2016 https://www.inthelandoftheliving.org/
223 See Chapters 5 and 6 in Castoriadis, Cornelius, Political and Social Writings, Volume 1, 1946-1955: From the Critique of Bureaucracy to the Positive Content of Socialism, trans. David Ames Curtis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
224 Debord, Guy, Theses 100 and 107 in The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995) and “The Explosion Point of Ideology in China” in A Sick Planet, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Seagull Books, 2008).
225 Alain Touraine, Solidarity: The Analysis of a Social Movement: Poland 1980-81, trans. David Denby (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
226 The argument here is developed in different directions and complemented by discussions in my books Unbounded Publics (2008), Spectacular Capitalism (2011), and Precarious Communism (2014).