Conway

 

Going Astray

Photograph by Herve Guibert

Capability and Errancy

One of the final pieces Michel Foucault was able to complete for publication before his death was an homage to his beloved teacher, Georges Canguilhem. It was published both in a French metaphysics journal and as the introduction to the English translation of Canguilhem’s seminal text, The Normal and the Pathological. In his piece, Foucault takes note of something important to Canguilhem, error:

At the center of these problems, one finds that of error. For at the most basic level of life, the processes of coding and decoding give way to a chance occurrence that, before becoming a disease, a deficiency, or monstrosity, is something like a disturbance in the informative system, something like a “mistake.” In this sense, life—and this is its most radical feature—is that which is capable of error.

(FOUCAULT 1998, 476)

Life as being that which is capable of error bursts through Foucault’s oeuvre, illuminating so much of what can often be perceived as its darkest moments. This comment on Canguilhem at the end of his life furnishes so much of what was already present in lecture series such as Abnormal or central works like Discipline and Punish. However, it also allows readers to acquire a more immediate understanding of something crucial at stake in Foucault’s work: how we conceive of life. Giorgio Agamben uses this position of errancy and subjectivity in Foucault’s essay to oppose the conception “of the subject on the basis of a contingent encounter with the truth” (Agamben 1999, 221). But one can make a much simpler argument: if to live is fundamentally to always be at risk to err, biopolitical circuitry has had no other goal than to determine, define, and eliminate error in life.

This “disturbance” in the information system becomes a crucial node of resistance in the Foucauldian framework. To go astray is to resist.

The normal and the abnormal become a schema through which all broader technologies can be applied. The initial shift towards the disciplinary society is marked by, among other things, the fact “power no longer manifests itself through the violence of its ceremony, but it is exercised through normalization, habit, and discipline” (Foucault 2015, 240). Subjects move through and interact with these normalizing apparatuses, always with the goal of reintegration; however, it may not always end there. Abnormality is a form of “anarchy” from which society must be defended, it disrupts the proper flow of bodies, information, capital, and the maximization of state forces (Foucault 2003, 318)...The task of biopolitics can be described as a secular continual pastoral gaze. The pastor is tasked with detecting abnormality and managing circuitries. For this reason, the sovereign right to life is not completely dissolved in this new regime – it is merely reworked and given a new assignment and rationality. Those who have gone astray, whose lives are in error, become a risk that warrants their confinement, correction, and, often, their liquidation.

It is in this sense that one can understand Foucault’s genealogical work on disciplinary systems as a historical cartography of paths of resistance and capture. This resistance can take various forms. There are moments where a direct affront to a law results in its neutralization. Alternatively, there are also those who, by their form of life or mode of existence, challenge the economic, medico-juridical, or state practices under which they suffer.

Finally, a clear distinction can be made between these two forms of going astray; those who flee, who end up at the limit of the contemporary dominant regime, and those who get lost in it, those who short-circuit technologies of power from within its grip and inside its own framework. The neutralization of apparatuses remains common to both these forms of confrontation and freedom in the anarchy of abnormality.

The Norm

L’orthopedie, 1741

In Discipline and Punish, among the provided images of panoptic mechanisms, rigid pedagogical practices, and torturous solitary imprisonment, there is a far more placid sketch. It is a depiction of a crooked tree that is tethered to a post by a rope, preventing it from sprouting out in a deformed manner. The image’s origin is the first volume of a series of works on “the art of correcting and preventing deformities in children” by Nicolas Andry, the inventor of the term “orthopedics” (Kohler 2010, 394). The image is a perfect encapsulation of the ideal functioning of apparatuses of normalization. The establishing of constraints, the redirection of the mechanics of a living body, is fundamental to the disciplinary apparatus.

Timetables, large-scale cooperation in a factory, and drilling; they all function to initiate a self-propelling momentum in the body. Prior to articulating his theory of docility, in a lecture in 1973, Foucault uses an extensive amount of care analyzing the shift from the policing of morality to the policing and instillation of “habit”. Initially, following the Humean conception, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, habit had a primarily critical use. Its role was that of reanalyzing “traditional obligations founded on a transcendence, and to replace these obligations with a pure and simple obligation of the contract” (Foucault 2015, 238). In the nineteenth century, the conception of habit shifts. Habit evolved into a valued tendency which people must submit to. Habit becomes the fabric laid across a matrix of links that connects the order of things.

However, these habits can only be instilled effectively in a regime that functions along the lines of a norm. For Canguilhem, “[t]he normal is not a static or peaceful, but a dynamic and polemical concept” (Canguilhem 1989, 239). Foucault extends this definition. “Perhaps we could say it is a political concept”, because “the norm brings with it a principle of both qualification and correction. The norm’s function is not to exclude or reject. Rather it is always linked to a positive technique of intervention and transformation” (Foucault 2003, 50). Normalizing power is tasked with reaching out and pulling back those who have wandered off or those who are not quite aligned with a productive modality. The normal displaces the moral, virtuous, and perfected subject. But a trace of morality remains in the notion of the norm.

Normalizing judgements meet straying subjects precisely where they are situated, and render them docile, thus productive, and therefore within the acceptable variance of the norm. That is the ruthless advantage of normalizing power, its judgement can pierce anywhere and immediately send a subject—a singular piece of data—through the necessary corrective circuitries.

The norm is what directs both biopolitical apparatuses and disciplinary technologies. It is what flows between both, it is what directs their modes of intervention and regulation. “The norm is something that can be applied to both a body one wishes to discipline and a population one wishes to regularize” (Foucault 2003b, 254). The disciplinary and biopolitical circuitry merge at the point of the abnormal, each with different levels of evaluation and activity.

The Pastoral Paradox

The emergence and development of pastoral power in the Christian context marks an important evolution in the execution and domain of power, but also in the surveillance of abnormality. Power is redefined in the pastoral context. “The shepherd wields power over the flock rather than over the land” (Foucault 2001, 301). Pastoral power sits at the connecting roots of the administration of population and the regulation of life, it has a small but informative role to play in the development of biopolitics. Pastors concern themselves with the conduct of individual members of the flock, but also the general community of the flock. Its divine purpose, the solemn responsibility God bestows upon the pastor, is to ensure the salvation of the flock in its entirety. However, with pastoral power comes a paradox, one that is not unlike the paradox of the biopolitical administrating of life. “The sheep that is a cause of scandal, or whose corruption is in danger of corrupting the whole flock, must be abandoned” (Foucault 2007, 169). This paradox is the violent sovereign kernel in the pastoral. If the flock is to be saved, it must be pure. The good shepherd must keep their senses tuned to the possibility of any corruption which may desecrate the flock with its profane presence. This is the primary modality of the “sacral prohibition” (Stiker 1999, 26).

However, salvation takes on a new orientation in the era of the birth of the modern state. No longer is there a closed salvation history, one where empires and kingdoms, “at a certain moment, had to become unified as the universal time of an Empire in which all differences would be effaced […] and this would be the time of Christ’s return” (Foucault 2007, 260). The indefinite deferral of the return of Christ pulls the worries of the pastoral back to the secular game of pure immediate governance. This new salvation will take the form of the maximization of state forces, which will be achieved through policing. “The police must ensure the state’s splendor” (Foucault 2007, 313). At the center of these series of practices that constitute the state, the police, and strategies of population and security, is development and productivity. Salvation becomes biopolitical. And with productivity as its criterion, the problem of abnormality becomes a problem of social order and of deliverance.

Foucault argues that one could “take up” the “problem of psychiatry as a social defense at the end of the nineteenth century, starting with the problem of anarchy and social disorder” (Foucault 2003, 318).

The Anarchy of Abnormality and the Abnormality of Anarchy

Édouard Seguin, the French physician who was acclaimed for his work with institutionalized disabled children, wrote a clinical text in 1846 that was widely disseminated across Europe and the United States, The Moral Treatment, Hygiene, and Education of Idiots and Other Backward Children. European physicians lauded it as “the Magna Charta of the emancipation of the imbecile class!” J.E. Wallin an American physician, seemingly no less impassioned, identified Seguin as a “prophet”, and described his book as “the best work done since his day for the amelioration of the feeble-minded”. The teachers following Seguin’s didactic methodology must “call out to the soul of the child” (Wallin 1924, 18). For children diagnosed with “idiocy” possess an instinct that is in a “wild state without being integrated”. This does not just mean that the child’s instinct is not properly integrated within their “organs and faculties”, it is also a fundamental lack of integration with this very world and all of its precious moral expectations. Seguin describes the disabled child as one with a mode of being that “removes him from the moral world” (Foucault citing Seguin 2006, 210). Within the norm sits an assertion about one’s own moral position in the world. A violent moral condemnation sits at the root of the identification of abnormality. There is a political distinction as well. The abnormal child’s diagnosed disposition is one that expresses not symptoms, but rather “natural and anarchical elements” (Foucault 2006, 212). The abnormal child is described as possessing “a certain anarchic form of will”. The normal, desirable, adult will is “a will that can obey”. The will of the “idiot” is one which “anarchically and stubbornly says ‘no’”. Seguin’s recommendation is that teachers should intervene in such a way that produces “a total physical capture that serves to subject and master the body” (Foucault 2006, 217). It remains a mystery that psychiatrists struggled with why a child may become “anarchic” with such instructors. Unsurprisingly, Seguin’s recommendations became the model and “inspiration” for “publicly and privately supported institutions” tasked with the education, confinement, and sequestration of disabled children in America in the early twentieth century (Wallin 1924, 19).

This relationship between anarchy and abnormality also functions in the opposite direction. Cesare Lombroso, an Italian criminologist, argued that “[b]iological, anatomical, psychological, and psychiatric science” could provide “a way of distinguishing between the genuine fruitful, and useful revolution from the always sterile rot and revolt”. Lombroso describes revolutionaries such as Marx and Charlotte Corday as possessing “wonderfully harmonious physiognomies”. Contrarily, in his analysis of a photo of forty-one anarchists arrested in Paris, “31 percent of them had serious physical defects. Of one hundred anarchists arrested in Turin, thirty-four lacked the wonderfully harmonious figure of Charlotte Corday or Karl Marx” (Foucault 2003, 154).

In abnormality, there is a thread that runs through to a political assertion of anarchy; and in anarchy, there is a thread that runs through to a medico-juridical assertion of abnormality.

Wandering Deviance

In The Punitive Society, Foucault follows the work of the French physiocrat and jurist, Guillaime Le Trosne, and his policy prescriptions for vagabondage and begging. The vagabond has a peculiar position in the social body. They are not described “in relation to consumption, to the mass of goods available, but in relation to the mechanisms and processes of production” (Foucault 2015, 45). The vagabond is not simply a thief. The vagabond instead must be dealt with and penalized because they attack the very mechanisms of production. It is in the vagabond’s refusal to work and their vagrancy that the crime is found; not in any one particular action that can be juridically singled out in time, but in going astray. Le Trosne believes them to be an enemy comparable to a foreign army: “they live in a real state of war with all citizens” (Le Trosne 1764, 9). The true problem lies in their strange positionality. “They live in society without belonging to it” (Foucault 2015, 49). Le Tronse’s warlike position towards these bodies indicates that they represent an internal yet hostile and foreign world; one that must be eliminated. It is not simply an action, but a form of existence that is identified as the problem. And considering at the advent of each economic crisis, vagabondage increased, everything must be done to capture and hide these escapees of the productive cycle. “There are aspects of evil that have such a power of contagion, such a force of scandal that any publicity multiplies them infinitely” (Foucault 1965, 67). They are just outside the reach of the productive apparatus, and always at risk of contaminating the productive process with the viral intensity of a different world and a different form-of-life. “[B]etween the two worlds there can be only war, hatred, and fundamental hostility” (Foucault 2015, 55).

Children fall through the stockades of the disciplinary apparatus and the circuitry of the biopolitical regime as well. In many ways they are its most precious target. A utopian socialist publication in nineteenth century France retells an interaction between a judge and a boy charged with criminal vagrancy:

‘The judge: One must sleep at home. – Béasse: Have I got a home? – You live in perpetual vagabondage. – I work to earn my living. – What is your station in life? – My station: to begin with, I’m thirty-six at least; I don’t work for anybody. I’ve worked for myself for a long time now. […] I’ve plenty to do. – It would be better for you to be put into a good house as an apprentice and learn a trade. – Oh, a good house, an apprenticeship, it’s too much trouble. And anyway the bourgeois … always grumbling, no freedom. – Does not your father wish to reclaim you? – Haven’t got no father. – And your mother? – No mother neither, no parents, no friends, free and independent.’ Hearing his sentence of two years in a reformatory, Béasse ‘pulled an ugly face, then, recovering his good humour, remarked: “Two years, that’s never more than twenty-four months. Let’s be off, then!’

(FOUCAULT 1977, 290-291)

His reaction seems absurd, especially in the face of the horror that is incarceration. However, here one ought to heed the words of Bataille. “When we laugh at childish absurdity, the laugh disguises the shame that we feel, seeing to what we reduce life” (Bataille 2014, 47). Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and still today, the moral nomadism of the vagrant, whose mode of being is one perpetually in error, strikes a unique fear. Through error, the undefined work of freedom comes into view.

Lost in the Circuitry

There are those, on the other hand, who are embedded deep within a power relation, with very little space for evading ensnarement. So, they press inward. They expose the faulty wiring of the biopolitical circuitry and lean into it, causing it to either expose its own weaknesses and frailties, or to short-circuit altogether. With limited options and a subject-function imposed on them – they reverse the strengths of the dominant power. For, in a very particular sense, they have a more intimate sense of the tools and technologies in play, even if they do not wield them.

If, as Foucault suggests, psychiatrists acquired their role as defenders of the social against the aberrant dangers of the mad through their access to its reality, hysteria constitutes the worst kind of epistemological crisis. Hysteria collapses the walls between reality and simulation. This is why the psychiatrist Jules Falret, whose work was foundational to initial theories of folie à deux, rational insanity, and mass behavioral phenomena as forms of social contagion, is left with no option other than to pathetically attest: “The life of the hysterics is just a constant lie” (Foucault 2006, 307). One wonders what that outburst means for Falret’s several volumes of clinical study.

Moving to the twentieth century, in December of 1972, those incarcerated at the Toul prison revolted. Generally, the detainees would use methods of escape which guards, wardens, and other officials knew how to respond to or counter: suicide or breakout. But this was not the strategy these prisoners utilized. Instead, a complete inversion occurred. A barricade arose within the walls of the detention center. The complex system of enclosure became their entrenchment. All the mechanisms that they had come to know so well through their cruel subjugation became tactical elements in their defense.

They took no hostages, they led the guards who had abused them to the gates of the now occupied prison and let them leave. In that moment, in this new territory behind the prison walls, the victims of an uninterrupted regime of penality suspended the entire practice of it. Despite having chained prisoners to their beds for days on end, pushing prisoners frequently to suicide, and regularly administering sedatives against their will, the guards were let free (Foucault 2021b, 252). The only place in France where the logic of political torture momentarily subsided was inside the Toul detention center, in the midst of a revolt. The prisoners chose to hold no leverage over the administrators beyond the building itself. Guards would be allowed back into their place of work only once they had recognized those they incarcerate “as a force with which one negotiates” (Foucault 2021, 235). Foucault takes this revolt as proof that “we can call “political” any struggle against established power when it constitutes a collective force, with its own organization, objectives and strategy” (Foucault 2021, 236).

This journey through revolts within biopolitical circuitry will close in Denver, Colorado, in 1978. A disability advocacy group, ADAPT (then named Atlantis), had been campaigning for access to public transportation for over a year. Their requests went without response. This is a marginal population, on the margin of the productive apparatus, and therefore in the margins of the social order. Deprived of transportation, one can imagine the hubristic city officials not seeing much of a threat in this population they had so thoroughly restricted and confined. Later that year, the city of Denver’s transportation department purchased a new fleet – without lifts.

The state of Colorado had imposed immobility on the disabled population of Denver. In the face of a complete monopolization of mobility, these protestors abandoned their respectable democratic strategy and opted for militancy. Early on a Wednesday morning, thirty disabled militants barricaded an intersection and blocked two of these brand-new buses. Some even pulled their bodies under the chassis against the tires, preventing them from moving at all. There were attempts at arrest, but the increasing commotion and unexpected traffic made it nearly impossible. Of course, serendipitously, the police buses were not equipped with lifts either (Worthington 2017).

Their imposed immobility becomes the city of Denver’s. This act, this halting of a city, interrupted the flow of bodies, the flow of capital, and productive processes. The “concrete utopia of cybernetic Empire” was, at one node, for one moment, disrupted (Tiqqun 2011, 152). And though this militant act was focused, it scrambled busing, pulled police off their patrol routes, and stopped itinerant workers. Every act that motions towards the insurrectionary, even if minor in its militancy, gestures at something beyond what is immediate to it. It gestures at another world. This weaponization of the very conditions of their subjugation disrupted an entire city and, for a moment, exposed the weakness of the circuitries that seamlessly subjugate all.

Conclusion: Other Life

Giorgio Agamben, calling upon the work of Walter Benjamin, attests that “the state of exception turned into rule signals law’s fulfillment and its becoming indistinguishable from life” (Agamben 1998, 53). The law as indistinguishable from life, that is the horror at the core of the lingering state of exception. One could say the same of the biopolitical apparatus; that its perfect functioning is found when one’s life, its motions, habits, and behaviors become indistinguishable from the processes that “ensure the state’s splendor” (Foucault 2007, 313). The terror of the norm reigns everywhere life and policing enter a zone of indiscernibility. Biopolitical circuitry functions seamlessly when one can no longer identify its content. The means of control become so vast, and so precise, one no longer notices them. Deleuze describes the control society as comparable to a highway. “[B]y making highways, you multiply means of control”, one can “travel infinitely and ‘freely’ without being confined while being perfectly controlled” (Deleuze 2007, 327).

The images of a disabled teenager sleeping on hot asphalt under the shadow of a wheel well, of a child grinning as he is taken to serve his sentence in a reformatory, or of a vagabond wandering in affirmation and search of a freedom industrialization has stolen from them are all images of error. They are those who have strayed from the norm, failed to develop habit, and therefore present a danger. Some present a challenge to the disciplinary apparatuses that attempt to capture them and render them docile, others threaten the biopolitical salvation of the flock. However, they all are the presence of a different life, another life. As Foucault writes of the cynics in his final lectures: “There can only be true life as other life, and it is from the point of view of this other life that the usual life of ordinary people will be revealed as precisely other than the true” (Foucault 2011, 314). The cynic attests to those horrified by their actions, that they in fact live in truth. This interplay between processes of subjectivation and the fluid dynamic of truth and error comes to constitute a central element in Foucault’s work on normativity.

When life becomes perfectly isomorphic with its systems of control, when it never leaves the “highway,” is self-formation possible? Abnormality, though it bears the etchings of a history of abuse, confinement, pathologization, castigation, and death, also carries a very particular and subversive freedom. It is a freedom of divergence; and it is divergence that has always been, and must forever remain, undefined and anarchic.

To err is to affirm life.

       Will Conway

''In Foucault’s 1978-1979 lecture series on post-war liberalism, The Birth of Biopolitics, he spends an extended period of time looking at the theory of “human capital” which he describes as representing two processes. The first process is the extension of economic analysis into “previously unexplored” domains. The second, on the basis of the first, is the process that provides a strictly economic interpretation of what was previously considered non-economic. Peculiar to neoliberal economics is this renewed focus on labor. “American neoliberals say this: It is strange that classical political economy has always solemnly declared that the production of goods depends on three factors—land, capital, and labor—while leaving the third unexplored” (Foucault 2004, 219). Human capital, clearly, is a “very illiquid asset” (Becker 1993, 91). There is also a long window of time, filled with innumerable variables, before a return on investment can even be meaningfully expected. This makes any given investment in human capital relatively difficult to make informed observations about.

There is an informational gap.

This entrance of economic interpretation into what was previously considered non-economic, coupled with a shift in risk analysis regarding human investment, also results in an alteration of the understanding of labor and the capital of the worker. This capital is “the set of all those physical and psychological factors which make someone able to earn this or that wage”. On the one side, labor comprises a capital which can be best understood in this liberal economic discourse as a series of skills, capacities, and abilities; “as they say: it is a ‘machine’” (Foucault 2004, 224). On the other side, there is an earnings stream or a set of wages. With this machinic conception of the worker’s skill deployed in neoliberal economics—which Foucault will describe as a return of the classical homo oeconomicus—comes a new kind of focus on the worker themselves. “In reality, this machine has a lifespan, a length of time in which it can be used, an obsolescence, and an aging” (Foucault 2004, 225).

The new figure of the neoliberal policymaker must be concerned with everything from the genetic makeup of a worker to the amount of time spent in their mother’s arms to the color of the classroom walls they were educated in – it is all valuable knowledge for the complicated and risk-heavy investment in refining and improving a given subject’s human capital (Foucault 2004, 229). Foucault notes this disturbing element in neoliberal economics: “we can see through anxieties, concerns, problems, and so on, the birth of something which, according to your point of view, could be interesting or disturbing” (Foucault 2004, 227).

This new approach to labor produces a new approach to risk. “[W]e can identify what individuals are at risk, and what the risks are of unions of individuals at risk producing an individual with a particular characteristic that makes him or her the carrier of a risk” (Foucault 2004, 228). For Foucault, the neoliberal government of risk is always searching to make new analytic alliances, to expand the communication of inputs that produce particular individuals with particular traits and modes of behavior.

The assemblage theorist’s and political ecologist’s call for an expanded communicative polity is not only entirely compatible with this form of sovereign extensionism but produced by it entirely. “This means we arrive at a whole environmental analysis, as the Americans say, of […] life which it will be possible to calculate, and to a certain extent quantify, or at any rate measure, in terms of the possibilities of investment in human capital” (Foucault 2004, 230). The interconnective nature of etiological pursuit is not a coincidence, it is entirely central to the eugenic impulse of neoliberalism. Foucault summarizes the danger this way:

[A]s soon as a society poses itself the problem of the improvement of its human capital in general, it is inevitable that the problem of control, screening, and improvement of the human capital of individuals, as a function of unions and consequent reproduction, will become actual, or at any rate, called for.

(FOUCAULT 2004, 228)

Through this framework of human capital, a series of capacities and abilities, turns homo oeconomicus into an “abilities-machine”. The eugenic biopolitical impulse that underwrites the process to refine and improve human capital is fundamental to the function of neoliberalism. The model of centering risk does not just preclude catastrophe, but it also lends flexibility to a given governmentality that needs to reorient itself around new conditions''.

Will Conway

Stanford on Arendt

''For Arendt modernity is characterized by the loss of the world, by which she means the restriction or elimination of the public sphere of action and speech in favor of the private world of introspection and the private pursuit of economic interests. Modernity is the age of mass society, of the rise of the social out of a previous distinction between the public and the private, and of the victory of animal laborans over homo faber and the classical conception of man as zoon politikon. Modernity is the age of bureaucratic administration and anonymous labor, rather than politics and action, of elite domination and the manipulation of public opinion. It is the age when totalitarian forms of government, such as Nazism and Stalinism, have emerged as a result of the institutionalization of terror and violence. It is the age where history as a “natural process” has replaced history as a fabric of actions and events, where homogeneity and conformity have replaced plurality and freedom, and where isolation and loneliness have eroded human solidarity and all spontaneous forms of living together''. 

''The hermeneutic strategy that Arendt employed to re-establish a link with the past is indebted to both Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger. From Benjamin she took the idea of a fragmentary historiography, one that seeks to identify the moments of rupture, displacement and dislocation in history. Such fragmentary historiography enables one to recover the lost potentials of the past in the hope that they may find actualization in the present. From Heidegger she took the idea of a deconstructive reading of the Western philosophical tradition, one that seeks to uncover the original meaning of our categories and to liberate them from the distorting incrustations of tradition. Such deconstructive hermeneutics enables one to recover those primordial experiences (Urphaenomene) which have been occluded or forgotten by the philosophical tradition, and thereby to recover the lost origins of our philosophical concepts and categories.

By relying on these two hermeneutic strategies Arendt hopes to redeem from the past its lost or “forgotten treasure,” that is, those fragments from the past that might still be of significance to us. In her view it is no longer possible, after the collapse of tradition, to save the past as a whole; the task, rather, is to redeem from oblivion those elements of the past that are still able to illuminate our situation. To re-establish a linkage with the past is not an antiquarian exercise; on the contrary, without the critical reappropriation of the past our temporal horizon becomes disrupted, our experience precarious, and our identity more fragile. In Arendt’s view, then, it is necessary to redeem from the past those moments worth preserving, to save those fragments from past treasures that are significant for us. Only by means of this critical reappropriation can we discover the past anew, endow it with relevance and meaning for the present, and make it a source of inspiration for the future''.

''Let us now turn to an examination of the disclosing power of action and speech. In the opening section of the chapter on action in The Human Condition Arendt discusses one of its central functions, namely, the disclosure of the identity of the agent. In action and speech, she maintains, individuals reveal themselves as the unique individuals they are, disclose to the world their distinct personalities. In terms of Arendt’s distinction, they reveal “who” they are as distinct to “what” they are — the latter referring to individual abilities and talents, as well as deficiencies and shortcomings, which are traits all human beings share. Neither labor nor work enable individuals to disclose their identities, to reveal “who” they are as distinct from “what” they are. In labor the individuality of each person is submerged by being bound to a chain of natural necessities, to the constraints imposed by biological survival. When we engage in labor we can only show our sameness, the fact that we all belong to the human species and must attend to the needs of our bodies. In this sphere we do indeed “behave,” “perform roles,” and “fulfill functions,” since we all obey the same imperatives. In work there is more scope for individuality, in that each work of art or production bears the mark of its maker; but the maker is still subordinate to the end product, both in the sense of being guided by a model, and in the sense that the product will generally outlast the maker. Moreover, the end product reveals little about the maker except the fact that he or she was able to make it. It does not tell us who the creator was, only that he or she had certain abilities and talents. It is thus only in action and speech, in interacting with others through words and deeds, that individuals reveal who they personally are and can affirm their unique identities. Action and speech are in this sense very closely related because both contain the answer to the question asked of every newcomer: “Who are you?” This disclosure of the “who” is made possible by both deeds and words, but of the two it is speech that has the closest affinity to revelation. Without the accompaniment of speech, action would lose its revelatory quality and could no longer be identified with an agent. It would lack, as it were, the conditions of ascription of agency''.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Mbembe

According to Enzo Traverso, the gas chambers and the ovens were the culmination of a long process of dehumanizing and industrializing death, one of the original features of which was to integrate instrumental rationality with the productive and administrative rationality of the modern Western world (the factory, the bureaucracy, the prison, the army). Having become mechanized, serialized execution was transformed into a purely technical, impersonal, silent, and rapid procedure.

   Achille Mbembe

Habermas claims that in ordinary transactions, we act within the shared assumptions of our lifeworld and we transmit cultural knowledge about our tradition and we coordinate our actions and express our desires, wishes etc. It is only when communication breaks down and we can no longer understand or trust one another or bring our actions into sync that it becomes necessary to engage in special argumentation practices called “discourses.” It is then that we must seek “Verständigung,” both in morals and politics, that is, we must seek to come to some kind of agreement about the conflictual and contentious situation at hand — if it is even only, to agree to disagree. There is no guarantee that we will achieve this. Habermas’s point is that if the certainties that guide our lifeworld are disrupted and torn apart, and can no longer be restored through communication, we will experience crises-like phenomena in our societies and in our selves.

Seyla Benhabib

Habermas traces the development of the idea of the critical public in 18th-century Europe, one that would hold state power accountable through the use of reason, and then its decline in an era of public-relations management focused on minimising the role of the public in political decision-making. While Habermas has been accused of romanticising the European Enlightenment, his goal was to draw attention to the stark gap between the ideals of the critical public and the reality of political and social domination.

Steven Klein

Kierkegaard

 

“It is (to describe it figuratively) as if an author were to make a slip of the pen, and as if this clerical error became conscious of being such. Perhaps this was no error but in a far higher sense was an essential part of the whole exposition. It is, then, as if this clerical error were to revolt against the author, out of hatred for him, were to forbid him to correct it, and were to say, "No, I will not be erased, I will stand as a witness against thee, that thou art a very poor writer.”

Soren Kierkegaard

Conway

“Deleuze and Foucault share a resonance in that the State-form inspired image of thought is one that sees obedience as mastery and adherence to reason”. 

“One ought to look no further than Foucault’s processual theory of the subject. Foucault’s shift to Ancient Greece toward the end of his lectures at the Collège de France is not a conventional “ethical turn,” but rather a demonstration that “the strength of bourgeois rule has been built—even before economic factors—on two centuries of ethical struggle, of transforming morality, of a generalized dictatorship over behavior and attitudes”(Tarì 2021, 189). The model of civil war is fundamentally maintained in these lectures, it is just extended to the foundations of the ethical itself”.

“This “individual full of ill will”, who “neither allows himself to be represented nor wishes to represent anything”, is the final hindrance and merciless destroyer of the dogmatic image of thought (Deleuze)”

“This act of refusal initiates the process by which the individual can intervene in the process of their own subjectivation. But the “moment of refusal is rare and difficult.” It is difficult because “one must refuse not only the worst but also what seems reasonable” (Blanchot 1997, 111). The figure of refusal is, in a sense, not immediately intelligible. This refusal, which culminates in a revolt, is a rejection of representation. It is to proclaim that one does not possess this good will, that one does not think this way, and that one refuses to be represented as a subject. ”

“Deleuze’s critique of the dogmatic image of thought exposes the normalizing power of philosophy as an apparatus. The dogmatic image of thought shows the biopolitical role that philosophy plays. It impedes the materialization of new forms-of-life by reducing them to error, to the mutilation and misadventure of thought. This is an explicitly biopolitical function. For “biopolitics has never had any other aim but to thwart the formation of worlds, techniques, shared dramatizations, magic in which the crisis of presence might be overcome, might become a center of energy, a war machine” (Tiqqun 2011, 150). Disability comes from the outside, with hands that converse, eyes that listen, and skin that sees.”

“If this figure is to simply be reduced to error by a dogmatic image of thought, then they are an incorrigible error. They refuse to be hidden or eliminated.  They are comparable to the error that has become animated in Kierkegaard’s Sickness Unto Death. “No, I will not be erased; I will stand as witness against thee, a witness that thou art a very poor writer!” (Kierkegaard 1941, 119). The figure who refuses representation stands as witness to the insufficiency of the dogmatic image of thought. If the overwhelming model for disability is a “controlled ‘situation of abandonment,’” the refusal of the dogmatic image of thought turns that position into the revolutionary one. Remember, the war machines always make contact with, or come from, the outside. The State-form inspired an image of thought, but the state “has no war machine of its own” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 355)”.

“The disabled body is certainly often confined, rejected, and abandoned. Tobin Siebers may have been correct to attest boldly that disabled people belong to the nation of the “abandoned and the dead” (Siebers 1998). This is a pessimistic outlook. But it is the pessimistic that must be organized, rather than those with malformed extensionist optimism. It is only through this refusal of the image of thought, this rejection full of ill will, that new images of thought become possible, images that are no longer functioning as the tribunals of an underexamined, yet all too powerful, reason. The abandoned carry with them wounds of the failure of the present”.

Will Conway

Foucault

By subjugated knowledges I mean two things: on the one hand, I am referring to the historical contents that have been buried and disguised in a functionalist coherence or formal systemisation. Concretely, it is not a semiology of the life of the asylum, it is not even a sociology of delinquency, that has made it possible to produce an effective criticism of the asylum and likewise of the prison, but rather the immediate emergence of historical contents. And this is simply because only the historical contents allow us to rediscover the ruptural effects of conflict and struggle that the order imposed by functionalist or systematising thought is designed to mask. Subjugated knowledges are thus those blocs of historical knowledge which were present but disguised within the body of functionalist and systematizing theory and which criticism – which obviously draws upon scholarship – has been able to reveal.

On the other hand, I believe that by subjugated knowledges one should understand something else, something which in a sense is altogether different, namely, a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naive knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity. I also believe that it is through the re-emergence of these low-ranking knowledges, these unqualified, even directly disqualified knowledges (such as that of the psychiatric patient, of the ill person, of the nurse, of the doctor – parallel and marginal as they are to the knowledge of medicine – that of the delinquent, etc.), and which involve what I would call a popular knowledge (le savoir des gens) though it is far from being a general commonsense knowledge, but is on the contrary a particular, local, regional knowledge, a differential knowledge incapable of unanimity and which owes its force only to the harshness with which it is opposed by everything surrounding it – that it is through the re-appearance of this knowledge, of these local popular knowledges, these disqualified knowledges, that criticism performs its work.

However, there is a strange kind of paradox in the desire to assign to this same category of subjugated knowledges what are on the one hand the products of meticulous, erudite, exact historical knowledge, and on the other hand local and specific knowledges which have no common meaning and which are in some fashion allowed to fall into disuse whenever they are not effectively and explicitly maintained in themselves. Well, it seems to me that our critical discourses of the last fifteen years have in effect discovered their essential force in this association between the buried knowledges of erudition and those disqualified from the hierarchy of knowledges and sciences.

In the two cases – in the case of the erudite as in that of the disqualified knowledges – with what in fact were these buried, subjugated knowledges really concerned? They were concerned with a historical knowledge of struggles. In the specialised areas of erudition as in the disqualified, popular knowledge there lay the memory of hostile encounters which even up to this day have been confined to the margins of knowledge.

What emerges out of this is something one might call a genealogy, or rather a multiplicity of genealogical researches, a painstaking rediscovery of struggles together with the rude memory of their conflicts. And these genealogies, that are the combined product of an erudite knowledge and a popular knowledge, were not possible and could not even have been attempted except on one condition, namely that the tyranny of globalizing discourses with their hierarchy and all their privileges of a theoretical avant-garde was eliminated.

Let us give the term genealogy to the union of erudite knowledge and local memories which allows us to establish a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of this knowledge tactically today. This then will be a provisional definition of the genealogies which I have attempted to compile with you over the last few years.

You are well aware that this research activity, which one can thus call genealogical, has nothing at all to do with an opposition between the abstract unity of theory and the concrete multiplicity of facts. It has nothing at all to do with a disqualification of the speculative dimension which opposes to it, in the name of some kind of scientism, the rigour of well established knowledges. It is not therefore via an empiricism that the genealogical project unfolds, nor even via a positivism in the ordinary sense of that term. What it really does is to entertain the claims to attention of local, discontinuous, disqualified, illegitimate knowledges against the claims of a unitary body of theory which would filter, hierarchize and order them in the name of some true knowledge and some arbitrary idea of what constitutes a science and its objects. Genealogies are therefore not positivistic returns to a more careful or exact form of science. They are precisely anti-sciences. Not that they vindicate a lyrical right to ignorance or non-knowledge: it is not that they are concerned to deny knowledge or that they esteem the virtues of direct cognition and base their practice upon an immediate experience that escapes encapsulation in knowledge. It is not that with which we are concerned. We are concerned, rather, with the insurrection of knowledges that are opposed primarily not to the contents, methods or concepts of a science, but to the effects of the centralizing powers which are linked to the institution and functioning of an organized scientific discourse within a society such as ours. Nor does it basically matter all that much that this institutionalization of scientific discourse is embodied in a university, or, more generally, in an educational apparatus, in a theoretical-commercial institution such as psychoanalysis or within the framework of reference that is provided by a political system such as Marxism; for it is really against the effects of the power of a discourse that is considered to be scientific that the genealogy must wage its stuggle.

To be more precise, I would remind you how numerous have been those who for many years now, probably for more than half a century, have questioned whether Marxism was, or was not, a science. One might say that the same issue has been posed, and continues to be posed, in the case of psychoanalysis, or even worse, in that of the semiology of literary texts. But to all these demands of: ‘Is it or is it not a science?’, the genealogies or the genealogists would reply: ‘If you really want to know, the fault lies in your very determination to make a science out of Marxism or psychoanalysis or this or that study’. If we have any objection against Marxism, it lies in the fact that it could effectively be a science. In more detailed terms, I would say that even before we can know the extent to which something such as Marxism or psychoanalysis can be compared to a scientific practice in its everday functioning, its rules of construction, its working concepts, that even before we can pose the question of a formal and structural analogy between Marxist or psychoanalytic discourse, it is surely necessary to question ourselves about our aspirations to the kind of power that is presumed to accompany such a science. It is surely the following kinds of question that would need to be posed: What types of knowledge do you want to disqualify in the very instant of your demand: ‘Is it a science’? Which speaking, discoursing subjects – which subjects of experience and knowledge -do you then want to ‘diminish’ when you say: ‘I who conduct this discourse, I am conducting a scientific discourse, and I am a scientist’? Which theoretical-political avant-garde do you want to enthrone in order to isolate it from all the discontinuous forms of knowledge that circulate about it? When I see you straining to establish the scientificity of Marxism I do not really think that you are demonstrating once and for all that Marxism has a rational structure and that therefore its propositions are the outcome of verifiable procedures; for me you are doing something altogether different, you are investing Marxist discourses and those who uphold them with the effects of a power which the West since Medieval times has attributed to science and has reserved for those engaged in scientific discourse.

By comparison, then, and in contrast to the various projects which aim to inscribe knowledges in the hierarchical order of power associated with science, a genealogy should be seen as a kind of attempt to emancipate historical knowledges from that subjection, to render them, that is, capable of opposition and of struggle against the coercion of a theoretical, unitary, formal and scientific discourse. It is based on a reactivation of local knowledges – of minor knowledges, as Deleuze might call them – in opposition to the scientific hierarchisation of knowledges and the effects intrinsic to their power: this, then, is the project of these disordered and fragmentary genealogies. If we were to characterize it in two terms, then ‘archaeology’ would be the appropriate methodology of this analysis of local discursivities, and ‘genealogy’ would be the tactics whereby, on the basis of the descriptions of these local discursivities, the subjected knowledges which were thus released would be brought into play.

MICHEL FOUCAULT

Zizek

"This bias is ideology—a set of explicit and implicit, even unspoken, ethico-political and other positions, decision, choices, etc., which predetermine our perception of facts, what we tend to emphasize or to ignore, how we organize facts into a consistent whole of a narrative or a theory. My point is that the plurality of stories and biases is itself grounded in our real struggles". 

"Humanitarianism presents itself as something of an antipolitics—a pure defense of the innocent and the powerless against power, a pure defense of the individual against immense and potentially cruel or despotic machineries of culture, state, war, ethnic conflict, tribalism, patriarchy, and other mobilizations or instantiations of collective power against individuals."

"One does not need to know the brutal reality that sustains such interventions, the cynical pursuit of economic and political interests obfuscated by humanitarian concerns, to discern the falsity of such interventionism—the inconsistencies, gaps and silences of its explicit text are tell-tale enough. This, of course, in no way implies that the disclosure and analysis of facts are not important: one should bring out to light all the details of their atrocious brutality, of ruthless economic exploitation, etc".

"However, in order to explain how people often remain within their ideology even when they are forced to admit facts, one has to supplement investigation and disclosure of facts by the analysis of ideology which not only makes people blind to the full horror of facts but also enables them to participate in activities which generate these atrocious facts while maintaining the appearance of human dignity".

"There is another more refined point to be made here. Often, one cannot but be shocked by the excessive indifference towards suffering, even and especially when this suffering is widely reported in the media and condemned, as if it is the very outrage at suffering which turns us into its immobilized fascinated spectators".

      Slavoj Zizek

Chomsky

It’s hardly a secret that the terms of political discourse are not exactly models of precision. And considering the way terms are used, it’s next to impossible to try to get a meaningful answer to such questions as what is socialism or what is capitalism or what are free markets and many others in common usage. That’s even more true of the term “anarchism.” It’s been not only subject to varied use but also quite extreme abuse, sometimes by bitter enemies, sometimes, unfortunately, by people who hold its banner high. So much is the variation and abuse that it resists any simple characterization. In fact, the only way I can see to address the question that’s posed this evening, “What is anarchism?” is to try to identify some leading ideas that animate at least major currents of the rich and complex and often contradictory traditions of anarchist thought and, crucially, anarchist action.

I think a sensible approach can start with remarks by the perceptive, important anarchist intellectual and also activist, Rudolf Rocker. I’ll quote him. He saw anarchism not as “a fixed, self-enclosed social system,” with a fixed answer to all the multifarious questions and problems of human life, but rather as “a definite trend in the historic development of mankind,” which strives for “the free, unhindered unfolding of all the individual and social forces in life.” That’s from the 1930s.

These concepts are not really original. They derive from the Enlightenment and the early Romantic period. In rather similar words Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of the founders of classical liberalism, among many other achievements, described the leading principle of his thought as “the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity.” That’s a phrase that John Stuart Mill took as the epigraph to his On Liberty.

It follows from that that institutions that constrain such human development are illegitimate, unless, of course, they can somehow justify themselves. You find a similar conception widely in Enlightenment thought, so, for example, in Adam Smith. Everyone has read the opening paragraphs of The Wealth of Nations, where he extols the wonders of division of labor, but not many people have gotten farther inside to read his bitter condemnation of division of labor and his insistence that in any civilized society the government will have to intervene to prevent it because it will destroy personal integrity and essential human rights, will turn people, he said, into creatures as “stupid and ignorant” as a human can be. It’s not too easy to find that passage, whatever the reason may be. If you look in the standard scholarly edition, the University of Chicago Press bicentennial edition, it’s not even listed in the index, but it’s one of the most important passages in the book.

Looked at in these terms, anarchism is a tendency in human development that seeks to identify structures of hierarchy, domination, authority, and others that constrain human development. And then it seeks to subject them to a very reasonable challenge: Justify yourself, demonstrate that you’re legitimate, and maybe in some special circumstances or conceivably in principle. And if you can’t meet that challenge, which is the usual case, the structures should be dismantled, not just dismantled but reconstructed from below.

The ideals that found expression during the Enlightenment and the Romantic era foundered on the shoals of rising industrial capitalism, which is completely antithetical to them. But Rocker argues, I think quite plausibly, that they remain alive in the libertarian socialist traditions. These range pretty widely. They range from left anti-Bolshevik Marxism, people like Anton Pannekoek, Karl Korsch, Paul Mattick, and others, including the anarchosyndicalism that reached its peak of achievement in the revolutionary period in Spain in 1936. And it’s well to remember that despite its substantial achievements and successes, it was crushed by the combined force of fascism, communism, and Western democracy. They had differences, but they agreed that this had to be crushed. The effort of free people to control their own lives, that had to be crushed before they turned to their petty differences, which we call the Spanish Civil War.

The same tendencies reach further, to worker- controlled enterprises. They’re springing up in large parts of the old Rust Belt in the United States, in northern Mexico. They’ve reached their greatest development in the Basque country in Spain. Mondragon is partly a reflection of the achievements of the long, complex, rich Spanish tradition of anarchism, and partly it comes out of Christian anarchist sources. Also included in this general tendency are the quite substantial and cooperative movements that exist in many parts of the world, and I think it also encompasses at least a good part of feminist and human rights activism.

In part, all of this sounds like truism. So why should anyone defend illegitimate structures? No reason, of course. And I think that perception is correct. It really is truism, I think. Anarchism basically ought to be called truism. But truisms have some merit. One of them is the merit of being true, unlike most political discourse. This particular truism belongs to an interesting category of principles, principles that are not only universal but doubly universal: they’re universal in that they’re almost universally accepted and universal in that they’re almost universally rejected in practice. There are many of these.

For example, the general principle that we should apply to ourselves the same standards we do to others, if not harsher ones. Few would object, few would practice it. Or more specific policy proposals, like democracy promotion or humanitarian intervention. Professed generally, rejected in practice almost universally. All doubly universal. This truism is the same—the truism that we should challenge coercive institutions of all kinds, demand that they justify themselves, dismantle and reconstruct them if they do not. Easy to say, but not so easy to act on in practice.

Proceeding with similar thoughts, I will quote Rocker again. “Anarchism seeks to free labor from economic exploitation and to free society from ecclesiastical or political guardianship, and by doing that opening the way to an alliance of free groups of men and women based on cooperative labor and a planned administration of things in the interest of the community.” Rocker was an anarchist activist as well as political thinker, and he goes on to call on the workers’ organizations, other popular organizations to create “not only the ideas but also the facts of the future itself” within the current society. That’s an injunction that goes back to Bakunin.

One traditional anarchist slogan is “Ni Dieu, ni Maître,” “No God, no Master.” It’s a phrase that Daniel Guérin took as the title of his very valuable collection of anarchist classics. I think it’s fair to understand the phrase “No God” in the terms that I just quoted from Rocker — opposition to ecclesiastical guardianship. Individual beliefs are a different matter. That’s no matter of concern to a person concerned with free development of thought and action. That leaves the door open to the lively and impressive tradition of religious anarchism, for example, Dorothy Day’s very impressive Catholic Worker Movement. But the phrase “no master” is different. That refers not to individual belief but to a social relation, a relation of subordination and dominance, a relation that anarchism, if taken seriously, seeks to dismantle and rebuild from below, unless it can somehow meet the harsh burden of establishing its legitimacy.

By now we’ve departed from truism and, in fact, to ample controversy. In particular, right at this point the rather peculiar American brand of what’s called libertarianism departs very sharply from the libertarian tradition. It accepts and indeed strongly advocates the subordination of working people to the masters of the economy and, furthermore, the subjection of everyone to the restrictive discipline and destructive the features of markets. These are topics worth pursuing. I’ll take them up later, if you would like, but I’ll put them aside here, though also recommending to you about bringing together in some way the energies of the young libertarian left and right, as indeed sometimes is done. For example, it’s done in the quite important and valuable theoretical and practical work of economist David Ellerman and some others.

Anarchism, of course, is famously opposed to the state while at the same time advocating “planned administration of things in the interests of the community,” Rocker’s phrase again, and beyond that, broader federations of self-governing communities at workplaces. In the real world of today, the same dedicated anarchists who are opposed to the state often support state power to protect people and society and the Earth itself from the ravages of concentrated private capital. Take, say, a venerable anarchist journal like Freedom. It goes back to 1886, formed as a journal of socialist anarchism by supporters of Kropotkin. If you open its pages, you will find that much of it is devoted to defending rights of people, the environment, society, often by invoking state power, like regulation of the environment or safety and health regulations in the workplace.

There’s no contradiction here, as sometimes thought. People live and suffer and endure in this world and not some world that we imagine. And all the means available should be used to safeguard and benefit them, even if the long-term goal is to displace these devices and construct preferable alternatives. In discussing this, I’ve sometimes used an image that comes from the Brazilian workers’ movement. It’s discussed in an interesting work by Biorn Maybury-Lewis. They use the image of widening the floors of the cage. The cage is existing coercive institutions that can be widened by committed popular struggle. It happened effectively over many years. And you can extend the image beyond. Think of the cage of coercive state institutions as a kind of protection from savage beasts that are roaming outside, namely, the predatory, state-supported, capitalist institutions that are dedicated to the principle of private gain, power, domination, with the interest of the community at most a footnote. Maybe revered in rhetoric, but dismissed in practice and, in fact, even in Anglo-American law.

It’s also worth remembering that anarchists condemned really existing states, not visions of unrealized democratic dreams, such as government of, by, and for the people. They bitterly opposed the rule of what Bakunin had called “the red bureaucracy,” which he predicted 50 years in advance would be among the most savage of human creations. They also opposed parliamentary systems that are instruments of class rule. The contemporary United States, for example, which is not a democracy, it’s a plutocracy. That’s very easy to demonstrate. The majority of the population has no influence over policy. As you move up the income/wealth scale, you get more and more influence. The very top people get what they want. Well established by academic political science but familiar to everyone who looks at the way the world works. A truly democratic system would be quite different. It would have the character of “an alliance of free groups of men and women based on cooperative labor and a planned administration of things in the interests of the community.”

In fact, that’s not too remote from one version of the mainstream democratic ideal. Actually, one version. I’ll stress that. I’ll return to others. Take, for example, the leading American social philosopher of the 20th century, John Dewey. His major concerns were democracy and education. No one took Dewey to be an anarchist. But pay attention to his ideas. In his conception of democracy, illegitimate structures of coercion must be dismantled, and that includes domination “by business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents, other means of publicity and propaganda.” He recognized that “power today resides in control of the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation, and communication. Whoever owns them rules the life of the country,” even if democratic forms remain. And until these institutions are in the hands of the public, politics will remain “the shadow cast by big business on society.” Very much what we see around us, in fact.

It’s important that Dewey went beyond calling for some form of public control. That could take many forms. He went beyond. In a free and democratic society, he wrote, the workers should be “the masters of their own industrial fate,” not tools rented by employers, not directed by state authorities.” That position goes right back to the leading ideas of classical liberalism articulated by von Humboldt, Smith, others, and extended in the anarchist tradition.

Turning to education, Dewey held that it is “illiberal and immoral” to train children to work “not freely and intelligently but for the sake of the work earned,” to achieve test scores, for example, in which case their activity is “not free because it’s not freely participated in” and it’s quickly forgotten too, as all of us know from our experience. So he proceeded to conclude that industry must be changed “from a feudalistic to a democratic social order” and educational practice should be designed to encourage creativity, exploration, independence, cooperative work — exactly the opposite of what’s happening today.

These ideas lead to a vision of society based on workers’ control of productive institutions, the links to community control within the framework of free association and federal organization. In the general style of thought that includes, of course, along with many anarchists, others too, say G.D.H. Cole’s guild socialism in England, left anti-Bolshevik Marxism, a current development, such as, for example, the participatory economics and politics of Michael Albert, Robin Hahnel, Stephen Shalom, and others, along with important work in theory and practice by the late Seymour Melman, his associates, and many others, notably Gar Alperovitz’s very valuable recent contributions on worker-owned enterprise and cooperatives. Not just talk but actual taking place.

Going back to Dewey, he was as American as apple pie, to borrow the old cliché, right in the mainstream of American history and culture. In fact, all of these ideas and developments are very deeply rooted in the American tradition and in American history, a fact which is kind of suppressed but is very obvious when you look into it. When you pursue these questions, you enter into an important terrain of inspiring, often bitter struggle. That’s ever since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, which was right around here, Lowell, Lawrence, eastern Massachusetts, mid-19th century.

The first serious scholarly study of the industrial worker in those years was 90 years ago. It’s by Norman Ware. It’s still very much worth reading. He reviews the hideous working conditions that were imposed on formerly independent craftsman and immigrants and farmers, as well as the so-called “factory girls,” young women brought from the farms to work in the textile mills around Boston. He mentions that, he reviews it. But he focuses attention on something else—what he calls “the degradation suffered by the industrial worker,” the loss “of status and independence,” which could not be cancelled, even where there occasionally was some material improvement. And he focuses on the radical capitalist “social revolution, in which sovereignty and economic affairs passed from the community as a whole into the keeping of a special class of masters,” often remote from production, a group “alien to the producers.” Ware shows, I think pretty convincingly, that “for every protest against machine industry and privation there can be found 100 protests against the new power of capitalist production and its discipline.” In other words, workers were struggling and striking not just for bread but also for roses, in the traditional slogan of the workers’ communities and organizations. They were struggling for dignity and independence and for their rights as free men and women.

Their journals are very interesting. There’s a rich and lively labor press written by working people, artisans from Boston, factory girls from the farms. In these journals they condemned what they called the “blasting influence of monarchical principles on democratic soil, which will not be overcome until “they who work in the mills will own them,” the slogan of the massive Knights of Labor, “and sovereignty will return to free and independent producers.” Then they will no longer be “menials or the humble subjects of a foreign despot, the absentee owner, slaves in the strictest sense of the word, who toil for their masters.” Rather, they will regain their status as “free American citizens.”

The capitalist revolution instituted a crucial change from price to wage. It’s very important. When a producer sold his product for a price, Ware writes, “he retained his person. But when he came to sell his labor, he sold himself.” I’m quoting from the press. That’s a big difference. He lost his dignity as a person as he became a slave, a wage slave, to use the common term of the period. One hundred sixty years ago, a group of skilled workers repeated the common view that a daily wage was equivalent to slavery, and they weren’t warned, perceptively, that a day might come when “wage slaves will so far forget what is due to manhood as to glory in a system forced on them by their necessity and in opposition to their feelings of independence and self-respect,” a day that they hoped would be far distant. These were very popular notions in the mid-19th century, in fact, so popular that they were a slogan of the Republican Party. You could read them in editorials of The New York Times. That’s then, not now. But that day may come back. Let’s hope.

Labor activists of the time warned, bitterly often, of what they called “the new spirit of the age: Gain wealth, forgetting all but self.” That was the new spirit of the age 150 years ago. In sharp reaction to this demeaning spirit, there were quite enormous and active rising movements of working people and radical farmers. Radical farmers actually began in Texas and spread through the Midwest and much of the country. It was, of course, an agricultural country then. These are the most significant democratic popular movements in American history. They were dedicated to solidarity, mutual aid. They were crushed by force. We have a very violent labor history as compared to other countries. But it’s a battle that’s not over, far from over, despite setbacks, often violent repression.

There are familiar apologists for the radical revolution of wage slavery, and they have an argument. They argue that the workers should indeed glory in a system of free contracts voluntarily undertaken. There was an answer to that 200 years ago by Shelley in his great poem “The Masque of Anarchy.” This was written right after the Peterloo massacre in Manchester, England, when the British cavalry brutally attacked a peaceful gathering of tens of thousands of people—the first major example of huge, nonviolent protest and the reaction of the state authorities to it. They were calling for parliamentary reform. Shelley wrote that we know what slavery is. “Tis to work and have such pay/As just keeps life from day to day/In your limbs, as in a cell/For the tyrants’ use to dwell. … Tis to be slave in soul/And to hold no strong control/Over your own wills, but be/All that others make of ye.”

That’s slavery. That’s what working people and independent farmers were struggling against. The artisans and factory girls who struggled for dignity and independence and freedom might very well have known Shelley’s words. Observers at the time noted that they were highly literate. They had good libraries. They were acquainted with the standard works of English literature. This is before mechanism and wage slavery. The wage system ended, or at least curtailed, the days of independence, high culture, and security. Before that, Ware points out, a workshop might be what he called a lyceum. A journeyman would hire boys to read to them while they worked. These were social businesses, with many opportunities for reading, discussion, mutual improvement. Along with the factory girls, the journeyman, the artisans bitterly condemned the attack on their culture.

The same was true in England, incidentally, where conditions were much harsher. There’s actually a great book about this by Jonathan Rose called The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. It’s a monumental study of the reading habits of the working class of what we think of as Dickensian England. He contrasts what he calls “the passionate pursuit of knowledge by proletarian autodidacts” with the “pervasive philistinism of the British aristocracy.” Actually, I’m old enough to remember residues that remained among working people in New York in the 1930s, who were deeply immersed in the high culture of the day. It’s another battle that may have receded, but I don’t think it’s lost.

I mentioned that Dewey and American workers and farmers held one version of democracy with very strong libertarian elements. But the dominant version has been radically different. Its most instructive expression is at the progressive end of the mainstream spectrum. That is among people who are good Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Kennedy liberals. Here are a few representative quotes from icons of the liberal intellectual establishment on democratic theory.

The public are “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders.” They have to “be put in their place.” Decisions must be in the hands of an “intelligent minority” of “responsible men,” namely, us, and we have to be protected “from the trampling and roar of the bewildered herd” out there. The herd does have a function in a democratic society. They are supposed to lend their weight every few years to a choice among the responsible men. But apart from that, their function is to be “spectators, not participants in action.” And all of this is for their own good. We should not succumb to “democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests.” They are not. They are like young children. You have to take care of them. We are the best judges of their own interests. So their attitudes and opinions have to be controlled for their own benefit. We have to “regiment the minds of men the way an army regiments their bodies, ” and we have to discipline the institutions responsible for what they called “the indoctrination of the young”: schools, universities, churches. If we can do this, we can get back to the good old days — this is complaints about the 1960s — when “Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers,” then we will have true democracy.

These are quotes from icons of the liberal establishment: Walter Lippmann, Edward Bernays, Harold Laswell, the founder of modern political science, Samuel Huntington, Trilateral Commission, which largely staffed the Carter administration. The conflict between these conceptions of democracy goes far back. It goes back to the earliest modern democratic revolution in 17th century England. At that time, there was a war raging between supporters of the king and supporters of parliament. That’s the civil war that we read about. But there was more. The gentry, the men who called themselves “the men of best quality,” were appalled by the rabble, who didn’t want to be ruled by either king or parliament, like the Spanish workers in 1936, neither side. They had their own pamphlet literature, and they said they wanted to be ruled by “countrymen like ourselves that know our wants. It will never be a good world while knights and gentlemen make us laws that are chosen for fear and do but oppress us and do not know the people’s source.” That’s 17th century England.

The essential nature of this conflict, which is far from ended, was captured nicely by Thomas Jefferson in his later years. He had serious concerns about both the quality and the fate of the democratic experiment. He made a distinction between what he called aristocrats and democrats. The aristocrats are “those who fear and distrust the people and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes.” The democrats, in contrast, “identify with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the honest and safe, although not the most wise, depository of the public interest.”

The modern progressive intellectuals—the Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy intellectual left, those who seek to put the public in their place and are free from democratic dogmatisms about the capacity of the ignorant and meddlesome outsiders to enter the political arena—they’re Jefferson’s aristocrats. These basic views are very widely held, though there are some disputes, namely, who should play the guiding role. Should it be what the liberal intellectuals call the technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals, the ones we celebrate as the Camelot intellectuals, who run the progressive knowledge society, or should it be bankers or corporate executives? In other versions, should it be the central committee or the guardian council of clerics? They are all pretty similar ideas.

And they’re all the examples of the ecclesiastical and political guardianship that the genuine libertarian tradition seeks to dismantle and reconstruct from below, while also changing industry from a feudalistic to a democratic social order, one that’s based on workers’ control, community control, respects the dignity of the producer as a genuine person, not a tool in the hands of others, in accordance with a libertarian tradition that has deep roots and, like Marx’s old mole, is always burrowing quite close to the surface and ready to spring forth.

Noam Chomsky