Re: [AUT] Taking No One Seriously

["Andy Robinson" <ldxar1@xxxxxxxxx>]

Of course being "against the state" is very much conditional on what one
takes the "state" to be.  Neither Holloway/Open Marxism, nor anarchism
(classical or contemporary), nor Deleuzian politics of desire, nor
Zapatismo, are against "social organisation" conceived in its broadest
sense.  The point is that the state is a specific kind of organisation - one
might, to follow Clastres, speak of "society against the state", of kinds of
social organisation, or more accurately, social assemblage which are not
states and which exceed/escape the state (for Deleuze and Guattari, the
nomadic war-machine is a non-state; for Bakunin and Kropotkin, direct action
by the "masses" is non-state because its social form is associative rather
than impositional; for Stirner, a "union of egoists" escapes the logic of
"spooks"; etc).

Actually I'm inclined to think of statism in two senses.  The first is the
literal, Leninist/Weberian sense - a state is a special body of armed people
which claims to have a monopoly on violence and which thus attempts to
impose, by means of violence, a particular assemblage or a
limited/constrained space within a specified territory.  The second is the
broader, more Deleuzian/Foucauldian sense of state-like thinking - to think
like the state is to pursue fixity and control instead of openness and flow,
and to try to fix meaning in a more-or-less Schmittian way - to pursue
guarantees of certainty, and against contingency, by means of authority.
(This latter kind of statism tends to produce states in the former sense).
I'm opposed to the state in both of these senses.  The former because it's a
type of organisation which is not useful in producing a world free from
oppression and which, rather, repeatedly and in a predictable and patterned
way reproduces social oppression.  The latter because it's a formation of
desire which constructs destructive reactive formations which lead to
oppressive social relations.

There is no reason why the elimination of the state in either of these
senses should lead to the elimination of social organisation.  The
elimination of a special impositional body opens space for horizontal types
of association, dialogue, and in the worst case confrontation without
guarantee (which is still far less deadly than the wars which are the health
of the state); the overcoming of statist modes of thinking/desiring still
leaves open the possibility of socio-libidinal connections based on active
types of desire, and a power (in the Foucauldian sense) which is exercised
"through" and "with" rather than "over".

Andy