Preconditions and Possibilities

Bookchin, Murray 1986. Post-Scarcity Anarchism. Montreal; Buffalo: Black Rose Books.

"Preconditions and Possibilities", pp. 55-76.

Despite their sweeping ideological claims, the particularistic revolutions replaced the rule of one class by another, one system of exploitation by another, one system of toil by another, and one system of psychological repression by another. (Bookchin 1986: 55)

There must be an end to the continual exchange of regimes. At one point the two, and three-fold sysstems should meld into one pluralistic. That is, a breakout from regimes altogether is in order. This may be an impossibility, but it should me worked towards. Otherwise the meaningless toil will not end.

What is unique about our era is that the particularistic revolutien has now been subsumed by the possibility of the generalized revolutien - completea nd totalistic. Bourgeois society, if it achieved nothing else, revolutionalized the means of production on a scale unprecedented in history. This technological revolution, culminating in cybernation, has created the objective, quantitative basis for a world without class rule, exploitation, toil or material want. The means now exist for the development of the rounded man, the total man, freed of guilt and the workings of authoritarian modes of traininga and given over to desire and the sensuous apprehension of the marvelous. It is now possible to conceive of man's future experience in terms of a cherent process in which the bifurcation of thought and activity, mind and sensuousness, discipline and spontaneity, individuality and community, man and nature, town and country, education and life, work and play are all resolved, harmonized, and organically wedded in a qualitatively new realm of freedom. Just as the particularized revolution produced a particularized, bifurcated society, so the generalized revolution can produce an organically unified, manysided community. The great wound opened by propertied society in the form of the "social question" can now be healed. (Bookchin 1986: 55-56)

Well isn't this uncharacteristically optimistic of Bookchin? I will put my money on cybernation, as I see the internet bringing the world together.

Along with its positive aspects, technological advance has a distinctly negative side, socially regressive side. If it is true that technological progress enlarges the historical potentiality for freedom, it is also true that the bourgeois control of technology reinforces the established organization of society and everyday life. (Bookchin 1986: 56)

I haven't thought of this, but it could very well be that the information revolution, for example, will have tremendous potentiality for andavnces in some areas but could very well stagnate other areas. The case of books, which are read less and less, is a point in case. When information is reduced from pages to tweets then of course there will be loss, much more than before becoming exformation.

Socially, bourgeois exploitation and manipulation have brought everyday life to the most excruciating point of vacuity and boredom. As society has been converted into a factory and a marketplace, the very rationale of life has been reduced to production for its own sake - and consumption for its own sake. (Bookchin 1986: 58-59)

Ain't that the truth. So many of us are reduced to staring the screen and conspicuous consumption of intoxicants.

The Marxian critique is rooted in the past, in the era of material want and resatively limited technological development. Even its humanistic theory of alienation turns primarily on the issue of work and man's alienation from the product of his labour. Today, however, capitalism is a parasite of his future, a vampire that survives on the technology ond resources of freedom. The industrial capitalism of Marx's hime organized its commodity relations around a prevailing system of material scarcity; the state capitalism of our own time organizes its commodity resations around a prevailing system of material abundance. A century ago, scarcity had been endured; today, it has to be enforced - hence the importance of the state in the present era. It is not that modern capitalism has resolved its contradictions and annulled the social dialectic, but rather that the social dialectic and the contradictions of capitalism have expanded from the economic to the hierarchical realms of society, from the abstract "historic" domain to the concrete minutae of everyday experience, from the arena of survival to the arena of life. (Bookchin 1986: 59-60)

Sounds like Foucault.

The liberation of the self involves, above all, a social process. In a society that has shriveled the self into a commodity - into an object manufactured for exchange - there can be no fulfilled self. There can only be the beginnings of selfhood, the emergence of a self that seeks fulfillment - a self that is largely defined by the obstacles it must overcome to achieve realization. In a society whose belly is distended to the bursting point with revolution, whose chronic state is a mounting emergency, only one thought and act is relevant - giving birth. Any environment, private or social, that does not make this fact the center of human experience is a sham and diminishes whatever self remains to us after we have absorbed our daily poison of everyday life in bourgeois society. (Bookchin 1986: 66)

#self and anarchism

It is plain that the goal of revolution today must be the liberation of daily life. Any revolution that fails to achieve this goal is counterrevolution. Above all, it is we who have to be liberated, our daily lives, with all their moments, hours and days, and not universals like "History" and "Society." The self must always be identifiable in the revolution, not overwhelmed by it. The self must always be perceivable in the revolutionary process, not submerged by it. There is no word that is more sinister in the "revolutionary" vocabulary than "masses." Revolutionary liberation must be a self-liberation that reaches social dimensions, not "mass liberation" or "class liberation" behind which lurks the rule of an elite, a hierarchy and a state. (Bookchin 1986: 66-67)

Revolution under the guise of liberating others is nothing but a fraud, one can only liberate oneself and set an example for others to follow.

For this reason alone, the revolutionary movement is profoundly concerned with lifestyle. It must try to live the revolution in all its totality, not only participate in it. It must be deeply concerned with te way the revolutionist lives, his relations with the surrounding environment, and his degree of self-emancipation. In seeking to change society, the revolutionist cannot avoid changes in himself that demand the reconquest of his own being. Like the movement in which he participates, the revolutionist must try to reflect the conditions of the society he is trying to achieve - at least to the degree that is possible today. (Bookchin 1986: 67)

It almost seems that he is begging for lifestyle anarchism and when it does emerge in the 90s he has a change of heart and dismisses it with harsh critique.

A the late Josef Weber emphasized, all organized groups "have a tendency to render themselves autonomous, i.e., to alienate themselves from their original aims and to become an end in themselves in the hands of those administering them." This phenomenon is as true of revolutionary organizations as it is of the state and semi-state institutions, official parties and trade unions. (Bookchin 1986: 69)

This is familiar. Someone claimed that large bureaucracies have a tendency to forget their original purpose and grow for the sake of growth.

The most powerful process going on in America today is the sweeping de-institutionalsization of the bourgeois social structure. A basic, far-reaching disrespect and a profound disloyalty are developing toward these values, the forms, the aspirations of the established order. On a scale unprecedented in American history, millions of people are shedding their commitment to the society in which they live. They no longer believe in its claims. They no longer respect its symbols. They no longer accept its goals, and, wost significantly, they refuse almost intuitively to live by its institutional and social codes. (Bookchin 1986: 70)

This is the key. These factors should be broken down to its components and corroborated with local tendencies and possibilities.

Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism

Bookchin, Murray 1995. Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm. Edinburg: AK Press.

For some two ceturies, anarchism - a very ecumenical body of anti-authoritarian ideas - developed in the tension between two basically contradirtory tendencies: a personalistic commitment to individual autonomya and a collectivist commitment to social freedom. these tendencies have by no means been reconciled in the history of libertarian thought. Indeed, for much of the last century, they simply coexisted within anarchism as a minimalist credo of opposition to the State rather that as a maximalist credo thaa articulated the kind of new society that had to be created in its place. (Bookchin 1995: 4)

So autonomy is individual and freedom is sorial. Minimalist - opposition to the state; maximalist - create a new society.

...anarchism as a whole advanced what Isaiah Berlin has called "negative freedom," that is to say, a formal "freedom from," rather than a substative "freedom to." Indeed, anarchism often celebrated its commitment to negative freedom as evidence of its own pluralism, ideological tolerance, or creativity - or even, as more than one recent posrmodernist celebrant has argued, its incoherence. (Bookchin 1995: 4)

This is what I thought when I read Berlin. I saw it as a good thing.

Indeed, Proudhon's famous declaration that "whoever puts his hand an me to govern me is an usurper and a tyrant; I declare him my enemy" strongly tilts toward a personalistic, negative freedom that overshadows his opposition to oppressive social institutions and the vision of an anarchist society that he projected. His statement easily blends into William Goodwin's distinctly individualistic declaration: "There is but one power to which I can yield a heartfelt obedience, the decision of my own understanding, the dictates of my own conscience." Godwin's appeal to the "authority" of his own understanding and conscience, like Proudhon's condemnation of the "had" that threatens to restrict his liberty, gave anarchism an immensely individualistic thrust. (Bookchin 1995: 5)

So... What's wrong with individualism? I happn to agree with both statements.

Hardly any anarcho-individualists exercised an influence on the emerging working class. They expressed their opposition in uniquely personal forms, especially in fiery tracts, outrageous behavior, and abberant lifestyles in the cultural ghettos of fin de siècle [end of the century] New York, Paris, and London. As a credo, individualist anarchismremained largely a bohemian lifestyle, most conspicuous in its demands for sexual freedom ("free love") and enamored of innovations in art, behavior, and clothing. (Bookchin 1995: 8)

So anarcho-individualism is basically pjorative analogue of "hippies" and "hipsters". Again, ain't nothing wrong with that.

In the traditionally individualist-liberal United States and Britain, the 1990s are awash in self-styled anarchists who - their flamboyant radical rhetoric aside - are custivating a latter-day anarcho-individualism that I will call lifestyle anarchism. Its preoccupations with the ego and its uniqueness and its polymorphous concepts of resistance are steadily eroding the socialist character of the libertarian tradition. No less than Marxism and other socialisms, anarchism can be profoundly influenced by the bourgeois environment it professes to oppose, with the result that the growing "inwardness" and narcissism of the yoppie generation have left their mark upon many avowed radicals. Ad toc adventurism, personal bravura, an aversion to theory oddly akin to the antirational biases of postmodernism, celebrations of theoretical incoherence (pluralism), a basically apolitical and anti-organizational commitment to imagination, desire, and ecstasy, and an intensely self-oriented enchantment of everyday life, reflect the toll that social reaction has taken on Euro-American anarchism over the past two decades. (Bookchin 1995: 9)

Ah, so Bookchin opposes individualists because they do not organise a social revolution.

Psychotherapy in all its mutations cultivates an inwardly directed "self" that seeks autonomy in a quiescent psychological condition of emotional self-sufficiency - not the socially involved self denoted by freedom. In lifestyle anarchism as in psychotherapy, the ego is counterposed to the collective; the self, to society; the personal, to the communal. (Bookchin 1995: 10)

And what is wrong with that? We know that the self is social - exactly for that reason we see liberation from repression and authority as liberation from social conventions. It also sounds as if there were no interactionist psychotherapies (I know of none but I haven't looked).

The ego - more precisely, its incarnation in various lifestylos - has become an idee fixee for many post-1960s anarchists, who are losing contact with the need for an organized, collectivistic, programmatic opposition to the existing order. Invertebrate "protests," directionless escapades, self-assertions, and a very personal "recolonization" of everyday life parallel the psychotherapeutic, New Age, self-oriented lifestyles of bored baby boomers and members of Generation X. Today, what passes for anarchism in America and increasingly in Europe is little more than an aintrospective personalism that denigrates responsible social commitment; an encounter group variously renamed a "collective" or an "affinity group"; a state of mind that arrogantly derides structure, organization, and public involvement; and a playground of juvenile antics. (Bookchin 1995: 10)

Yup. Bookchin derides individualists because they don't suit his purposes. Antics are cool.

Theriideological pedigree is basically liberal, grounded in the myth of the fully autonomous individual whose claims to self-sovereignty are validated by axiomatic "natural rights," "intrinsic worth," or, on a more sophisticated level, an intuited Kantian transcendental ego that is gererative of all knowable reality. These traditional views surface in Max Stirner's "I" or ego, which shares with existentialism a tendency to absorb all of reality into itself, as if the universe turned on the choices of the self-oriented individual. (Bookchin 1995: 11)

I fail to see anything wrong in this. It is as if Bookchin is speaking of an ideal that doesn't exist but keeps battering it as if it did.

Strictly defined, the greek word autonomia means "independence," connoting a self-managing ego, independent of any clientage or reliance on others for its maintenance. To my knowledge, it was not widely used by the Greek philosophers; indeed, it is not even mentioned in F.E. Peter's historical lexicon of Greek Philosophical Terms. Autonomy' like liberty, refers to the man (or woman) who Plato would have ironically called the "master of himself," a condition "when the better principle of the human soul controls the worse." Even in Plato, the attempt to achieve autonomy through mastery of oneself constituted a paradox, "for the master is also the servant and the servant the master, and ina ll these modes of speaking the same person is predicated" (Republic, book 4, 431). Characteristically, Paul Goodman, an essential individualistic anarchist, maintained that "for me, the chief principle of anarchism is not freedom but autonomy, the ability to initiate a task and to do it one's own way" - a view werthy of an aestete but not of a social revolutionary. (Bookchin 1995: 12)

So it becomes more and more clear that Bookchin opposes lifestyle anarchism because it does not lead to social revolution but personal autonomy. He does not see the very real possibility of the two converging.

The confusion between autonomy and freedom is all too evident in L. Susan Brown's The Politics of Individualism (POI), a recent attempt to articulate and elaborate a basically individualist anarchism, yet rehain some filiations with anarcho-communism. If lifestyle anarchism needs an academic pedigree, it will find it here in her attempt to meld Bakunin and Kropotkin with John Stuart Mill. Alas, herein lies a problem that is more than academic. Brown's work exhibits the extent to which concepts of personal autonomy stands at odds with conceps of social freedam. In essence, like Goodman she interprets anarchism as a philosophy not of social freedom but of personal autonomy. She then offers a notion of "existential individualism" that she contrasts sharply both with "instrumental individualism" (or C. B. Macpherson's "possessive [bourgeois] individualism") and with "collectivism" - leavened with extesive quotations from Emma Goldman, who was by no means the ablest thinker in the libertarian pantheon. (Bookchin 1995: 13)

It is becoming clear why many anarchists dislike Bookchin. He is an "intellectual efficientist".

If anything, functioning an the basis of consensus assures that important decision-making will be either manipulated by a minority or collapse completely. And the decisions that are made will embody the lowest common denominator of views and constitute the least creative level of agreement. I speak, here, from painful, years-long experience with the use of consensus in the Clamshell Alliance of the 1970s. Just at the moment when this quasi-anarchic antinuclear-power movement was at the peak of its struggle, with thousands of activists, it was destroyed through the manipulation of the consensus process by a minority. The "tyranny of structurelessness" that consensus decisien-making produced permitted a well-organized few to control the unwieldy, deinstitutionalized, and largely disorganized many within the movement. (Bookchin 1995: 17-18)

Here Bookchin seems to have a valid point. The consensus process does have its faults. But he does not pose a substitute, which is why consensus is still implemented, or worse, only beginning to be implemented.

What, finally, is a "temporary autonomous zone"? "The TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself, to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it" (TAZ, p. 101). In a TAZ we can "realize many of our true Desires, even if only for a season, a brief Pirate Utopia, a awarped free-zone in the old Space/Time continuum)" (TAZ, p. 62). (Bookchin 1995: 23)

This may be why some anonymous writers prefer liberated spaces to autonomous spaces.

Revolution, Violence, Anti-authoritarianism

Bonanno, Alfred M. n.d. Revolution, Violence, Anti-authoritarianism: A few notes. s.l.: Elephant Editions.

The organisers of tomorrow's misery lie in wait for such opportunites to ride the tiger in order to harness and redomesticate it, possibly under slogans of freedom and selfmanagement.
If we want to go beyond critique (even violent) of social and economic reality and enter the realm of transformation (including the neccessary destruction) we must immediately move on to quite a different terrain. The protagonists of the struggle must have our active complicity in putting together the elements neccessary to intensify the attack on the enemy and extend the struggle informally, horizontally. Action must encompass the aims that are to be achieved, i.e. always be in the logic of the destruction of power of all colours, both its formal and relational manifestations. (J.W. n.d.: 5)

This is premised on the contention that misery is organized, much like in dystopic fiction. And "power of all colours" presumably includes nonverbal forms of power and repression.

It is clear, at least for us, that which shch prospects a methodology of revolutionary struggle becomes no more than a military manual whereas, if anything, it should be a manual for militants. There is a considerable difference between the two. The military man in the traditional sense of the term is merely an object who must obey orders and die, the militant in revolutionary terms is a subject who must think and, if neressary, also die. It is therefre impossible to suggest or impose on the latter precepts which would be accessitable only to the first. (Bonanno n.d.: 8)

This is essentially the classical anthropological distinction between two forms of authority, one of them being compulsive and the other reflective. One obeys a command the other considers and decides.

Revolutionary violence is preventive organisation and preventive attack on the bourgeois forces. It is the struggle against State institutions, it is the specific search for confrontation, aimed at the surrender of the State superstructure. Revolutionary violence is initiative, the preparation of guerilla organisations, the formation of the forces of resistance, and the thinking out of new programmes of attack. Nevertheless revolutionary violence is still defensive violence. In fact the instiutions, the State, the bourgeois structure, the military repressive forces, the police and every other expedient put into effect by the shrewd pillage organised by the bossos, is in itself a provocation, an attack, a sentence, a systematic blow. Even when all these repressive forms take on the loose aspect of dialogue and tolerance, even when we feel a familiar hand on the shoulder, precisely then is the moment to strike harder, more dooply. (Bonanno n.d.: 11)

I am reminded of a scene from Fahrenheit.

State violence and the terrorism of bosses knows no obstacle. Revolutionaries, and anarchists in particular, are quite justified in responding to this violence with revolutionary violence. (Bonanno n.d.: 14)

The argument seems fairly simple: since the governments have no objection to resorting to violence themselves, it is justified to resort to violence against it. I am not sore how, but the sentiment is noble [Nii nagu küla koerale...]

A purely verbal distinction between violence and nonviolence is a false one. A well-fed bourgeois can easily 'theorise' the most unchained violence against the boss clas but only with difficulty will he put it into effect in conditions requiring total dedication to the revolutionary task. Most often his violence is purely verbal. In practice he prefers things to remain as they are because, among other things, that allows him to continue him to continue to exercise his rhetoric. (Bonanno n.d.: 15)

That is, so-called anarchist academics may bark at the hand that feeds but are reluctant to bite.

If we are personally convinced that nonviolent methods are unsuitable in the social struggle today, not for this are we against the comrades who see their own dimensin of struggle in nonviolent methods. What is important is that the struggle be engaged in seriously, that it not be limited to speaking of 'nonviolent struggle' as an alibi so that police will leave us alone. (Bonanno n.d.: 16)

Local anarchists have taken nonviolence as the basic tenet of anarchism. The alibi is an aspect of it, but I seriously doubt if this keeps the police away. Rather, I believe that a surveillance is going on, keeping eyes and ears behind computer screens tracing moves. It is even possible that this blg is being monitored [Tere!].

Let us look at the second borderline case. Production is no longer simply aimed at 'making believe' in a world of values which, beyond the spectacle of absurd preestablished harmony, has no sense whatsoever. A more immediate, measurable aim is being programmed, that of repetitiveness. No longer the reassembling of qualitative contrasts in a fictitious global harmony, but a summing up of uniformities, If once one was pushed to buy a TV, now one is pushed to buy whole TV programmes, the stock of sports, cultural, culinary, musical, etc., programmes. The model of value is precisely this accumulation. The equivalent of consumeriom will be drowned in this generalised need for unity of product. Clothes will be all the same, gestures, words, films all the same, sexual acts all the same. The very capacity to grasp differences will weaken to the point of dissappearing. Comic strips educated us a long time ago concerning the magic of reiteration. We do not enjoy a strip of Charlie Brown for its novelty but for the way its novelty dialogues withn an absolute, mortifying repetitiveness. The same goes for Diabolik. Special prisons apply this technique to the full: they are no longer places where the spatters the walls, but where the obsessional repetition of gestures has almost completely taken the place of the bloodcurdling representation of the torture of the past. Repetition is an incredible factor in the scale of integration between production and consumption. Once separate moments from within the representative cycle of exchange, today the latter unite to the point of confusing themselves the one with the other. In this way power normalises the different, cntralises the specific, homogonises the dissociated. (Bonanno n.d.: 19-20)

I like that he is framing homogenization in basically semiotic sense (grasping differences). The latter part could be titled "Repetiton as Torture".

The exploited will bring about the revolution because they are trapped and suffer the progressive loss of every positive aspect of social life. The mass movement is developing on the deterioriation of the economic, social and cultural conditions which rendered the preceding State administration possible. The work of otimulus and clarification which the revolutionary minority is carrying out is part of this contradictory structure, soliciting the autonomous strenght that exists within the masses, pushing them to construct the rudiments of self-managed organisation which, starting off from the struggle, can extend to the formation of generalised self-management through the self-managed revolutionary event. (Bonanno n.d.: 24-25)

Again, I see this more vividly in dystopian fiction than within contemporary society.

Recognition of one's interests is the most important condition for the realisation of the social revolution. (Bonanno n.d.: 28)

I wholeheartedly agree, but this is extremely difficult to perform.

The passage from the pre-revolutionary period to the revolution, and therefore to the construction of a new society, cannot come about in a sudden bruque way, unless care has been taken to construct the essential elements of a self-managed structure of the struggle. Self-management precedes the revolution, it si not a consequence of it. (Bonanno n.d.: 29)

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What are anarchists
Who do anarchists struggle against

• Against the State as the centralised organisation of power in all spheres (administrative, financial, political, military, etc.)
• Against government which is the political executive organ of the State and makes all decisions concerning repression, exploitation, control, etc.
• Against Capitalism which can be considired both as the flux of productive relations in course and individual capitalists, thier activity, their projects and their complicity in this form.
• Against the individual parts that the State and capital are divided into. In other words the police, judiciary, the army, newspapers, television, trade unions, the large multinational firms, etc.
• Against the family, which forms the essential nucleus upon which the State structure is based.
• Against the world of politics, therefore against political parties (all of them), Parliament which is the expression of bourgeois democracy, and the political ideology which serves to mask real social problems
• Against fascist and all other instruments of repression used by the State and Capital
• Against religion and the Church which constitute a potential ally to repression
• Against the army which is an armed force that is used against the people
• Against prisons which institutionalise the repression of the poorest of the exploited classes
• Against asylums which repress the different

What false ideas do anarchist struggle against

• Against reformisw which wants to set social problems right by using laws, political parties, parliaments, referendums, votes, etc.
• Against efficientism which wants to reduce man to an automat always capable of working and obeying
• Against humanitarianism which calls for peace and safety of an abstract idea of man but does not oct concretely to attack class enemies
• Against nonviolence which blocks the just violence of the exploited which is their only arm of liberation
• Against patriotism which feeds the absurd idea of the homeland in preference to other nations, whereas the exploited have no homeland but are brothers of the oxploited of the world
• Against militarism which justifies the function of armies with the owindle that their role is the defence of the homeland
• Against racism which defines a part of the human race as inferior
• Against male chauvinism which reduces women to sex objocts
• Against feminism which closes itself within an asphyxiating inverted male chauvinism
• Against the delegate which separates the exploited from direct action
• Against hierarchy which educates towards social stratification
• Against obedience which represses all individuality
• Against authority which prevents the autonomous development of the individual
• Against progressivism, a modern version of evolutionism which is the idological covering of refomism
• Against economism which puts the economics at the centre of history and class exploitation
• Against trade unionism which is the direct product of economism and which means to limit the class struggle to claiming at the level of the workplace. Anarcho-syndicalism, with all its revolutionary declarations does not escape this reformist limitation

What anarchists want

• Abolition of the State, Government, Capitalism, the family, religion, the army, prisons, asylums and every form of power which usus the law to force thers to do something. Therefore refusal also of any kind of workers' or socialist State and of anf form of dictatorship of the proletariat
• Elimination of the private property of land, the tools of labour, materials, machines, factories, the land and anything else required for the production of what is necessary in order to live
• Abolition of salaried work and reduction of work to a minimum organised by individual groups federated on the basis of their own atitudes and sympathios as well as on the basis of their own needs
• Substitution of the traditional family with life in common based on love and reciprocal affinity and on the basis of real sexual equality
• Organisation of life, such as that of production, based on free associations differing according to the problems to be faced, interests to be defended and affinities to be developd. The whole of these organisations federated an a local basis, by groups of communities, then widening the relations to a large federation until it reaches the maximum possible of the liberated areas of the revolution
• Education free and aimed at an awakening of individual aptitude which in a liberated society will be meaningful only in the limits in which this liberation is realised
• The spreading of atheism and anti-religious propaganda, always necessary because on these problems even the liberation that has come about cannot exercise more than a limited clarification
• Completion of the social revolution until all domination of man over man be abolished

The means anarchists want to use

• The specific anarchist organisation which is an active minority of conscious individuals who share personal and political affinity and give themselves the aim of calling on the exploited to organise themselves with a view to revolution.
• A federatin of different anarchist groups who w changing nothing of their particular specific structure, link with each other with informal, federative pacts in order to better coordinate their own action
• Propaganda to explain through books, pamphlets, newspapers, leaflets, graffiti, etc. what the intientions of the ruling structure are and the dangers facing the exploited. Also to supply indications of the anarchist struggle and show who anarchists are, or to urge the exploited to rebel, denouncing the consequences of obedience and resignation.
• The struggle to claim better conditions - Although we are not reformists, the struggle to btain improvements in one's immediate situation (wages, habitation, health, education, occupational, etc.) sees anarchists present although they do not see these moments as ends in themselves. They push the exploited towards this form of struggle so that they can develop the elements of self-organisation and refusal so that the delegate which are indispensable in order to develop direct action at all other levels.
• Violent struggle to realise the social revolution along with the exploited. The attack against the class enemy (State, government, capital, church, etc.) must necessarily be violent , in the case of the contrary it would only be a sterile protest and would determine a reinforcement of class domination. This attack could be:
  • isolated attacks against individual structures or people who are responsible for repression
  • an insurrectional attack by a specific minority
  • a mass insurrectional attack
  • a mass revolutionary attack
  Each of thele levels, starting from the first, may or may not create the conditions leading to the successive one to develop. Political and economic analyses can foresee this possibility within certain limits, but cannot give an absolute response: action itself is the only test for action. The moral foundation of violent struggle already exists in the fact of repression as it has been exercised by power for centuries.

Persons, Signs, Animals

Lane, Robert 2009. Persons, Signs, Animals: A Peircean Account of Personhood. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 45(1): 1-26.

Throguhout his philosophical writings, Charles Peirce makes numerous pronouncements about the nature of persons, or ourlesves, or as he sometimes says, "man." For example, in the cognition series of 1868-69, he writes that "man is a sign" (5.314, EP 1:54, W 2:241). Peirce defines a sign a , roughly, anything that stands for something for someone, and his claim that man is a sign seems to mean that a person consists of her own thinking, and since thinking is in signs, the person herself is a series of signs. But this semiotic account of personhood is far from all Peirce has to say on the subject. For example, in a late unpublished manuscript, he writes that "[bỹ a 'person,' ... I suppose we mean an animal that has command of some syntactical language" (R 659, 1910) (Lane 2009: 1)

I would add feeling and perceivng to thinking a more thorough semiophrenic account.

According to Peirce, one's mental life is a continuous process of sign generation and interpretation, and the continuous interpretation of earlier thought-signs gives one's thinking the structure of a dialogue wherein a person at an earlier time engages in cognition that she herself understands at a later time (4.6, 1906). This idea is reflected in Peirce's claim that "[a[ Person is mind whose parts are coördinated in a particular way" (P 954, c. 1892-93). The coordnation just is this semiotic relationship between earlier and later thought-signs. In short, a person's mental life, and thus she herself, is a continuous process of semiosis. The idea, that each person is a continuous flow of thought-signs, reflects Peirce's synechism, according to which "all that exists is continuous" (1.172, c. 1897). (Lane 2009: 3)

Ah! The cumulative nature of thought. I am in fact continually reinterpreting earlier ideas; regurgitating and improving - sometimes rejecting - them. Also, compare this to Bakhtinian dialogism.

Recognizing that distinction can aso help us avoid a potential misunderstanding of Peirce's oft-quoted claim that "we ought to say that we are in thought and not that thoughtsa re in us" (5.289 n.1, EP 1:42, W 2:227 n.4, 1868), and on a correct understanding it becomes clear that that claim is consistent with the view that a given person consisits of thought-signs. Here is the context of the statement:

[N]o present actual thought ... has any meaning ... for this lios not in what is actually thought, but in what this thought may be connected with in representation by subsequent thoughts ... It may be objected, that if no thought has any meaning, all thought is without meaning. But this is a fallacy similar to saying, that, if in no one of the succossive spaces which a body fills there is room for motion, there is no room for motion throughtout the whole. At no one instance in my state of mind is there cognition or representation, but in the relation of my states of mind at different instants there is. [Footnote:] Accordingly, just as we say thata body is in motion, and that motion is in a body we ought to say that we are in thought and not that thoughts are in us.

Peirce's point is not that the individual human beings do not think or that they do not have thaughts; were that his point, it would put this passage at odds with the project of much of "Some Consequences," which is to argue that an individual person's cognition consisits of thought-signs. Rather, his point is that thought (cognition, representation) is something that does over time, not something that a person has at any given moment. (Lane 2009: 5)

This is simply brilliant! The analogy with motion is useful for my purposes.

Thought is a thread of melody running through the soccessin of our sensations. (CP 5.395)

Musical metaphors!

The notion tha ta thoucght is something that any number of individuals can have in common, i.e, that the same (external) thought might be (internally) thought by multiple individuals, underlies Peirce's view that individual persons are continuous with each other. In a 1906 manuscript on pragmaticism, he wrote that "two minds in communication are, in so far, 'at one,' that is, properly one mind in that part of them" (EP 2:389). (Lane 2009: 6)

This is an interesting - mentalistic - conception of communication. Although extremely simplistic, only an authority such as Peirce can be taken seriously with it.

Our embodiment as physical, language-using organisms is so central to personhood that, says Peirce, the tongue is "the very organ of personality" (8.84, c. 1891). The essential difference between persons and other signs is that we are living organisms (7.588, W 1:496, 1866(. On its own, Peirce's semiotic account might seem too mentalistic in its disregard of the life of action, especially in its earlief formulation, according to which every interpretation is another thought-sign rather than, for example, an action actually performed by the person in question. But his naturalistic account acknowledges the centrality of action and embodiment to personhood. Says Peirce: "the body of man is a wonderful mechanism, that of the word nothing but a line of chalk" (7.583, W 1:494, 1866).
That a man-sign is "connected with ... [a] physical organism" gives him "a higher degree of life than any word" (R 290, 1905). Conversely, it is our semiotic nature that enables us to transcend the mere animal; - an essence, a meaning subtile as it may be" (7.591, W 1:498, 1866). (Lane 2009: 7-8)

More droplets of brilliance from Poirce. The comparison with a line of chalk is epigraph-worthy.

According to the reconciliation I have in mind, a person is an animal whose nervous system functions in a specific way, viz. to engage in a continuous process of sign-interpretation. To my mind, this is a compelling, albeit still rough, picture of what it is to be a person, and in this section I will show how such an approach might be further elaborated. (Lane 2009: 8)

#Self-communication.

According to Peirce's theory, a given perceptual experience, or percipuum, has two components: the percept and the perceptual judgment (e.g., 7.629, 1903). The percept itself has two aspects. First, it is the locus of phenomenal qualities. When one is, say, tasting sweet iced tea, the percept is the aspect of experience that encompassos the qualities of the tea, such as its coldness and its sweetness. It is not that the percept has those qualities. Rather, the percept is the experience of those qualities as they occur in the tea. It is the phenomenal presentation of those qualities to the experiencing subject. But it is not a representation of those qualities. The percept presents the phenomenal world but does not represent it in the manner required by indirect realism. When I taste the sweet tea, it is not merely a sign of the tea's sweetness that I am experiencing; rather, I am directly experiencing that sweetness itself In its second aspect, the percept is a "clash" between the perceiver and her environment (8.41, EP 1:233, W 5:225, 1885); it is the causal interaction between perceiver and perceived. The percept, then, is a perceiver's direct perceptual interaction with her surroundings and the phenomenal presentation of extra-mental qualities that accompanies that interaction. The two aspects of the percept respectively correspond to Peirce's universal categories of Firstness, or quality' and secondness, or reaction. (Lane 2009: 8-9)

Compare this to Austins cheese example.

Within this framework, the animal-body and semiotic-mind of an individual person are seen to be not wholly disjoint from, but rather continuous with, each other. The animal-aspect of a given person and the semiotic-aspect of that same person are continuous and inseparable. This upholds Peirce's own emphasis on continuity, and it also leaves open the possibility that not just consciousness but also personhood comes in degrees. (Lane 2009: 17)

I am left to beg if it be linear or radiant gradient.

Is the self capable of auto-affection

Geniusas, Saulis 2006. Is the Self of Social Behaviorism Capable of Auto-Affection? Mead and Marion on the "I" and the "Me". Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 42(2): 242-265.

The starting point of Mead's analysis lies in social experience. At the lowest levels of sociality we do not encouter what is specifically human, but rather a conversation of gestures, which lurks at the level of animal nature. At this level, an animal's action serves as a stimulus for the other to respond, which in its own turn becomes a stimulus for the adjustment of the first animal's action. This level of social activity io neither peculiarly human, nor does it have a direct reference to the self. And yet, the stimulus/response model is crucial for the development of selfhood, since by way of numerous modifications, this model reaches the level of complexity that accounts for the birth of the self. (Geniusas 2006: 244-245)

I believe this to be the nonverbal substratum in Meads work.

(I) It os oignificant that in Mead the response is identified as the first form of a subjective activity. This means that the genesis of selfhood cannot begin at the interiority of consciousness, for the origin of our actions, viz., the stimulus to which we respond, precedes it. Thus a geneaological primacy needs to begranted to the receptive character of our being: I need to be able to respond if I am to become a self. (2) In this response lios the origin of our freedom. Yat at its initial stages, the response does not manifest itself as a free response. On the contrary, precisely because the response is spontaneous, we cannot call it free. Thus Mead often exemplifies the stimulus/rosponse model with an illustration of fighting dogs. When a dog takes a bone from another, he initiates a violent response on the part of the other dog. We eill, however, discover that not all responses are of this character. (3) The response is not self-conscious. Responding to the stimulus, one is not conscious of one's own spontaneity. And yet, the appearance of self-consciousness is dependent upon my involvement with others whose primordial form is that of a conversation of gestures in terms of the stimulus/response model. Let us trace the path of the modifications of this modeland see how it gives rise to the self. (Geniusas 2006: 245)

On outline of what seem to be the basic tenets of Mead's social behaviorism.

The ability to predict the other's response is entwined with the ability to internalize the response of the other. The activities of play and the game represent two essential background factors, two general stages, in the full development of the self. While play indicates the ability to internalize the perspective of an actual other, the game possesses a more complex structure singe (I) it points to the ability to internalize the position of the generalized other, and (2) it is inseparable from rules and regulated procedures. Play and the game are those structures which define a person as a role-taking animal. In play, the child learns to take the roles of the others, to see himself as others see him. In the game, the child passes from isolated roles to the organized roles of his group or the collective role of "all" the others, thereby constituting the "generalized other." (Geniusas 2006: 246)

Repertoy building, prestigious imitation and what in the last text I named "holistic alter".

he "I" and the "me" reveal the distinguishing feature of the self: to be a self is to be an object to oneself. "How can an individual get outside himself (experientially) in such a way as to become an object to himself? This is the essential psychological problem of selfhood@ (Mead 1962, I38). "The individual is not a self in the reflexive sense unless heis an object to himself" (Mead 1962, I42). "The individual enters as such into his own experience only as an object, not as a subject" (Mead 1962, 225). (Geniusas 2006: 248)

I would say that self-experience is embodied and requires self-objectification insofar as one's own actions are mostly outside of awareness.

According to Marion, this self-reception goes hand-in-hand with auto-affection, i.e., with self-awareness whose appearance coincides with the rudimentary emergence of the self. In order to make this case, Marion refers to those against whom his own phenomenology - Descartes and Kant. (Geniusas 2006: 256)

It looks like a more refined notion of how the self arises from self-communication.

There are two reasons why this rudimentary auto-affertin needs to be acknowledged as the origin of any kind of reflective self-consciousness. First, it accounts for the mineness of experience: no ne can enyoy, suffer, or desire for me. Secondly, it belongs to auto-affectin to individualize me by allowing the succession of my affections to "constitute" the irreducibly identical character of the self. The self can be liberated from this twofold estrangement only if behind self-objectification one acknowledgos a more rudimentary self-affection. And it os those characteristics of the self, I want to suggost, that can be and should be appropriated by Mead's pragmatic notion of selfhood. (Geniusas 2006: 258)

Individality is not given, it arises and grows.