From Autonomies
March 3, 2025
The scandal that is Donald Trump’s administration – from the gutting and/or paralysing of federal government agencies, justified in the name of eliminating and controlling government waste of public monies due to indulgent, corrupt government workers and government policies, to budget plans for rampant privatisation and parallel tax benefits for the private companies that will substitute for government agencies, to an ideological war against the already modest US “welfare state”, to mass racist deportations, to a foreign policy driven by a logic of “strong men” competing for spheres of influence irrespective of the resulting human sacrifices – is shocking only to liberal sensibilities enamoured of the rule of law.
That the left should be equally scandalised is testimony to the left’s own submission to the same sensibilities and to their faithlessness to an older ideal that once animated it: the destruction of capitalism, in all of its many incarnations and manifestations at all levels of modern society.
The left, as Walter Benjamin so presciently diagnosed, has been as entranced by the illusions of progress as the liberal apologists of capitalism. And consequently, it has continually faltered before the excesses of liberal government and governance; its “exceptional” violence, its rule by exception, which underlies all state sovereignty, but which only visibly rears its head, in our times, in fascist forms.
For Benjamin, the left had forgotten the “tradition of the oppressed”, and as a consequence, could no longer find a voice, an agency, to confront fascism.
"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable."
(Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History – thesis VIII, 1940)
What Benjamin’s “real state of emergency” is, however, is a matter of controversy and without wishing to close the debate on the matter, it does seem illusory or misguided to read him as some sort of romantic anarchist for whom the state is absolutely evil and its absence unquestionably good.
This is not to defend the state, but to understand, after Gustav Landauer, that we are the state.
"The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another… We are the State and we shall continue to be the State until we have created the institutions that form a real community."
(Gustav Landauer, Weak Statesmen, Weaker People!, 1910)
To follow Landauer is to understand the modern state, in its many forms and multiple institutional expressions, as the complex and changing outcome of the relations and conflicts of power in a society. And historically, whether we celebrate it or criticise it – and both attitudes are called for –, the “welfare state”, as it took shape and evolved in different societies, reflects these struggles.
To merely then dismiss the state on ideological grounds – anarchist or otherwise – is to ignore the overwhelming role of the struggles of the working class, women, racialised and colonised peoples, in the shaping of that state.
A recent piece by the Observer columnist, Kenan Malik, summarises the point well:
"What we call liberal norms – democracy, equality, freedom of speech and association, the right of nations to self-determination and so on – became social realities largely through the efforts of radical movements and working-class organisations, and often in the face of ferocious opposition from liberal elites that sought to limit the scope of these norms, denying the majority of society, indeed the majority of the world, basic democratic rights.
It was through the struggles of the dispossessed – of slaves to emancipate themselves, of colonial subjects confronting imperial rule, of the working class organising to improve their lives, of women claiming the right to vote – that liberal norms were made universal rather than remaining the exclusive property of a privileged few.
The erosion of that radical universalist tradition has befuddled the left, detaching it from liberal traditions, and from class politics, and leaving the remnants more authoritarian and identitarian. It has also discombobulated liberalism.
Without the buttress of radicalism, liberals themselves have become more illiberal, whether on free speech or democracy, and less willing to address issues of social inequality or working-class needs."
(The Guardian, 02/03/2025)
The conclusion to draw from all of this is not that anarchists are delusional in their anti-statism and that their desire for a free and egalitarian society unburdened by the oppressive hierarchies of the state and other institutions is misguided, but rather that the latter translates into a complexity of political possibilities that cannot be reduced to a single line of fracture or division.
Ideological judgement is easy, especially when distant or detached from everyday struggles. One can always dismiss the fight for “rights”, whether of workers, women, migrants, the colonised, gays and trans people, and so on, for not understanding that it is the state that must be destroyed. But then how is the state, the capitalist state, to be contested if not at the level of the everyday, with all of the accompanying risks and uncertainty of such struggles?
The words of civil rights activist, David Dennis Sr., can perhaps serve as a reminder of what a politics of the “tradition of the oppressed” looks like:
“I think that we need to go back to our roots,” Dennis said. “The movement really wasn’t about thousands of people in the streets. The thousands of people came in the street after somebody did something. We took an issue and we zeroed in on that particular issue, as a people, as a group moving,” Dennis said.
“We didn’t try to solve everything at the same time. A few people would get together and they did something. People always ask me, ‘How do you get a movement started?’ I always go back to: you have to do something.”
(The Guardian, 02/03/2025)
There is nothing here of a political programme or an ideology or a vanguard, fit for all situations; what there is, instead, is a task, with a horizon of justice.
If Donald Trump pretends to govern the United States like a brutal, mafia boss, it is important to first understand what lies behind his slash and burn politics against the Federal government of his own country and his browbeating of foreign governments, to understand from whence it comes – that it is not some mad rupture with politics as it has hitherto been exercised –, and to understand that the struggle against his government, and violent governments and states everywhere, must begin in a present and place where many, in many different places, can converge to act for a justice of freedom and equality.
We close with a short article by Gustav Landauer.
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Weak Statesmen, Weaker People!
(1910)
A pale, nervous, sick, and weak man sits at his writing desk. He scribbles notes on a sheet of paper. He is composing a symphony. He works diligently, using of all the trade secrets that he has learned. When the symphony is performed, a hundred and fifty men play in the orchestra; in the third movement, there are ten timpani, fifteen percussion instruments, and an organ; in the final movement, an eight part chorus of five hundred people is added as well as an extra orchestra of fifes and drums. The audience is mesmerized by the enormous force and the imposing vigour.
Our statesmen and politicians – and increasingly our entire ruling class – remind us of this composer who possesses no actual power, but allows the masses to appear powerful. Our statesmen and politicians also hide their actual weakness and helplessness behind a giant orchestra willing to obey their commands. In this case the orchestra are the people in arms, the military.
The angry voices of the political parties, the complaints of the citizens and the workers, the clenched fists in the pockets of the people – none of this has to be taken seriously by the government. These actions lack any real force because they are not supported by the elements that are naturally the most radical in each people: the young men from twenty to twenty-five. These men are lined up in the regiments under the command of our inept government. They follow every order without question. It is they who help camouflage the government’s true weaknesses, allowing them to remain undetected – both within our country as much as outside of it.
We socialists know how socialism, i.e., the immediate communication of true interests, has been fighting against the rule of the privileged and their fictitious politics for over one hundred years. We want to continue and strengthen this powerful historical tendency, which will lead to freedom and fairness. We want to do this by awakening the spirit and by creating different social realities. We are not concerned with state politics.
If the powers of un-spirit and violent politics at least retained enough force to create great personalities, i.e., strong politicians with vision and energy, then we might have respect for these men even if they were in the enemy’s camp. We might even concede that the old powers will continue to hold onto power for some time. However, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the state is not based on men of strong spirit and natural power. It is increasingly based on the ignorance and passiveness of the people. This goes even for the unhappiest among them, for the proletarian masses. The masses do not yet understand that they must flee the state and replace it, that they must build an alternative. This is not only true in Germany; it is also the case in other countries.
On the one side, we have the power of the state and the powerlessness of the masses, which are divided into helpless individuals – on the other side, we have socialist organisation, a society of societies, an alliance of alliances, in other words: a people. The struggle between the two sides must become real. The power of the states, the principle of government and those who represent the old order will become weaker and weaker. The entire system would vanish without a trace if the people began to constitute themselves as a people apart from the state. However, the people have not yet grasped this. They have not yet understood that the state will fulfil a certain function and remain an inevitable necessity as long as its alternative, the socialist reality, does not exist.
A table can be overturned and a window can be smashed. However, those who believe that the state is also a thing or a fetish that can be overturned or smashed are sophists and believers in the Word. The state is a social relationship; a certain way of people relating to one another. It can be destroyed by creating new social relationships; i.e., by people relating to one another differently.
The absolute monarch said: I am the state. We, who we have imprisoned ourselves in the absolute state, must realise the truth: we are the state! And we will be the state as long as we are nothing different; as long as we have not yet created the institutions necessary for a true community and a true society of human beings.
(Source: panarchy.org)
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