… state-ness is not a binary, where something is a state or not a state, but it’s a continuum. So, things that are more a state or less a state. […] My argument would be that when the state has done something emancipatory, e.g. citizenship, it is almost always done with a pistol at its temple. That is to say it has created new rights when it was threatened in a vital way. […] I think the state is with us as a ruling institution for the foreseeable future. The question is, can we domesticate that state, or will it domesticate us?
“Can we domesticate the state or will it domesticate us?” — James C. Scott Interview, In Pursuit of Development, 2021
In 2014 – and still in the warmth of the “Arab spring” and multiple “occupy” movements -, we posted a review of James C. Scott’s then recently published Two Cheers for Anarchism (Princeton University Press, 2012). The later was a kind of self-refection by Scott on his own politics, distilled from many years of anthropological work on “vernacular” resistance to State authorities by non-state actors.
At the time – and still today -, we consider Scott’s intellectual work of enormous importance and as we look back on it, we can only mourn his death, but also express our gratitude for his commitment to sharing so many of the stories of those who refused and created outside state power.
In our review of 2014, we criticised Scott’s Two Cheers (and it is “two cheers”, not “three“) for not taking his anarchism further, for not considering the possibility that his conceptual-empirical opposition between “vernacular” (the space of anarchist “infrapolitics”) and “official” spaces and practices could itself be overcome by a more radical (“anarchist”) transformation of society, creating thereby, in other words, a free, non-hierarchical, self-managed society.
Today, we are perhaps less sanguine about this issue, for if we imagine “anarchism” in the way that Scott did, then it becomes a permanent possibility and necessity against any emergent “official” politics. And if the latter is a constant risk – even after an “anarchist revolution”, then “anarchist” politics is the ever constant and lucid gesture of refusal.
Is this then no longer anarchism? We leave the question to ideological puritans.
Do you consider yourself an anarchist at this point? Is that a label you’ve taken on?
In a way, no other label works as well. It doesn’t work very well but it works better than anything else. If I had a pistol put to my temple and had to answer “what are you?” I’d say “anarchist” probably. It’s just a point of departure.
(Points of Resistance and Departure: An interview with James C. Scott)
In memory and celebration of James C. Scott’s life and work, we republish our review of his essay, Two Cheers for Anarchism.
This is then followed by internet sources where his work may be found, to interviews and a selection of video recorded lectures and interviews.
… the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change.
Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco’s essay, “Ur-Fascism” (The New York Review of Books, 22/06/1995) remains a significant text in the cartography of fascist politics. Recognising the diversity of “local characteristics” in the form, Eco nevertheless endeavours to distil a set of common features – fourteen – as symptomatic. And it is not difficult to see them at play today. The mistake would be to read in any one of these qualities some sort of timeless fascist essence, when in fact they “cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”
This essay is the third in a roundtable discussion of Alberto Toscano’s Late Fascism. The others, from Jordy Rosenberg and Lisa Lowe, can be found here and here.
What does the word “fascism” mean today, when fossil capitalism continues its accelerated march toward a climate catastrophe and the liberal democracies of North America and Europe support and arm Israel’s genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza? In his powerful book Late Fascism,Alberto Toscano offers us a conceptual and political diagnosis of the emergence in new form of old fascist desires and impulses, a phenomenon he names “late fascism.” Toscano’s main premise is as straightforward as it is crucial: that liberalism and fascism, rather than being polar opposites, have been profoundly entangled with each other in the history of racial capitalism. And he adds that what we call “fascism” cannot be reduced to the ideologies and political regimes that defined it in the Europe of the 1930s and 1940s because it is primarily a type of desire, an eros, or what I would call an affective disposition, a propensity to make the body act in a particular way. Toscano builds his persuasive argument through an extraordinary archival work that examines and rescues multiple, often forgotten genealogies of anti-fascist, Black, and anti-white supremacist thought and action, helping us appreciate the incredible intellectual work of our anti-fascist predecessors and the importance of their insights for understanding the rise of the neo-liberal fascisms of the twenty-first century.
Fascism attempts to organise the newly proletarianised masses while leaving intact the property relations which the masses strive to abolish. Fascism sees its salvation in granting these masses not their rights, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have the right to change property relations; fascism seeks to give them expression while keeping these relations unchanged. The logical result of fascism is the aestheticising of political life.
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility
The fact of fascism, which has thrown the very existence of a workers’ movement into question, clearly demonstrates what can be expected from a timely recourse to reawakened affective forces. Unlike the situation during the period of utopian socialism, morality and idealism are no more the questions today than they are in fascist forms. Rather, an organized understanding of the movements in society, of attraction and repulsion, starkly presents itself as a weapon – at this moment when a vast convulsion opposes, not so much fascism to communism, but radical imperative forms to the deep subversion which continues to pursue the emancipation of human lives.
Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille reads fascism “psychologically” through the concepts of “homogeneity” and “heterogeneity”. Homogeneity refers to everything that is useful and that is grounded in commodity production, while heterogeneity points to what is in excess of the useful, the marginalised, the impure and the pure or sacred.
Fascism, for Bataille, is a political agency that is able to seduce and marshal the heterogeneity of the working classes – not as labour-power, but as what they are beyond proletarianisation – through the fusion of two powers: military and religious; a fusion effected through the heterogeneity of imperative sovereignty, embodied in the leader.
[And if today the “national-citizens” are no longer called to 1930s military style discipline, technologies of consumption-communication offer different modes of “fusion” and control, as we are surveilled and blinded by the flickering screens of algorithmic revelation.]
Yet Bataille also holds out the possibility of a subversive heterogeneity associated with an anti-fascism no longer reducible to merely ideological opposition, but one between heterogeneous forces that seek to enslave humanity and those that struggle for its emancipation. Bataille’s essay remains retains its urgency – however demanding it can be conceptually –, which is what has motivated our desire to share it, preceded a very good introduction to the essay by John Brenkman.
The opium of the people in the present world is perhaps not so much religion as it is accepted boredom. Such a world is at the mercy, it must be known, of those who provide at least the semblance of an escape from boredom. Human life aspires to the passions, and again encounters its exigencies.
…
In a certain sense, the Popular Front meant nothing more than the revolutionaries’ abandonment of the anti-capitalist offensive; the move to the defence of antifascism; the move to the simple defence of democracy; the abandonment, at the same time, of revolutionary defeatism.
Georges Bataille, Popular Front in the Street
The times, our times, call for a heightened concern with the echoes of early 20th century fascism in contemporary forms of authoritarian government. We will continue in our efforts to map this political reality through past and contemporary writers. And on this occasion, with the impetus of the Lundi Matin collective, we return to Georges Bataille‘s reflections on fascism, and more precisely, to his article on the French Popular Front of 1936, entitled “Popular Front in the Street”.
With France’s recent parliamentary elections (30/06 and 07/07), a New Popular Front emerged as the largest political block in the assembly, but without the sufficient number of parliamentary seats to form a majority based government. And while the politicians haggle over the distribution power, those who voted for the New Popular Front, the “people of the left” seem to have been forgotten. And it is with this in the background that Bataille still speaks to us.
Jean Lemaire (1598-1659), Daedalus sculpting a wooden cow for Queen Pasiphae
In the myth of Pasiphae, the woman who has an artificial cow built by Daedalus in order to mate with a bull, it is legitimate to see a paradigm of technology. In this perspective, technology appears as the device through which man tries to attain – or re-attain – animality. But this is precisely the risk that humanity runs today through technological hypertrophy. Artificial intelligence, to which technology seems to want to entrust its extreme consequence, aims to produce an intelligence that, like animal instinct, functions by itself, so to speak, without the intervention of a thinking subject. It is the Daedalic cow through which human intelligence believes it can happily mate with the instinct of the bull, becoming or becoming again, an animal. And it is not surprising that from this union a monstrous being is born, with a human body and a bull’s head, the Minotaur, who is locked in a labyrinth and fed with human flesh.
It would seem like a heavy-handed metaphor if it weren’t our actual reality. A doddering patriarch, representing the collapsing centrist political project, refuses to step aside even as it becomes certain that he faces defeat at the hands of an even more authoritarian autocrat. This encapsulates the global prospects for democracy today.
It’s not a particular politician that has grown senile, but an entire political system.
In 2018, when we described centrist politics as a race to the bottom dooming its adherents to advocate for “the second worst of all possible evils,” it seemed like hyperbole. Now even the most faithful centrist journalists acknowledge that this is indeed occurring.
The Russian autocrat is not crazy, war is simply a necessity for his power and economic system
Shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Putin outlined five goals for his war: Ukraine’s non-alignment with NATO; a change in Ukraine’s government; a severe limitation of Ukraine’s defence capacity; the seizure of Ukrainian territory (with international recognition); and the lifting of Western sanctions on Russia.
From Freedom News (10/07/2024), we share a memorial piece by Maurice Schuhmann dedicated to the life and work of the anarchist Erich Mühsam. We follow this with what is perhaps his most important essay: The Liberation of Society from the State: What is Communist Anarchism? (1932).
The anarchist author and poet, murdered by the Nazis on July 10, 1934, is now part of Germany’s literary canon
“Anarchist Executes Himself” was the headline of a Nazi propaganda paper on July 10, 1934. The “anarchist” in question was the German-Jewish writer Erich Mühsam, and the alleged suicide was easy to see through as National Socialist staging. Shortly before, he had been told that he should commit suicide, or else it would be taken care of. It happened on the night of July 9 or 10 in Oranienburg concentration camp, where he was imprisoned after the Reichstag fire. He was found hung in his cell. The fact that it was murder, and not suicide, has been established beyond doubt.
Question : One thing I’m interested in is the evolution of Rassemblement National itself. There are parts of the “catastrophist” left that want to depict it as basically a carbon copy of Mussolini and Hitler, and that if it wins then France will become a dictatorship. This then leads to political support to anyone who opposes them.
Whether the Rassemblement national (RN) has changed is a subject of debate on the left. Is it a sincere change in substance, or merely an opportunistic one, designed to increase its electorate?
For James C. Scott (1936-2024)
… state-ness is not a binary, where something is a state or not a state, but it’s a continuum. So, things that are more a state or less a state. […] My argument would be that when the state has done something emancipatory, e.g. citizenship, it is almost always done with a pistol at its temple. That is to say it has created new rights when it was threatened in a vital way. […] I think the state is with us as a ruling institution for the foreseeable future. The question is, can we domesticate that state, or will it domesticate us?
“Can we domesticate the state or will it domesticate us?” — James C. Scott Interview, In Pursuit of Development, 2021
In 2014 – and still in the warmth of the “Arab spring” and multiple “occupy” movements -, we posted a review of James C. Scott’s then recently published Two Cheers for Anarchism (Princeton University Press, 2012). The later was a kind of self-refection by Scott on his own politics, distilled from many years of anthropological work on “vernacular” resistance to State authorities by non-state actors.
At the time – and still today -, we consider Scott’s intellectual work of enormous importance and as we look back on it, we can only mourn his death, but also express our gratitude for his commitment to sharing so many of the stories of those who refused and created outside state power.
In our review of 2014, we criticised Scott’s Two Cheers (and it is “two cheers”, not “three“) for not taking his anarchism further, for not considering the possibility that his conceptual-empirical opposition between “vernacular” (the space of anarchist “infrapolitics”) and “official” spaces and practices could itself be overcome by a more radical (“anarchist”) transformation of society, creating thereby, in other words, a free, non-hierarchical, self-managed society.
Today, we are perhaps less sanguine about this issue, for if we imagine “anarchism” in the way that Scott did, then it becomes a permanent possibility and necessity against any emergent “official” politics. And if the latter is a constant risk – even after an “anarchist revolution”, then “anarchist” politics is the ever constant and lucid gesture of refusal.
Is this then no longer anarchism? We leave the question to ideological puritans.
In memory and celebration of James C. Scott’s life and work, we republish our review of his essay, Two Cheers for Anarchism.
This is then followed by internet sources where his work may be found, to interviews and a selection of video recorded lectures and interviews.
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