An anarchist review and critique of The Operating System: An Anarchist Theory of the Modern State, by Eric Laursen.

by anonymous, It’s Going Down

It feels safe to say that contemporary anarchists have a pretty poor understanding of the State. We are not alone in this: some part of this leviathan-monster is implied a thousand times a minute in “public” discourse, but the State is rarely named as such. This opacity filters down to everyday conversations in our daily lives, making opposition to this or that State policy or program easy, but opposition to the form itself particularly difficult. It can be hard to name the forest for the trees.

It’s alarming that this opacity persists even in anarchist-involved struggles. Yet here we are, able to describe why we are opposed to this or that institution by citing this or that specific example of oppression, but often struggling to declare and describe a thoroughly anti-State perspective and trajectory with our words and actions. Compared to many of our revolutionary ancestors, we’ve lost the confidence of our desire, to even be able to describe our desperate hunger for a stateless world as a justifiable end in and of itself.

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