By Uri Gordon

Anarchist practices have had an unquestionable presence in the cycle of resistance that recently swept from Tunis to Madrid to New York. Far from a novelty, the political toolbox of seizing public space, nonviolent disruption and anti-authoritarian organizing arrived on the scene practically ready-made, having been synthesized over the previous decade of anti-capitalist resistance out of the legacies of yet earlier convergences between radical forms of feminism, anti-militarism, environmentalism and anti-fascism, to name a few. Perhaps the most evident anarchist influence that has carried over from the alter-globalization movement is the commitment to horizontal organizing. While during the latter protest wave anarchists had to constantly resist attempts by NGOs and Leninst groups to squeeze the emergent grassroots militancy into formal top-down structures (with whatever semblance of electoral democracy), in the recent wave non-hierarchical organizing was the widely-accepted default.

Yet there was at least one “innovation”, if it is worth calling that, which made its first appearance in the last cycle: the deployment of anarchist means towards reformist ends. As much as movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Spanish Indignados made use of the abovementioned tactical toolbox, this was more often than not often geared towards a politics of demand towards governments, protesting policies that pass onto the public the costs of a crisis created – as the argument ran – by an under-regulated financial sector.[1] With some notable exceptions (including, perhaps most prominently, Occupy Oakland[2]), much of the civil resistance in Western Europe and North America saw the root causes of the crisis in terms of a corruption of democratic government by corporate interests and a lack of public influence on decision-making. To portray this as a retreat from previous, more explicitly revolutionary stances would be a mistake. What in fact happened was a rebooting of social struggle, with anarchist and other veterans failing to carry over the radicalism of the alter-globalization cycle into a new and much wider movement. On the one hand, the struggles of the early 10s represented an intensification of social conflict, with the previous cycle’s focus on the injustice of IMF and WTO policies towards the poorer world turning inwards now that the effects of the same policies had come home to roost in the core capitalist countries. On the other hand, the calls for thorough transformation heard from those employing the most direct and decentralist forms of organizing and action were replaced by much meeker calls for a re-establishment of the welfare state or, even less, an end to plutocratic corruption.

Indeed, while movements associated with the Occupy banner and their sister movements worldwide often adopted quintessentially anarchistic modes of organizing – non-hierarchical, decentralized, consensus-based, and mindful of the need to overcome enactments of domination among the participants – their outward demands have remained far removed from the implications of their own internal political process. While I cannot claim to have conducted an exhaustive multilingual survey, a few examples should at least demonstrate this hypothesis. The Lisbon Indignados, for instance, provide on their website a detailed guide to popular assemblies which is explicitly anchored in an anarchist ethos, with equality of all participants and consensus decisions that are non-binding on those who disagree. Yet in stark contrast, their Manifesto contains demands for gradual establishment of participatory democracy within the state framework, electoral law reform, harsher punishment of political corruption, transparency in all acts of state, and effective regulation of financial institutions.[3] It seems that all the commitment to horizontalism in terms of internal decision-making is not transposed into a vision that wold see such horizontalism generalized to the running of society as a whole.

Similarly, the #M25 Manifesto, from Barcelona, on the one hand heaps scorn on the “untouchable oligarchy” that profits from the crisis with the complicity of “all political forces represented in the parliament”, and declares the problem so large and deeply-rooted that “no solution will be founded in reforms based in the existing political system”. At the same time it demands reforms that assume many features of the existing system, such as a moratorium on national debt, abolition of all cuts to the welfare state, tax reform, abolition of the fiscal amnesty, efficient controls on the performance of public officials, socialization of housing owned by banks, and the creation of new and sustainable jobs. Alongside the dismissal of the entire government, the Manifesto demands a new constitution created in a “transparent and democratic way” with the “participation of the whole community of citizens” and “the design of a new electoral process, in order to really represent the people’s will”.[4] The contradiction here is glaring: on the one hand thorough disillusionment with the state, and on the other hand a belief that it can somehow be reformed to contain participatory democracy.

While anarchists surely have no expectation that any given cycle of protest will grow and radicalise uncontrollably towards a global revolution, I would venture to say that they have come to see protest waves as important moments of concentration that could have a lasting residue in social movement memory. In such a context, anarchists have come to expect that their interventions can establish not only practices but also political content that will carry over from one cycle to another. However, this hoped-for ratchet effect has only partially manifested itself. We find that anarchists have been far less successful in influencing the content rather than form of recent resistance.

The most immediate example of this comes from Occupy Wall Street itself, where explicitly anarchist initiative still failed to sway the movement’s content. The first call for this convergence, issued by Adbusters magazine, was squarely within the liberal-regulatory framework, demanding “that Barack Obama ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington”.[5] This line was not, however, accepted by the group who came together to actually organize the event. Its own call to action expressed a much more sober view of the relationship between state and corporations:

Money, it has been said, has taken over politics. In truth, we say, money has always been part of the capitalist political system. A system based on the existence of have and have nots, where inequality is inherent to the system, will inevitably lead to a situation where the haves find a way to rule, whether by the sword or by the dollar…If you agree that state and corporation are merely two sides of the same oppressive power structure then you might be one of us.[6]

Yet hardly two weeks had passed and the General Assembly of the occupation, now with much wider participation, reverted to a stance much closer to the initial one:

a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth…no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments.[7]

Conversations with participants in OWS indicate that this reversion to reformism was at the same time in contradiction to the implications of internal horizontality and its result. For most participants this was – as with the alter-globalization movement – the first experience of mass political mobilization. Lacking the healthy cynicism garnered from previous struggles, newly-empowered protesters seek immediate and tangible victories, and as products of a statist education they naturally expect this to come from their elected officials. Add to this pressure from bandwagoneering journalists, unionists and politicians who call for the movement to coalesce around clear demands (a Tobin tax, more or different regulation, institutions to replace the IMF/WTO/World Bank, or an electoral campaign), and the appeal of reformist agendas becomes very powerful. Once this content is cast into the deliberately open and inclusive political space created by anarchists, it tends to move the collective process towards its lowest common denominator, with anarchists often allowing this to take place since they realize the participants must sow and reap their own disillusionment.

It was to the abovementioned about-face that the CrimethInc. group responded with their open letter to the Occupy encampments, stressing that

No government—that is to say, no centralized power—will ever willingly put the needs of common people before the needs of the powerful. It’s naïve to hope for this. The center of gravity in this movement has to be our freedom and autonomy, and the mutual aid that can sustain those—not the desire for an “accountable” centralized power. No such thing has ever existed…the important thing is not just to make demands upon our rulers, but to build up the power to realize our demands ourselves.[8]

Yet such appeals are not sufficient. What is self-evident to seasoned anarchists is not so to others. To take social struggle beyond the reformism that is so easily defused with a combination of empty rhetoric, unfulfilled promises and repressive violence, anarchists must at a minimum be able to counter expectations from the state in in terms that are both convincing and nuanced. In what follows, I begin by exposing what I would argue is an unsatisfying level of clarity and detail in contemporary anarchist movement critiques of the state, focusing on the empirical or analytical, rather than ethical or normative, dimension of the critique. I then argue that the vagueness observed in these utterances is compounded by, and at least in part the result of, a more general indeterminacy over the role of the state, created by mutually contradictory trends that pull both away from and back towards the state as a central object for anarchist concerns. I then offer an initial approach to an anarchist theory of the state that aims to reconcile these opposing trends, by conceptualizing it as a nexus through which various regimes of inequality are rationalized and controlled. In doing this I draw on three recent contributions that afford a more rigorous view than the movement-based utterances observed earlier. Finally, I consider some consequences of the initial approach in regard to prospective strategies of resistance, with particular reference to the possibility of state fragmentation and decline in a peak-everything world.

In approaching contemporary anarchist critiques of the state, one is immediately confronted with a seeming paradox: while all anarchists reject the state as an institution and work towards its abolition, there is very little in anarchist literature to suggest a distinct anarchist analysis of the state and its workings. Overall, contemporary anarchist movement expression fails to provide a clear and detailed account of what the state actually is, how it operates, and what may be expected of it in the future. Even terse and partial accounts are surprisingly rare among the countless action reports, campaign calls for solidarity and intermural debates. Although I am open to being contradicted, my impression is that there is precious little in contemporary anarchist movement output that constitutes state theory. In relation to the state, as to other features of society that they seek to abolish, anarchists seem content to elaborate an ethical position while leaving the analytical work to others. This raises a preliminary question: Do anarchists even require their own distinctive theory of the state? After all, in matters relating to the multiple systems of domination to which they object, anarchists seem all to content to be magpies, incorporating those insights of feminists, black and indigenous liberation activists, LGBT militants and so on which most closely chime with their own values. Yet I would like to argue that the case of the state is different. Here we are no longer dealing with a system that oppresses only a section of humanity, where anarchists’ solidarity with those who directly struggle against their own oppression leads them to privilege those agents’ analysis. The state is ubiquitous. It is not a system of domination in the same way that patriarchy, racism or homophobia are. It is, instead, the one area where anarchists cannot appeal to subsidiarity but must instead argue as anarchists and provide an analysis that is truly their own.

In approaching such extant efforts, it is certainly impossible to provide anything like a representative account that can confidently claim to gauge the relative importance or prevalence of various trends and tendencies. Unlike the population of a country, the international anarchist movement is not capable of being rendered into a representative sample. The best one can do is count on one’s level of rootedness in movement networks and ability to tell the difference between expressions that have a broad base, and the esoteric musings of individuals which have no connection to the wider movement. I would like to begin, quite plausibly, with those semi-doctrinal statements emanating from groups associated with the especifist current.[9] These are the only statements of which it can be said with any confidence that they are to any degree representative of the relatively large groups that have formulated them. Here then, is a quote from the core theoretical document of the Federação Anarquista do Rio de Janeiro (FARJ), Social Anarchism and Organization.

We consider the state the set of political powers of a nation [o conjunto de poderes políticos de uma nação], that takes shape by means of “political, legislative, judicial, military and financial institutions etc.” [the quote is from Malatesta’s Anarchy, UG]; and, in this way, the state is broader than the government. The state, since its inception in antiquity…has always been an instrument for perpetuating inequality and a liberty-exterminating element, whatever the existing mode of production.[10]

This definition raises a serious difficulty from the very outset. The “nation” is invoked here as a logically-antecedent entity, to which belong the powers whose conjunction by institutional means is defined as the state. Yet the term “nation” is neither problematized nor even mentioned anywhere else in the entire document. The authors’ evident commitment to anarchist principles rules out the possibility that they have in mind the “nation” in the sense invoked by nationalists, a more or less homogeneous and historically-continuous identity which somehow precedes the state rather than being manufactured by it.[11] But then the term is either left empty of content, which leaves us with no clear understanding of whose powers are conjoined in the state; or else the term may be taken simply to refer to a territorial unit, in which case the terms “nation” and “state” are in fact synonymous and the definition is lost to circularity. For a statement born of an exhaustive collective process, this is surprisingly careless wording.

Further, the FARJ statement regards the state as an instrument, more specifically as an instrument of the capitalist ruling class. The state is a “strong pillar of capitalism” and in all effect subservient to its long-term interests:

The state extrapolates the political ambit [?] and functions as an economic agent of capitalism…In the course of the historical process…A state that clearly defends the position of the capitalists could intensify class struggle and there is therefore nothing better, from the capitalists’ point of view, than to give it an aspect of neutrality. Giving it the appearance of an independent – or even autonomous – organism in relation to the ruling class or to capitalism itself…As with representative democracy, measures that improve conditions for workers always function, for the state, as an ideological tool to pass off this idea of neutrality, independence and autonomy…[yet] the state, as a strong pillar of capitalism, seeks to sustain it and, if capitalism is a system of exploitation and domination, the state cannot do anything else but sustain the class relations that exist in its midst.

On this formulation, the autonomy of the state is not even partial but simply illusory. The state is an instrumental mechanism for class dominance, and its actions are reduced to a mere service of capital. There are two problems with this account. The first is that it fails to provide an adequate foundation for explaining the usurpation of one ruling class by another, especially in cases such as the Russian Revolution where capitalism had yet to mature. If the state is an “economic agent of capitalism”, not circumstantially but fundamentally, then it remains unclear how it could also be the agent of a bureaucratic ruling class composed not of capitalists but of party functionaries. Adopting an analysis of the Soviet system as state capitalism does not solve the problem but only makes it more pronounced, since such an account presents the state in a generative relationship towards capital rather than vice versa. Secondly, the FARJ doctrine does not provide an explanation of how the state relates to other forms of domination and oppression not based on class, such as patriarchy and racism. While these could theoretically be reduced to phenomena auxiliary to a foundational class oppression, this would render anarchist analysis undistinguishable from libertarian forms of Marxism. Perhaps anarchists can do better.

A similar account is found in a recent blog post by Seattle activist Dave Fryett, responding to a liberal call for Occupy activists to work with the Democratic party:

We do not seek merely the end of the police state, but the end of the state altogether… Capitalism has wrought a society remorselessly divided into the few rich and the great many poor. It is the raison d’etre of the state to perpetuate this inequality. The state exists to suppress democracy as the great mass of people would never willingly accept the pitiless economic polarization under which we are compelled to live. In its entirety, the state is the enforcement apparatus of ruling class power. It cannot be reformed, it has to go, as does the power behind it.[12]

Another Platformist group, the South African Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front, hits closer to the mark in an official position statement when asserting that “the State is not simply the tool of economic interests, but a structure of domination in its own right and with its own dynamics” and that one of its two main imperatives (alongside safeguarding the process of capital accumulation) is “to preserve its domination over society” – in defence of a ruling class composed of not only the capitalists “but also the generals, the politicians and the top civil servants”.[13] In insisting that the state is both dependent on capitalism and partially autonomous towards it, this statement more closely approaches what could qualify as a full-blooded anarchist account in which the state has independent status. Still, we are left without a detailed account of the internal workings of the state: the ZACF’s pithy account still presents the state monolithically, and is as silent as the FARJ concerning forms of domination that could be conceived in other than class terms.

These two contradictory positions – the autonomy of the state and its subservience to capital – are present throughout the history of anarchist expression. The Anarchist FAQ, in an attempt to synthesize the anarchist canon into a self-consistent whole, ends up presenting them unproblematically alongside one another. On the one hand,

the “essence of government” is that “it is a thing apart, developing its own interests” and so is “an institution existing for its own sake” [Voltairine de Cleyre]…”a highly complex state machine…leads to the formation of a class especially concerned with state management, which, using its acquired experience, begins to deceive the rest for its personal advantage.”…the “State has been, and still is, the main pillar and the creator, direct and indirect, of Capitalism and its powers over the masses.” [Kropotkin]…while “a special class (government) which, provided with the necessary means of repression, exists to legalise and protect the owning class from the demands of the workers…it uses the powers at its disposal to create privileges for itself and to subject, if it can, the owning class itself as well.” [Malatesta].

On the other hand,

the state is basically “the property owners’ gendarme” [Malatesta]…[it] is “the political expression of the economic structure” of society [Nicholas Walter]… It represents the essential coercive mechanisms by which capitalism and the authority relations associated with private property are sustained……it is the primary function of the state to uphold [class] domination…”the mission of all governments…is to protect and maintain by force the…privileges of the possessing classes.” [Kropotkin]…the state machine remains a tool by which the few can enrich themselves at the expense of the many.[14]

I would like to argue that the tension between these two positions in today’s anarchist discourse is heightened by two opposing trends: on the one hand a centrifugal trend that draws attention away from forms of power located specifically in the state, and thus leads to accounts that reduce its centrality; and a centripetal trend that draws attention directly to the state, and maintains its centrality.

One aspect of the centrifugal trend has to do with the neoliberal economic reconstruction of the past decades. The apparent retreat of the state from its previous role as an economic actor – through financial deregulation, the removal of tariffs, privatization of state-owned industries and public services, and cuts in social spending – all create the impression that the role of the state in society is diminishing, and that where it was once possible to associate it with aspects of control and injustice, these are now being taken over by private interests. Another aspect is internal to anarchist thought, namely the postanarchist emphasis on the ontological indeterminacy and dislocation of power. This account seeks to move away from what Todd May calls a “strategical” account of power to a “tactical” one. The former “is engaged in a project that it regards as the centre of political universe…all problems can be reduced to the basic one …a central problematic within the purview of which all injustices can be accounted for”. The latter, as embodied in the works of poststructuralist writers including Foucault, Deleuze and Lyotard, argues that “there is no centre within which power is to be located…There are many different sites from which it arises, and there is an interplay among these”. (May 1994:11). While there are crucial intersections around which power “conglomerates”, it does not originate in these points. The postanarchist project is, at least in part, concerned with taking anarchism away from a strategical view which imagines the state as a pivotal locus of power and therefore a primary target for revolutionary attack, to a “tactical” account that eschews the belief in any punctum archimedis for social analysis and intervention, instead viewing power as located in multiple institutions and in the interstices of social interaction, in cultural expectations and in conceptions of the self.

The centripetal trend points in the opposite direction. Far from receding or becoming dislocated, state power is more relevant than ever and still maintains a privileged – though perhaps not ultimate – position in terms of the generation and maintenance of social hierarchy. This trend is generated by two aspects of its own. First there is an evident increase in nominally-democratic states’ use of repression and surveillance, from biometric databases and wiretapping to increasingly violent crowd control and extra-judicial executions at home and abroad. Measures justified in the name of defence against jihadist terrorism very quickly bled over to the repression of animal rights groups, environmentalists, human rights defenders, minority nationalists and anarchists. An appreciation of this aspect is expressed in a recent communique from Anonymous/Lulzsec, which has by now completed its transformation from a single-issue anti-Scientology outfit to a network with unmistakable anarchist affinities:

It’s the old double standard that has been around since the 80’s. Govt Agencies are obsessed with witchhunts against hackers worldwide, whilst they also recruit hackers to carry out their own political agendas…You are forbidden to outsmart the system, to defy it, to work around it. In short, while you may hack for the status quo, you are forbidden to hack the status quo. Just do what you’re told. Don’t worry about dirty geopolitical games, that’s business for the elite…Just dance along, hackers. Otherwise… well…

Second, and in obvious contradiction to the appearance of neoliberal retreat, Western governments’ fiscal activism in the wake of the financial crisis, including bank bail-outs and austerity measures, point to the state as a more interventionist and powerful entity than the centrifugal trend alone would suggest. Nor is this a new development. As Noam Chomsky emphasizes that “the dynamic state sector was and remained a primary factor in development and innovation” through procurement, subsidies, and regular bailouts. In the US this has been heavily reflected in the defense budget, and more lately in the life sciences and information technology sectors. As a counter-argument to semblance of state retreat and deregulation, Chomsky emphasizes that “the state has always been a central factor in economic development”[15] whereby the public pays the costs and takes the risks while the result is eventually privatized. Relatedly, Jason Royce Lindsey argues that

There is agency and design to the contemporary state’s declining visibility. The state is still an important institution, but this fact has become more difficult to see thanks to ideological camouflage…the state has not metastasized into society and become less relevant. Instead, the state has greatly expanded its control of society by employing surveillance and discipline at a distance. This sleight of hand allows the state to creep into…more and more areas of life. Nonetheless, the state remains an organized institution behind this colonized front.[16]

The tension between these two trends is evident in numerous contemporary utterances on the state that anarchists would find appealing. One prominent example is The Invisible Committee’s widely circulated tract The Coming Insurrection – a text that is perhaps more indebted to the French left-communist tradition than to anarchism in the strict sense, but which has nevertheless circulated widely among anarchists and found sympathy among many of them. Towards the end of the text the authors express what we have identified above as centrifugal thinking which draws attention away from the state, or any other center of power for that matter:

the end of centralized revolutions reflects the decentralization of power…Power is no longer concentrated in one point in the world; it is the world itself, its flows and its avenues, its people and its norms, its codes and its technologies. Power is the organization of the metropolis itself. It is the impeccable totality of the world of the commodity at each of its points.[17]

Yet earlier in the text, the authors offer a different statement which is preceded by another one which accords much more importance to the state, not only as an instrument of repression but as a formative force on individual consciousness:

In France, civilization is inseparable from the state. The older and more powerful the state, the less it is a superstructure or exoskeleton of a society and the more it constitutes the subjectivities that people it. The French state is the very texture of French subjectivities, the form assumed by the centuries-old castration of its subjects.

While The Invisible Committee probably favours evocative language over analytical precision, a contemporary anarchist theory of the state would need to somehow respond to both trends. It thus faces two central challenges:

• To account for the relationship between state and capital in a way that does not reduce the former to an auxiliary of the latter.

• To account for the relationship between state power and forms of domination such as patriarchy and racism which does not reduce them to epiphenomena of class.

As we have seen above, there do exist anarchist utterances which construct the state as an autonomous entity in its own right, irreducible to a tool of capital. Saul Newman elaborates on this view:

Oppression and despotism exist, then, in the very structure and symbolic location of the state: in the principle of sovereignty that lies at its heart. The state, in other words, constitutes its own locus of power: it is not merely a derivative of class power. The state has its own specific logic, its own momentum, its own priorities: these are often beyond the control of the ruling class and do not necessarily reflect economic relations.[18]

There are, however, a few problems with Newman’s account. To begin with, he mistakenly attributes this account it to anarchism as such, ignoring the reductive-instrumental view which is also, as we have seen, present in the tradition. Secondly, Newman’s phrasing is contradictory: if the state’s priorities are “beyond the control of the ruling class” then the latter hardly rules. What he should have said that they are beyond the control of the capitalist class. Finally, Newman goes perhaps too far in reversing the state-capital relation such that “the political forces of the state actually determine and select specific relations of production…that are functional for the state, allowing the development of the means of coercion required by the state”. This is not a position that Newman argues for in any detail, but it is inspired by Alan Carter’s “analytical anarchism” – an attempt to mirror the analytical Marxism of G. A. Cohen, John Roemer and others by offering an account of political forces and relations alongside economic ones.[19] In Carter scheme, it is the structure of political relations which selects economic relations that are functional for it, in producing the surplus that is necessary for the development of political forces (e.g. the military and police that depend on taxation).

This is, on its face, an attractive account for anarchists. First, because its insistence on the primacy of the state and its generative stance towards capital provides the strongest possible argument against both parliamentarism and vanguardism. Secondly, because it has the appearance of a full-blooded anarchist account, that is, one rooted independently in the state and thus finally free from its inferiority towards Marxist analysis.

However, there remains a problem with this account, in that it circumscribes our understanding of social relations – political forces and relations are narrowly conceived in terms of the state, leaving out the many forms of extra-legal domination that anarchists would also need to theorize in order to combat. While it is indeed impossible to explain the emergence of the first form of surplus economy – slavery – without positing an earlier coercive apparatus capable of enslaving, it would be more difficult to explain, say, gender domination as the product of the state, certainly not in its modern form. So while this account does do some work for us in extracting the state from the instrumental account which sees it as subservient to capital, we still need a wider account that contextualizes the state within a broader intersectional theory.

Let me begin by approaching this second challenge by looking at Gustav Landauer’s famous utterance on the state:

One can throw away a chair and destroy a pane of glass; but…[only] idle talkers…regard the state as such a thing or as a fetish that one can smash in order to destroy it. The state is a condition, a certain relationship among human beings, a mode of behavior between men; 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 and society

Like the proverbial elephant in the room, what is most striking about this statement often goes unnoticed, namely the fact that Landauer’s analysis is not about the state in any narrow or institutionally-circumscribed sense of the term. Instead, Landauer is pointing to relations of domination beyond the state and outside its specific institutional boundaries. What does it mean that “we are the state”? When a man beats his wife he is not being the state. He is being patriarchy, sexism, gendered domination – call it what you will, but it is quite distinct from the state. The state, at least the liberal state, would at least in principle censure such behaviour, educate against it, and outlaw it – even if this is enforced all too rarely. Likewise, when football fans emit monkey howls as a player of African origins comes on the pitch, they are not “being the state”: they are expressing a form of racism that is doubtlessly outside the state, whatever other forms of institutional discrimination against people of African origin the latter may preserve.

What Landauer is doing in this phrase is to preserve the term “state” as a rhetorical device, since his audience presumably sees it as the primary object of resistance, but in order to argue that liberation cannot be realized through the destruction of things he then expands the meaning of the term state, so much that it no longer conforms to any reasonable understanding of the term. What Landauer ends up referring to under the heading “state” is in fact domination – the entire ensemble of social relations characterised by the power of one person, group or institution over another. And domination, indeed, is not a thing or a fetish. It is dyed into the fabric of everyday social relations, cultural grammars, habits of thinking and mutual expectations. But the state, to use the term in a narrower and more normal sense of the term, is in no such way diffuse. On the contrary, it does reside in a concrete set of institutions, persons and places.

We just said that a wife-beater or racist Ultra is not “being the state”. But it is precisely by counterexample to these that we can approach a more concrete understanding of what it does mean to be the state. I think it is reasonable to maintain, for example, that where the state is not embodied and enacted by acts that it deems illegal, it is so by its actual employees. A soldier standing at a checkpoint, a Consulate official considering a visa application, a judge proclaiming a prison sentence – these individuals are “being the state” in a way quite distinct from, and more specific than, what Landauer means when he says “we are the state”. On this reading the state, unlike domination or hierarchy, is a discrete body of people, buildings, weapons, information storage devices and so on, bound by certain procedures and elements of organizational culture. Concomitantly, unlike domination, the state can be abolished, at least in principle, by annihilating the roles and procedures through which individuals embody it.

We can thus begin approaching an anarchist account of the state as a polycentric but nevertheless formal nexus in which regimes of domination are actuated into enforceable policy, as well as being renegotiated and mitigated. In an unpublished manuscript, Glasberg and Shannon move towards such an account. Generalizing from Jessop’s concept of “state projects”[20] they theorise the way in which the state contributes, through its process of policy formation, to the social construction of regimes of domination outside class. Legislation, policy formation, the promulgation of directives and procedures, budget allocation, and judicial determination all act to reproduce, but sometimes also weaken or at least reconfigure, racism, patriarchy, heteronormativity and speciesism as well as class exploitation. Existing patterns in these regimes of domination create a path dependency and bias policy creation, yet there is also a possibility of at least some successful pressure by oppressed groups. On this reading, the state itself is

both an arena of struggle and an actor that, above all other actors, has the unique authority to codify social constructions into legalized norms and to enforce these in ways that shape cultural repertoires and social behaviors, but which is also subject to resistance and modification from below…State projects are thus animated by the push and pull of political forces in the claims process, producing an ongoing dialectic of policy making and implementation, as well as social practices and repertoires over time.[21]

The state, in other words, does remain a privileged node in the lattice of social forces since it is where they become condensed and actualized into enforceable policy. There are certainly also intersections outsides the state where regimes of domination are oppressions are instantiated, elaborated and/or normalized, but the coercive capacity at the end of every state project does generate a qualitative difference that anarchists should be stressing. An account of this kind also generates, as Glasberg and Shannon point out, multiple avenues for research into the specifics of various recombinations of domination regimes within the multiple institutional organs of the state, as well as their interaction with extra-state ones.

I would like to close with a more speculative note, derived from the realization that the combination of peaking oil production, runaway climate change, and devaluing speculative capital has already placed industrial civilization—and thus capitalism—on an irreversible trajectory of decay, however protracted and uneven. This realization is perhaps more widely shared among anarchists today than its prominence in their literature would indicate. In this context, I would like to draw attention to one possibility which has not been emphasized enough in my opinion, namely, that this decomposition may come under management from above and give rise to more, rather than less, oppressive social forms. There are strong indications that the more forward-thinking sections of both corporate and political and military state elites are past the point of denial about this trajectory. On this reading, current state-driven trends from the Green New Deal to fiscal austerity amount to efforts to prolong the period of manageable crisis, so as to allow hierarchical society and the state to adapt away from capitalism. While dwindling energy resources will inevitably require a transition to more local and labour-intensive forms of production, this transition will have to be a state-driven process. Such a process would aim at the creation of post-capitalist models of alienated production, which, while appropriate for a declining resource base, continue to harness human productive power to arrangements of economic imprisonment and maintain the same regimes of domination we are familiar with. If successful in the long run, such a strategy may usher in new forms of feudalism in which labour is at least partly de-commodified and replaced by serfdom—while armed elites retain privileged access to whatever energy resources remain. The role of the state will be increasingly important in such a scenario, and anarchist revolutionary strategies should adapt to it. The context is now a struggle over the nature of the social and political structures that will arise amid industrial modernity’s decaying ruins. An account of the state that appreciates its ability to work not only against the immediate interest of capital but against its very existence is helpful in constructing anarchist revolutionary imaginaries that can effectively intervene in the resistance to this trajectory.

Notes

[1] For a discussion of this in reference to the Arab Spring see Mohammed A. Bamyeh. 2013.  Anarchist Method, Liberal Intention, Authoritarian Lesson: The Arab Spring between Three Enlightenments. Constellations 2013

[2] See e.g. http://occupyoakland.org/2011/10/occupy-oakland/ and texts in Aragorn!, ed. (2012). Occupy Everything: Anarchists in the Occupy Movement 2009-2011. Oakland: LBC Books

[3] See texts at http://indignadoslisboa.net/

[4] http://takethesquare.net/2012/09/17/manifesto-25s-we-will-surround-the-congress-from-coordinadora25s/

[5] Adbusters. 2011. A shift in revolutionary tactics. Adbusters.org blog, 13 July; http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/adbusters-blog/occupywallstreet.html

[6] Occupy Wall Street. 2011. A Modest Call to Action on September 17^th.. Occupywallstreet.org, 17 September. http://occupywallst.org/article/September_Revolution/

[7] Occupy Wall Street General Assembly. 2011. Declaration of the Occupation of New York City (29 September). http://www.nycga.net/resources/documents/declaration/

[8] CrimethInc. 2011. Dear Occupiers. Crimethinc.com blog (10 July). http://www.crimethinc.com/blog/2011/10/07/dear-occupiers-a-letter-from-anarchists/

[9] Platformist groups take their inspiration from a document produced in Paris by Ukrainian anarchist exile Nestor Makhno and his comardes; see . Especifismo stands for . “”/

[10] Federação Anarquista do Rio de Janeiro. 2008/2012. Society of Domination and Exploitation: Capitalism and the State. Part 4/16 of Social Anarchism and Organization, trans. Jonathan Payn. http://anarkismo.net/article/21892

[11] Cf. Rocker, Rudolf. 1978. Nationalism and Culture. St. Paul, MN: Michael E. Coughlin. p.200

[12] Fryett, Dave. 2012. On the Appeal of Anarchism, a Response to Don Smith’s “Are Anarchists in Occupy Aiding Grover Norquist?”; http://www.opednews.com/articles/On-the-Appeal-of-Anarchism-by-Dave-Fryett-120918-538.html

[13] Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front. n.d. Class Struggle, Capitalism and the State. Johannesburg: ZACF; http://zabnew.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/class_struggle_capitalism_and_the_state_zacf.pdf

[14] Iain MacKay et al. 2010. An Anarchist FAQ, §B.2. http://www.infoshop.org/AnarchistFAQSectionB2. See texts for the references to citations form the canon.

[15] Noam Chomsky. 2009. Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours. Boston Review, September/October. http://www.chomsky.info/articles/200909–.htm

[16] Jason Lindsy (forthcoming) Concealment of the State. New York: Bloomsbury. Ch.1

[17] The Invisible Committee. The Coming Insurrection. http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/texts/the-coming-insurrection/

[18] Saul Newman. 2004. Anarchism, Marxism and the Bonapartist State. Anarchist Studies 12.1, 43

[19] Alan Carter. 2000. Analytical Anarchism: Some conceptual foundations. Political Theory 28.2: 230-253

[20] Jessop, Bob. 1990. State Theory: Putting the Capitalist State in its Place. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press.

[21] Glasberg, Davita Silfen and Deric Shannon . (Submitted). The State of State Theory: A Look at Where We’ve Been and Where We Might Go.