A FEW WORDS:
Thoughts on Alienation
Alienation is a
concept frequently talked about in anarchist circles. Clearly, domination and
exploitation can only develop in conjunction with alienation, so such
discussion is important. But it is necessary to focus this discussion in order
to make it useful to the anarchist project of destroying the present order and creating
new ways of living.
I have always said
that the revolt against the present order of things originates in the
individual desire to create one's life as one sees fit. This does not
contradict the necessity for class struggle or the desire for communism, but
rather provides a basis for clarifying the methods for carrying out this
revolutionary project. In terms of the present matter, it provides a basis for
understanding alienation and it s relationship to domination and exploitation.
When I talk about
alienation, I am talking about a social process through which the institutions
of social reproduction wrest our creative energy, our capacity to determine the
conditions of our existence from us, placing their alienated form (not just as
labor power, but as social roles of all sorts as well) at the service of the
ruling order. This social process divides society into classes-the exploited
whose capacity to create their lives as they see fit has been taken from them
and the exploiters who benefit from this separation by accumulating and
controlling the alienated energy in order to reproduce the current society and
their own role as its rulers. The struggle of the exploited against the
exploiting class thus finds its aim and method in the individual's struggle to
realize herself by reappropriating her creative energy, his capacity to
determine his life as she sees fit. This struggle must ultimately become
collective, but there is no need to wait for the rising of the multitudes in
order to begin.
But I often hear
the word alienation used in a much more general way. One hears of our
alienation from nature, from others and from ourselves. These forms of
alienation are not without their basis. When our capacity to determine the
conditions of our own existence is taken from us, we become dependent on the
institutions of domination. This situation forces us to separate from
environments that are not controlled, environments that have not been
institutionalized, and frequently places us into adversarial relationships with
these environments. It also forces us to carry out activities that have no
immediate relationship to our needs, desires and passions and to enter into
relationships the content of which has been determined beforehand by the
requirements of the social order.
But often when
these latter forms of alienation are discussed, their social basis is
forgotten. Rather than finding their source in the alienation of the
individual's creative capacities for living which puts them into the service of
the dominant social order, these forms are instead traced to the alleged
alienation of the individual from a greater whole, an imagined original unity.
This idealist version of alienation moves it from the social into the
metaphysical. In this form, it may be interesting on a philosophical level, but
offers little or nothing for the development of an insurrectional anarchist
theory and practice. In fact, it could prove detrimental, making concepts so
murky that clarity gets lost.
Consider, for
example, the way some primitivists use the word "civilization". This enemy that
we are to destroy becomes as nebulous as the original Oneness, Wild Nature or
whatever other reified concept one may use to idealize and unify the
uncivilized state. The struggle then ceases to be social in nature and begins
to take on mystical and psychological connotations. One must free oneself of
the civilized mindset in order to reconnect with the Oneness of Wild Nature.
Revolution is seen as a return to a past Eden rather than a rupture with the
present aimed at the liberation from all constraints and the opening of
possibilities.
But civilization
is not essentially a mindset, a particular ideological system or a fall from
Eden. It is something far more concrete: an ensemble of intertwined
institutions-the state, the economy, technological systems, religion, the
family, the city, etc.-that work together to precisely to predetermine the
conditions under which we exist, thus alienating our capacity to determine our
own lives, producing and reproducing social relations of domination and
exploitation. Thus, the revolutionary destruction of civilization would simply
be the revolutionary destruction of the institutions through which domination
and exploitation are maintained. It would not be a return to a supposed Eden or
some alleged original Oneness of being. In fact, it would offer no guarantees.
It would simply put the capacity to determine our lives back into our own
hands-from there it would be up to us to decide what we would do with it.
Naturalizing alienation, casting it in a metaphysical form as the disintegration of an original Oneness, with the consequent vision of a return to an Eden that never was, offers nothing to the insurrectional project. When we recognize that the fundamental form of alienation with which we have to contend is the theft of our capacity to create our live as we desire, it becomes clear that our struggle itself must be where we begin to steal it back by refusing every attempt to institutionalize the struggle, by acting directly and autonomously to destroy the present social order.