Power and anti-power

Straight after publishing my last rather downbeat note, I read Sabu Kohso/Liaisons' article "Radiation, Pandemic, Insurrection" in The New Inquiry. It's what I needed. Sabu Kohso explores the meaning of and links between Japan's triple-disaster a decade (oh my god is it that long?) ago – the earthquake, tsunami, and finally the nuclear explosion in Fukushima – the COVID-19 pandemic, and the various insurrections across the planet that have inspired and sparked off each other, but are centred at least in the English-speaking world on the pent up rage of Black America.

There is so much in this piece, I will need to go back and read it again, and perhaps again and again. A powerful observation about what is so unnerving about the USA:

Rather than a nation-state that has reached the stage in which imperialist expansion is compelled by internal contradiction – like the Third Reich or the Japanese Empire (up until the end of the Second World War) – America is instead an empire that always desires to become the World itself, and yet pretends to be a nation.

There are more paragraphs that made me sit up with a jolt, Sabu pithily describing my own state of mind with all it's overlaying, contradictory, and strong emotions. But whilst it's nice to be validated, you know I'm looking for more than that right now. I want some lessons, something I can cling to for guidance in our long, slow rolling state of disaster.

What do radiation and the pandemic reveal? They paradoxically tell us something essential by way of what they destroy. They speak to us in the negative. In the philosophical sense, catastrophe is a message or an education – a lesson about its own origin as an event that takes place in the boundary between what humans do consciously and their unconscious effects on the planetary body. Radiation teaches us the indispensability of the rapport between people and land, by giving a fatal blow to it. The pandemic demonstrates the necessity of physical interaction among bodies, by making it hazardous. Their ultimate message is that we have nothing if not for these two relationalities.

I realised last week that my "politics" is indeed anarchist, despite protestations to the contrary. I've probably moved more that way in recent years, but my reluctance to describe myself that way has been more to do with my own pre-conceptions about what anarchists are like. I've listened to and read works about and by various left-liberationists in the last few years and, well, they sound awfully like the way I see the world, or want to see it. The irony of anarchism is that for it to actually work in practice there needs to be a lot of process and agreement. The aspect of anarchism I'm repelled by is something that id definitely around in "anarchist" circles but is more akin to individualistic libertarianism – the sort that smashes the windows of local cafés, and paints slogans over the top of bus timetables.

I also – and I admit this is probably fueled by my physically weak stature and conflict-avoidant nature – really don't see much to be gained from "street battles" and picking physical fights with cops. They are always going to be more powerful, more violent, and more deadly. They're going to win almost every time. And if you beat them, what do you get? Most probably a smouldering city and a very brief reprieve before an army with bigger guns comes in to wipe you out with a great deal less hesitancy. Ask the Paris Communards. So the whole "get buff so you can fight cops" anarchist strain is amusing but seems a bit absurd.

I'm also still not quite sure that capital-A Anarchism is really enough, and there's plenty to explore around the connections and differences between anarchism – a philosophy based on nineteenth century European ideas and deeply connected to industrial living – and more traditional/Indigenous ways of living. It certainly doesn't seem correct to describe the Indigenous societies of Australia or the Americas as "anarchist". I don't want to be one of those people who only have one book, but Tyson Yunkaporta helped me to see a lot of this, with his writing about The Law and the law. It takes a huge amount of effort to build worlds where the wielding of non-consensual power is difficult. It takes – this is the hard thing to wrap our heads around when we live in a hierarchical, oppressive society – consensually agreed rules and processes. Elinor Ostrom's work on Commons management explained this, and the "😲" reaction to her work shows how shockingly far we've moved from where we need to be: it's hard even to imagine.

So what do we do with all this?

Sabu Kohso has some advice:

In the original sense, the state is ahistorical. It creates various, possible forms of “independence,” but not autonomy...

The age when national independence created a horizon for liberation is over. Today, the autonomy of the people of the world is achieved more through creating enclaves of counter-power inside and across national territories.

And so we keep cycling back, in a big loop, or spiral. My main hesitancy with this idea, which I hear a lot lately, is "counter-power". Perhaps what I want to explore soon is the possibility of "anti-power", in the same sense as "anti-matter". A Black Hole to suck away power, instead of a Black Bloc of counter-power.

=> Radiation, Pandemic, Insurrection