The Psychosis of Anti-Theory

Revolutionary socialists are often accused, by the right, of having a lust for violence and a lack of concern about corruption. For example, in his debate with Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, Jordan Peterson states:

Marx had this crazy idea… a dictatorship of the proletariat [that] could come about… the first stage in… a bloody violent revolution and the overthrow of all… existing social structures.

Now, this claim is only partially correct in that revolutionary socialists do see that revolution, even violent revolution, is a likely aspect of the development of socialism [1]. However, this violence is not the goal of revolutionary socialism but rather the concern of the socialist party, and it is here where we must first distinguish that one’s concern is not one’s goal. I am concerned with ensuring that the engine in my car runs well, but my goal is to drive to my destination. Revolutionary socialism would be a total misnomer if the term ‘socialism’ didn’t gesture, somewhat weakly, at its actual goal. This goal is the dictatorship of the proletariat, the rule of the proletariat first over capitalism and then over whatever society may come after.

Here, the socialist party is revolutionary because this goal, the dictatorship of the proletariat, necessitates a revolutionary understanding of violence, production, political association, and theory. But people fixate on violence, whether they view revolution as horror or an opportunity for revenge.

For a proper revolutionary socialist movement, revolution does not serve as a moment of revenge or even mere apotheosis. Rather, revolutionary socialists concern themselves with revolution because capitalism necessarily produces crises followed by counter-revolutionary cycles that demand working-class intervention. Suppose there is no such intervention by some section of the working class during the crisis. In that case, the counter-revolutionary threat is far greater than it could be. Capitalism produces these crises with or without the implementation of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Further, any such movement out of capitalism will encounter at least the crises created by its own self-substantiation — that is, crises occur with or without our intervention, and the exit ramp from this cycle of crises that we propose also necessitates at least one crisis more. To be a socialist, to seek the dictatorship of the proletariat, one must be revolutionary as a matter of course — it is not for bloodlust or justice or love or any other high ideal that one must be revolutionary: simple enlightened pragmatism will do.

But what of this dictatorship itself? What kind of thing is it? For many opposed to the socialist movement, this dictatorship is not only not a goal but something to be opposed. If we go back to Peterson:

When you do establish a dictator of the proletariat… [and] replace the capitalist class with a minority of [proletarians], how they’re going to be chosen isn’t exactly clear in the communist manifesto, [And there’s this assumption that] none of the people who are from the proletariat class are going to be corrupted by that sudden access to power. That’s a failure conceptually on both dimensions because first of all the proletariat aren’t going to be good and when you… put people in the same position as the evil capitalists, especially if you believe that social pressure is one of the determining factors of human character, which the Marxists certainly believe, then why wouldn’t you assume that the proletariat would immediately become as or more corrupt than the capitalists?

For those opposed to proletarian rule, their opposition grows from their blindness to the currently existing order — the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie[2]. This dictatorship appears first as a kind of limitation or restriction on our political and social life. Then later, as capitalism piles capital relation on top of capital relation, it becomes a literal dictatorship by a small caste of individuals, fusing state and business interests. Libertarians will assert that imperialist capitalism is not ‘true capitalism’ but rather ‘crony capitalism’ or ‘fascist communism’; however, this final form of bourgeois dictatorship is in reality, a kind of inevitable ‘lowest energy’ state for capitalism as a whole. The structure of capital focuses more and more veto over productive capacity into the hands of a smaller and smaller group of people.

The primary understanding of revolutionary socialism is that capitalism cannot avoid its own internal dictatorships: liberalism is a kind of Utopian mirage of capitalism, its ultimate horizon so that it is never quite possible to realize the liberal dream of a free and democratic people united by self-rule alongside the ravenous, all-consuming power of the capital markets. There are places and times where this dream is almost true[3], but never completely realized. The problem is not that we are all bourgeois subjects but rather that no one can ever become a bourgeois subject under capitalism because, ironically, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie forbids it.

But what of the dictatorship of the proletariat, this oft-maligned and unhappy creature? As Peterson says, hasn’t it shown us untold horrors in the Soviet Union? Is it not also a mere mirage and chimera, an impossibility? My claim, along with many other Marxists and Hegelians, is that the impossible has more content than we realize. What is impossible does not so much never exist as always almost exist — because ‘a and not a’ must always be half true. The true problem is not when we attempt to implement a contradiction but when we are not contradictory enough. The goal is to avoid a bad infinity — a contradiction that does not move smoothly back and forth between positive and negative nodes but rather moves in a disjointed manner, consuming some important resource through its unhappy movement. Under capitalism, the important resource that capital relations consume is the future demand on human attention.

I claim that the proletariat’s dictatorship allows the possibility of a contradictory movement that does not move in a bad infinity — or which at least moves in an infinity that is less bad than our current system. This dictatorship will appear during the crises of capitalism as a revolutionary focusing of the power of workers in a small section of their class, yes, but with the purpose of laying out a framework capable of extending finally, to every person, full bourgeois right — just as the old dictatorships of the Roman republic and Grecian democracy used the most authoritarian measures to ensure the popular sovereignty of the people of both polities during crises. And what the dictatorship leaves behind is the trace of a new working class contradiction far more stable than the capitalist orbit that fluctuates production in fits and starts.

But there is a history to the notion of dictatorship that the left has not fully grappled with, a history that must examine all hitherto existing societies. Here it is useful to ‘give the devil his due.’ Past attempts at achieving the dictatorship of the proletariat have led to caste society formations and semi-permanent rule of a small minority over captive populations. Something is lacking in our understanding of proletarian rule.

To advance our understanding, I feel I must make a speculative theoretical claim about the history of class society, a claim that I trace through four kinds of ‘institutions’ that have existed during four historical epochs. My claim applies to these institutions, their trace through history, and finally, their embodiment in communist society. They are:

1. The institution of violence, or the state

2. The institution of production or the firm

3. The institution of association or politics

4. The institution of theory or religion

My claim is that in each epoch, these institutions have a given structure and that, if we follow this structure, we can begin to see the shape of a true dictatorship of the proletariat worth having and the radical possibility that this dictatorship has in the liberation of humanity.

Section 1, The Life Cycle of the State

In the past, before caste/class society, there was tribal society or what Marx termed ‘primitive communism.’ Under primitive communism, there is no state, which is to say that as far as there are ‘special groups of armed men’ — following Lenin’s definition of the state — these groups are ‘special’ in that they only concern themselves with themselves. There is no basic ‘tribal state’ we can gesture towards; rather, the people of each tribe are concerned only with defending themselves from whatever outsiders, human or animal, they may encounter. Whenever there is something a bit more like a ‘state’ — a group of people who police others — its violence always appears in a partial manner as the possibility of a fetish generated to support a concrete object in reality. We can find two good examples of tribal-state violence as a mere possibility in the seasonally bound states of the North American plains peoples and the locality-bound chief-kings of coastal tribal peoples in Louisiana.

The seasonal states of the plains tribes formed during the annual hunt. There, one tribal clade would act as a group of ‘clown-police’ whose job was to keep the peace during the hunt and punish those who might threaten the success of this significant annual event. However, this ‘state’ dissolved during the rest of the year as various tribal groupings split up. In pre-colonial Louisiana, a different order of ‘state’ existed, one composed of king-chiefs who had absolute power of life and death over tribespeople — as long as the king was within close physical proximity. Otherwise, the sacred power of the king was such that there was no notion of delegation. Thus, people mostly led their lives free of the burdensome royal power, relying upon its disciplining force only during emergencies.

Under primitive communism, there is no singular tribal state. Rather a multiplicity of pseudo-states may use violence in an obscene, partial, unjustified, or free-floating manner during emergencies or exceptional periods to fetishize (or exclude) those periods from daily life. The states of primitive communism are dead objects whose violence is a partial object, sublime to some and obscene to others, that appears and disappears as concrete circumstances demand. The tribal pseudo-state does not rule over society but defends only its particular concrete and limited interests. The violence of the tribal state only exists when it needs to exist.

This limited pseudo-state is distinct from the state under the second epochal form — caste society. In this social epoch, the state itself, in its very organization, starts as a sublime or obscene possibility (an excluded fetish) that exists to sustain a contradiction within society.

The contradiction it seeks to sustain is one of theory — namely, the theory that one group of people, the ruling caste, should have power over all others: an impossible theory[4]. In tribal society, the patchwork and disconnected nature of tribal pseudo-states imply that it is always possible to flee state violence in the worst conditions, limiting this violence. However, under caste society, the partial, image-like state uses its very symbolic character to cover enough territory in a sufficiently permanent manner to support a broad and permanent castal division.

The contradiction in theory that the state supports also impacts this same state, leading to violence that moves forward and back in a contradictory motion. However, because the state starts as an obscene-sublime partial object, the expression of this contradiction takes on many forms: gamic, administrative, and pharaonic caste societies are all possible.

In the gamic caste society, the contradiction of the state explodes outward, driven by a lack of direct administrative capability on the part of the ruling caste — they often base their power on some kind of slave relation to subaltern castes. This slave relation is ‘administered’ by specific slave drivers rather than through a unified social compact. What is more the society is gamic because one obtains a slave by winning a game of some kind, either on the battlefield, in business life, or politically. This game also generates a large body of ‘proletarians’ who are technically part of the ruling caste but otherwise own no slaves to support themselves, as was the case in ancient Rome. In this kind of society, the contradiction of the state forces it to constantly grow in the hopes of eventually providing slaves for this middle layer of persons who are part of the ruling caste — but without property. However, growing the state large enough to sate their hunger is impossible. Here, the specter of capitalism operates above and beyond the gamic slave society, making larger slavers more powerful over time (as they use their slaves to win even more slaves). As the price of labor collapses to zero, the over-accumulation of bound persons throws smaller slavers and ‘proletarians’ deeper into debt unless the ruling caste finds new populations to exploit at the edges of the gamic caste-state. Eventually, this state grows to its fullest extent, and the enslavement game becomes untenable: the ‘proletarian’ layer of the ruling caste becomes mercenary, provoking internal disorder until the caste society collapses — as in ancient Rome.

Administrative caste societies, however, are not forced to keep growing or die. Rather, these societies encounter the pressure of internal corruption as the priestly caste uses its superior control over information to demand more and more from the subaltern castes. As time goes on, there is an increasing possibility that the caste society will lose its administrative quality or that there will be a general collapse in order and civil war. This stabilization-collapse cycle around questions of corruption forms a partial basis for the eternal cycle of violent contradiction often observed throughout ancient Chinese history.

In a pharaonic caste society, the pharaoh personally embodies the state’s social contradiction. If they are incompetent or otherwise limited in their capabilities, the ruling caste can lose its internal coherence, possibly leading to the overthrow of the pharaoh or a civil war. If the pharaoh is capable, however, a contradictory cycle can be established, such as the tendency in the middle east for rulers to declare a ‘jubilee’ — society-wide forgiveness of debts. These Jubilees served three purposes. First, they helped increase the popularity of the Pharaoh. Second, they created the conditions for continued commerce in the pharaonic caste societies. Finally, and most importantly, they disciplined the ruling caste as a whole, rebinding them to the Pharaoh and separating them from an independent power base — wealth itself.

Therefore in caste society, the state is always bound to rise and fall. This process either explodes into all possible space (ancient Rome), moves through a continual cycle of civil-social unrest/renewal (ancient China), or depends upon a periodic religious re-negotiation of power (Egypt). This rise and fall pattern informs conservative wisdom about the cyclical nature of ‘society.’ This understanding is inadmissible in the moderare set and constrained not by the behavior of any small tribe of humans but rather determined by the collective action of all humans across an entire ecoregion.

Primitive communism does not immediately and efficiently socialize production beyond a single tribe; Nevertheless, cultural norms ensure a weak circulation of products within a given ecoregion in this epoch. So we have the custom in some parts of the world that, upon receiving a compliment on a product, one must turn the product over to the complimenter. Alternatively, in some parts of North America, it was the tradition that a dream could create a claim to a product.

However, the natural productivity of the ecoregion formed the basis for productive output that was often socialized and consumed within a single tribe. It is here that we find the next difficult point for communists. Under primitive communist tribal society, the firm is mostly the environment itself and what small labors humans can apply to that environment, an environment which produces all manner of things for people, but which is beyond human ken and control.

In caste society, production somewhat separates from the limits imposed by the ecoregion through agricultural practice. Simultaneously, productive activities are split along a division of labor between various castes so that a multiplicity of castal associations become embedded in distinct productive centers. Here we can see a kind of repetition of what happens with the state under primitive communism — there we have many different states, each of which moves violently under specific concrete circumstances. In caste society, we have many different productive units — limited concrete objects — the collective action of which produces some kind of social surplus that must be absorbed[10]. While such surpluses may periodically appear in tribal society, in caste society there is an absolute explosion in such surplus.

However, the fact that the society is a caste and not a class society also limits the growth of surplus labor so that it must exist but tends not to accumulate on an exponential trajectory as under capitalism. Instead, in some sense, this surplus is consumed by the contradictory theory of the ruling caste: religious fetes, monuments, fetters for enslavement, and grand parties eat through the excess. Caste society is a society where production is primarily or singularly for consumption, not production. As such, technical advance slows to an absolute standstill as the ruling caste seeks to absorb surplus in their various projects of anti-theory.

In feudal society, production is no longer divided among many different labor castes. Instead, it becomes a pure surplus or obscene partial object — a fetish, with the servile serf swearing their labor to the feudal lord. Under feudalism, the only thing produced en masse is food — and productive capacity in all other fields is tied directly to this surplus in food production. Beyond farming, there is a small amount of properly ‘productive’ activity. Eighty to ninety percent of the population in a feudal society are farmers, and their production is the fuel upon which the very tiny sliver of non-farming producers and consumers live. This reliance on a narrow productive surplus in food generates the contradiction of town and country, where the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie finds themselves subject to the provincial demands of the peasantry. Further, the smallest fall in the surplus productive capacity of those who work the land can devastate the whole of society. Such upsets, like the black death and the historical economic shock created by the discovery of gold in the Americas, can lead to a rise in the power of the peasants — whose productive capacities may then increase sufficiently so that power then moves back into the cities.

A process like this shook Europe, moving from the fifteenth century into the nineteenth and culminating in the capitalist epoch. In this epoch, the firm’s drive does not orbit about the existence or absence of a mere agricultural surplus. Instead, production is in a state of constant self-contradiction between the various sections of the bourgeois classes. Each section of these classes competes against the others for market share, with the most important division being between the owners of living capital and dead capital — namely between the working class and the capitalist class[11]. As long as we operate under capitalism, neither side of this war can win. Instead, the contradictory nature of capitalism ensures there isn’t merely a division of labor but rather a division of capital that moves back and forth between the two classes and between their various pseudo-castal sections or layers. Thus we see that capital moves in ‘fits and starts’ with production moving forward at an amazing, almost miraculous, pace before there is a crisis of overproduction and undervalorization of capital that then causes a collapse in the price of dead capital and thus a significant decrease in investment. There is no singular firm but a million firms, large and small, clawing at each other for market share. Their anarchy creates a singular market with its price signal for everything available under the sun, including the sweat of a man’s brow.

And finally, what of production under the dictatorship of the proletariat and the communist society after that? Here, I should point out that we return to the ecoregional society of primitive communism but at a higher level. While it should not be the goal of the socialist movement to have a single world communist state, it will be the goal of this movement to build the singular worker’s firm, a kind of engineered preconscious producer of what is needful for all humankind. This firm would be owned by all and would act as the single monopolist producer of necessary goods and the single monopsony where one could sell their labor. Its goal is to produce everything we need to pursue life, liberty, and happiness at zero marginal labor cost (and at a fair wage before reducing labor costs to zero). The hang-up for most communists has been the belief that the construction of this firm requires the domination by the working class of the capitalist state from the beginning of the project — that is to say, for many communists, the model of revolution goes:

1. First we win the revolution

2. Then we get control of the capitalist state

3. Then we build the firm.

This model, I posit, is incorrect; the construction of the workers’ firm is the first and primary goal of the working class — as a class. It is something that must be done from the first stirrings of class consciousness to the final moment where labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want.

The Structural Position of the Firm in Each Epoch

Section 4: The Life-Cycle of Association

Under primitive communism, the master of society was the associational division between particular tribes. That is to say, rather than any kind of advanced notion like democracy or law being the primary ‘glue’ that held together tribal society, instead it seems likely that the absolute freedom of movement between tribes, provided to early humans by the general anarchy of tribal society, implied that the reason people stayed together was that staying together worked at the level of associational identity — people stayed in a particular tribe and did not wander off to seek others precisely because that tribe suited them at the level of the tribe’s local tradition, language, lifestyle, and personnel. People stayed in a tribe because they loved the tribe. That is to say, tribes formed and disunited relatively freely according to the movement of actually existing human relations, relations which are in constant flux/contradictory movement[12].

The rule of humans from this time is that we don’t all have to be friends but can associate with whomever we wish. Yes, there was a great deal of evolutionary pressure on people to behave. Someone constantly running from their previous tribe due to their crimes and misdemeanors is less likely to find success reproducing as each ‘flight’ amounts to an immense and traumatic expenditure of personal resources. But given that many tribes swapped guests with each other in a relatively free flow across continental scale ecoregions, it also seems likely that this evolutionary drive to fit in is not absolute. We are not a uniformly harmonious species. Rather, we oscillate between harmony with those we like and discord with those we do not like.

Luckily the conditions of the major ecoregions in prehistory made it possible to sustain the contradiction of association in tribal society. Many distinct and contentious tribal associations could coexist with the relatively large ecoregions occupied by our ancestors. While they all remade the region through their minor efforts, none completely dominated a region for any period, instead simply acting to change some small part of it for their habitation before moving on.

In caste society, associations are no longer capable of more or less freely mutating and flowing across an entire ecoregion. Instead, the tribal association develops into factionalism — the ruling caste association seeks to disorganize and dominate other potential associations, establishing a central faction[13]. This central association, now a permanent super-object of society, is the ruling caste. This ruling caste and its material and social domination of subaltern castes become the fixed point or dead object that defines the social preconscious — the very space of social understanding. In a caste society, we have a society that really does move by the ‘conspiracy logic’ that people often tend to assign to the capitalist class under capitalism. That is, while the modern capitalist state is generally looking only to prosecute crimes against property, in a caste society, the state instead is constantly looking to persecute anyone who seems like they may pose a political threat to the personnel of the ruling caste. A castal state is, in some sense, a private state, owned and directly administered by the ruling caste who personally know what is to be done with whom.[14]

This social form often appears as if it has no ‘‘factions’ even though there is no caste society without stable, large-scale associative factions. Often, the ruling caste hides its factional divisions from all other subaltern castes, driven by a holy fear of their revenge should they get the upper hand and bring down the state. The caste society is, in fact, ‘harmonious’… until it comes tumbling down, and the appearance of strong factions at the top of caste society heralds its self-destruction.

In feudal society, however, the unified operation of a singular ruling caste controlling a particular state is more permanently shattered into a thousand pieces so that there is a mishmash of different ruling factions fighting with each other for control over territory. Under feudalism, we begin to see the formation of the nation but not the creation of the ‘nation-state.’ Here there is a different image of factional ‘harmony’ available to us — the backward and insulated peasantry and their attendant backwater nobility can live in ‘harmony’ only by violently excluding outsiders from their notion of humanity. The harmony of village life is predicated upon relatively stable productive relations within the village. However, In exchange for village harmony, society at a broader scale exists in a state of chaos. Under these conditions, the deep divisions of factionalism necessitate wild underproduction.[15]

Then, we have association in capitalist society. Here, association without factionalization becomes a possibility once again: but only by identifying a kind of association or subject that can never exist within society — this association or what is now termed an identity is the fully bourgeois subject, the subject that Marx talked about who could “do one thing today and another tomorrow, hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner… without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.” This subject is one that the capitalist class can almost embody: except that they exclude themselves from the most radical material critique, as the capital they hold drives others into poverty. Alternatively, the working class can never individually embody this bourgeois subject or identity but can only ever embody it as a collective — a collective they are, to this day, struggling to build. This bourgeois subject is the thing tugging upon all classes and castes within every nation, a kind of flickering possibility at the corner of everyone’s eye.

It is the repression of this bourgeois subject which drives forward the contradiction of production within capitalism. Workers seek, individually and collectively, to become bourgeois subjects with full freedom and right. In return, capitalists seek to sustain the freedom and right they have already obtained against the workers. In all cases, the lure of possibility within this subjectivity drives forward the behavior of everyone involved. But this lure is a mirage under capitalism: any approach towards its realization causes a general crisis in the system, as occurred in the late 60s when the working class chose a stable partial bourgeois existence against a more risky move for power.