I’m working on an article for a special issue of Anarchist Studies focusing on technology. This article focuses many of my central ideas about technology toward anarchists in particular, but it has implications for direct or participatory democrats, and radical democrats. It would also pose problems for communists who hold true to Marx’s commitment to the withering away of the state under communism.

This article focuses on issues of justice that have unfortunately not been taken up very well in the literatures I have been able to find. The treatment of justice by anarchists has been incomplete and haphazard. Distributive and resource-based justice and social justice have been well developed more broadly (by liberals and socialists), and have important uses when injected into an anti-authoritarian politics. With the added demand of simplicity – of relying on neither representatives or authorities, nor on unwieldy participatory models which may not be capable of grappling with overly complex sociotechnical systems – we may turn to the systems themselves to ask of them what they demand from us in order for them to function. Which artifacts permit a nonauthoritarian, stateless society when deeply embedded in social reproduction?

In the last decade, the anarcho-primitivists and anti-civilizationists have been joined by some in CrimethInc among the anarchists who seem to understand a key problem related to technology. There seems to be a shift elsewhere, too, but the tendency among most anarchists to see all technologies as completely and totally shaped by their political context (to view the politics of artifacts as purely contingent) remains. This mythology is beginning to crack if for no other reasons than the renewed attention to scarcity, generated by recognition of the “peak everything” world we live in today.

When we consider (1) complexity; (2) specialization and expertise and their relation to the division of labor; (3) resource distribution; (4) the distribution of “the good”; and (5) the distribution of risk; all in a world with rapidly declining resources that much of the technical infrastructure depends upon; and the world population surging toward and above 7bil, anarchists are forced to reevaluate their tendency to view the political qualities of artifacts as fully contingent only upon capitalism and the state.

There are many technologies far more integral in daily life – and upon which daily life depends – than the state. Many of these technologies require high levels of authority and domination to function. That (some) anarchists would challenge only the state (or all authoritarian sociopolitical structures) and not also these technologies (or sociotechnical artifacts) is deeply problematic. Expecting that the removal of the state, patriarchy, etc. would enable autonomy or freedom without also jettisoning many (or most) highly complex technics that require highly divided/specialized labor and expertise, and depend on scarcely available materials (that therefore require inequitable distribution), and generate high levels of risk (that are often unable to be inequitably diffuse) shows that – with the exception of very specific strands of anarchism – anarchists have a very shallow and ambivalent understanding of technology that ultimately undermines the politics. We should reject the “liberatory technology” model of a “post-scarcity anarchism.” Instead of seeking liberation through technology, we ought to consider liberation from technologies that reproduce domination and continually threaten autonomy. We need a “peak everything anarchism.”

One Response to “Peak Everything Anarchism”

1. 

   Chris Barron

   February 13, 2012 at 1:51 am

   Sound! – it disturbs me when i read/hear of someone like George Monbiot no longer representing himself as an anarchist – i immediately worry about where the rot got in – glad you have the clear eye!