K-AFF

Theory of Power
All states are forms of centralized power, subverting the wills of individuals to its own
ends in a constant, unforgiving battle between the state and the subject. It is a
machine chalk full of biopower, convincing the masses of its necessity and
benevolence, all while disciplining them for letting out a single question about
revolution or its existence.
Anark 20 [Daniel Baryon or aka Anark, Popular anarchist writer and organizer “Power,” https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anark-
power] // tempeprep ov

In the theory of power I will set out in this essay, power is defined as: “the ability to successfully enact
one’s will.” With this definition in mind, there are many types of power because there are many ways of bringing one’s will into
existence. To which end is one’s will inclined? Through which methods might they achieve that end? These are the questions that must be
answered in this framework. And to do so, it will be necessary that we come to understand power in a more fundamental fashion, its modes
and its ends, its desires and limitations. So what does it mean to be powerful then in this framework? Well, clearly it is not a universal matter.
Power is contextual in its means and ends. Take for example, the prisoner who becomes very strong lifting weights. Though their strength may
serve them well within the prison, such a physical might will never allow them to escape their captivity, to burst down the walls and evade
being re-captured, it will never allow them to find a life as a farmer, or attend Cornell University, or eat caviar upon a great yacht, or publish a
great work of philosophy. Power is contingent upon means and ends. The prisoner is imbued with a powerful means in achieving the end of
lifting some great weight or of pummeling some other imprisoned threat, but that is a narrow power by comparison to the great potentiality
A being is not powerful simply because of one particular strength, they are
that lies in existence.

powerful to the degree that, when they will something to take place, it is materialized
in the faithful image of their intention. Inversely then, their power is lacking insofar as what they will to take place
mismatches intention. Therefore, when we say someone is powerful, we mean that they can reify a broad-ranging, generalized will; one in
which the vast majority of onlookers can recognize their own goals as achievable. In understanding these means and ends in the full scope of
potentiality, we also grasp the nature of a power. Some powers have limited ends, but very potent means, while others have a very broad
range of achievable ends and very constrained means. A being is most powerful when they have the most effective means and the most
diversified possible ends. That is to say, a person is most powerful when they simultaneously achieve whatever they will and can will the widest
array of possible things. This is why, in this framework, we split with the terminology of these scholars. This definition allows us to understand
power on a continuum, not constrained to the social sphere alone, but also containing the ability to understand how power functions within
both human and non-human populations. For example, while it is absolutely true that the ability to create mass submission of human minds
has been the primary method by which the rulers have historically become powerful, in this framework, one of the earliest methods by which
humans gained power was actually in the domestication of plants and non-human animals. Through these relations, humans were able to
achieve a greater embodiment of their will and with less exertion. However, this power was contingent on humanity’s ability to recognize
ecological bounds. To derive power within this system, humanity had to respect its environment and pay close attention to the accumulated
evolutionary wisdom within the biome around them. The power granted in attention to this ecological wisdom allowed the species to achieve
harmony within their environment, luxury enough to learn and play, said simply, to actualize their desires. And, although this paradigm
In time, a great beast arose in the form of
comprises the vast majority of human existence, it would not last.

organized, centralized power. This structure, this ideological and material engine which
was formed in the early monarchies, is the earliest example of what Mumford calls the
“social mega-machine.” And, as he says: “from the beginning [...] the weight of the mega-machine itself was the chief
burden of civilization: not merely did it turn daily work into a grievous penalty, but it diminished the psychal rewards that compensate the
hunters, farmers, and herdsmen for their sometimes exhausting labors. Never was this burden heavier than at the beginning, when the greatest
When there are
public activity in Egypt was mainly directed to supporting the claim of the Pharaoh to divinity and immortality.” [4]

those who wish to have their will enacted more fully, to have lives of even greater
luxury and command, and given that the only means available to achieve such ends is
the labor of human bodies, it then becomes only a question, for the ruler, of how they
might subvert the wills of those humans to meet their chosen ends. Humans are extraordinary
organisms, able in their utmost adaptability, to be set to either creative or machine-like tasks; this is why it has been overall more advantageous
 The power
to the rulers to bridle us than it has been to bridle the oxen. Indeed, as they have demonstrated, better still is to bridle both.

of the king relies on the fact that: as he commands, other beings act. A word commands
armies, a word changes laws, a word pardons the man on the gallows. If it has been said before that
“power is the ability to make others do as they would not otherwise do,” [5] if all these great scholars have been content to study only the
social dimension of power, this is why. No hierarchical power structure operating within these millennia could be as powerful as it has been if it
did not have the ability to compel or inhibit the actions of humans. The power of the oxen to plow the field or transport grain could never have
been sufficient to support the excesses of pharaohs and kings lest they also bridled the masters of those beasts. And, while humanity may one
day bridle automated robotics to meet our ends, in lieu of such specialized tools and their unlikely and complete separation from human
operation, whatever rulers remain will inevitably turn humans into servants. Indeed, by its measure of service to power, the human mind is
In this way, all power in human history has been
reduced increasingly into nothing more than a tool.

contingent on a system of control over the behavior of others and the reconfiguration
of the natural world to meet the needs of the holder. The more power one has, the
more obediently that some other person will act and the less gap between their
resistance and their obedience will exist. The larger number of people whose behavior
can be controlled and the more thoroughly that their behavior can be controlled, the
more powerful the controller is. If the desires of humans inhibit the ability to carry out one’s will, after all, they lack power
by measure to that. Power does not then lie in potential, power lies in action and materialization. Just as two explosive chemicals may contain a
great potential before combination, they are not powerful until they are actively combined and their proper mixture materialized in reality. In
order to illustrate this concept in context, let us inspect two thought experiments: the idle king and the idle worker. In the occasion of the idle
king, we can imagine the drunken lay-about, a son of some previous king perhaps, who has no desire to fill the role of the ruler. And yet, if this
king desired, at a whim, they could have their opponents executed, could have any person contorted to meet their demands, have any will
submitted to their own. Is this king not powerful, even if he chooses for a lifetime not to enact such machinations? They are powerful because
the structures are in place that actively reduce the gap between the willed desire of the king and the fully realized outcome of that will.
Whether the king acts upon them or not, the structures to reify his will are ready and waiting. By contrast, let us conceive of the idle worker.
The idle worker, whether they choose to act in the interest of their will or not, whether they summon the desire to command or whether they
toil for the duration of their life, short of building an actual structure of dual power, it makes no difference. Atomized, they must put in
extraordinary effort and sacrifice to enact their will. Conceived in isolation from a broader cooperative structure, the individual has to
accumulate terroristic knowledge to enforce their will. This is because structures are not in place to reduce the gap between their will and their
desired outcomes and thus they must resort to crude and ineffective means. In this way, we can see that the idle masses start at a competitive
disadvantage from those in positions of privilege and authority. What I was laying out in the essay Constructing the Revolution, was a method
to make the masses powerful. To organize prefigurative structures is to develop a method that reduces the gap between the will of the masses
and outcomes. This is, in fact, a necessary precondition to revolutionary change. There are some, however, who claim that this state of affairs is
authoritarian. And such an infantile claim would be unworthy of addressing were it not the sober-minded conclusion of some important
theorists in the last century, most notably that of Frederick Engels in his essay “On Authority.” [6] So let us untangle this old confusion. In this
argument, it is said that, to make the masses powerful is to create a new authority because they necessarily demand that the previous ruling
class submit itself to the rule of the masses. But authority is not just one group holding power over another. If that were the case, we would be
forced to conclude that the slave who strikes down their master is only seeking to “become a new authority.” The exact opposite is, of course,
the truth. Authority is the demand that there be a narrow grip on the reins and that is precisely what the slave seeks to end when he abolishes
his debt of servitude. A power is more authoritarian to the degree that it monopolizes power for fewer and fewer people. To undergo a
revolution of the masses is precisely to abolish such a hierarchical power and to revolt against suppression; thus revolution is to abolish
authoritarian power; it is the elimination of narrow monopoly and the distribution of power to the masses. This is not to say, of course, that we
should not trust in the knowledge of experts, for example. Such an implied authority extends no further than the recognition that the expert’s
knowledge is genuinely beyond our own. Whatever rewards or marks of academic honor have been bestowed upon them are not what imbue
them with the right to be respected. Also, such a respect does not suggest a desire to perpetuate a monopoly on that expertise. Quite the
opposite, the anarchist wishes to create a society in which expertise is distributed freely and fairly instead of gatekept in the ivory tower. So,
instead of saying that the masses, seeking to liberate themselves from a systemic slavery are “seeking to become a new authority,” it is more
accurate to say that the masses organized together and holding now the strength to emancipate themselves, are a new kind of “power
Power structures are social and material relations which vest beings within
structure.”

them with power above and beyond their individual means. For this reason, a
horizontal confederation of councils is a power structure, an affinity group is a power
structure, even an anarchy would likely contain some sort of power structure. Each of
these arrangements, after all, vest individuals within them with power beyond their
simple individual wills. But they seek to achieve such an affair with flat, decentralized,
diffused power structures relying on social compact, agreement, and communal enforcement. So while it is not
the case that the anarchist rejects all power in this framework, they do firmly reject
hierarchical, centralized, or authoritarian power. It must be said, however, that, using this conception, power
cannot ever really be destroyed. After all, persuasion is power, science is power, consensus is communal power, even the usage of tools, as we
have said, is power. In absence of a complete extinction of the species, human power can only ever be redistributed or diminished. But that is
precisely the motivation of building a power structure which is held together by the people and diffused among them. Concentrated power is
akin to a sort of cancer, having arisen inside its host from the malfunction of a necessary system. And, like cancer, whether benign or malignant,
Absolute power, predicated on the absolute
it is a tumor which must be destroyed or cut out from the body.

contortion of other human beings, must be dissolved and systems of resistance to its
re-emergence must be robustly developed. But in order for us to succeed at that task,
we must know its modes and behaviors. So let us now discuss the mechanics of this great cancer.
The Dynamics of the Mega-Machine Sometimes, when referring to concentrated power structures, there is a sort of common tendency to call
them ‘the machine’ or ‘the system.’ However, usually the usage of this metaphor comes along with some mild condescension. Its wording has
become attached with a sort of rebellious naivete, maybe the result of its prevalent usage in the hippy and student movement of the 60s. We
see the metaphor, for example in the famous words of Mario Savio: “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious,
makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and
upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it,
to the people who own it — that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!” And to conceive of hierarchical,
centralized power structures as machines is more than some reductive metaphor. Although it is true that hierarchical power structures are only
embodied through the means of conscious beings and that actions carried out by that power structure are actually the result of accumulated
individual actions within it, in the creation of an internal discipline, the people actually are made closer and closer to constituent parts of a
machine. Their individuality is gradually subsumed hierarchical needs and their actions increasingly carried out as a regimented response, not
as an individual act of choosing, as it is, in fact, precisely the act of choosing which hierarchical power structures will have a tendency to want to
eliminate. Individual choice means unpredictability and unpredictability is antithetical to a reliable mechanization. Lewis Mumford, an American
scholar in the middle of the 20th century, wrote a book on this very subject called The Myth of the Machine. In it he says: “...to call these
collective entities machines is no idle play on words. If a machine be defined [...] as a combination of resistant parts, each specialized in
function, operating under human control, to utilize energy and to perform work, then the great labor machine was in every aspect a genuine
machine: all the more because its components, though made of human bone, nerve, and muscle, were reduced to their bare mechanical
elements and rigidly standardized for the performance of their limited tasks.” We do not mean to say, of course, that the power structure itself
has consciousness nor that those who are in control of the machine do not drive it to some significant degree, but instead that the machine is
built toward an end and insofar as it has successfully subverted the will of the majority of individuals within it and turned them into operational
components, it will function as per the smooth dictates of the logic of that machine. This is discussed from time to time by Marx as well, notably
in Capital where he points out that, having consciously reduced themselves into nothing more than conduits for the flow and accumulation of
Actors within regimented,
capital, capitalists become “capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will.”

hierarchical systems do not act outside the dictates of that system, including the many
managers and technicians which form the functioning of its administration. If they did,
they would no longer be allowed to operate within the system. The system would
either discipline them through punishment and social sanction or prioritize some other
human that is willing to contort themselves into the shape needed by the social mega-
machine. In this way, even the holders of power are contorted into the mold of the machine. This is what Rudolf Rocker meant in
Nationalism and Culture when he said: “It is the secret curse of every power that it becomes fatal, not only to its victims but to its possessors.
The bare thought that one must live for the achievement of an end which is opposed to all sound human feeling and is incomprehensible in
itself, gradually makes the possessor of power himself into a dead machine, after he has forced all coming under the dominance of his power to
a mechanical obedience to his will. There is something puppetlike in the nature of every power, arising from its own illusions, which coerces
everything coming into contact with it into fixed form. And all these forms continue to live in tradition even after the last spark of life has died
in them, and lie like an incubus on the spirit which submits to their influence.” As Marx describes in his theory of alienation, humanity has a
Gattungswesen, a “species essence.” [7] Marx conceives of that species essence as one which desires to produce of its own volition and that,
under constraint, unable to control the act of production, we are alienated from that essence. And it is true, humanity desires to control the
conditions of its own production, but it is greater than that. Humans, fundamentally defined through their adaptability and mentally able to
conceive of a boundless future, are not meant to be rigidly disciplinized. As Lewis Mumford says in the second part of his Myth of the Machine
“[...] it is part of the essential nature of man to transcend the limits of his own biological nature, and to be ready if necessary to die in order to
To be disciplined by power is to be limited, to be made
make such transcendence possible.”

subservient is to be turned into a component, a thing with a purpose but no meaning.

Humanity does not wish to be made into a slave justified by race, a soldier justified by
contract, a wage laborer or an automaton told it is human but experiencing nothing of
what it is to be a human. Humanity inherently desires to be boundless. Humanity naturally desires
freedom. Indeed, Marx, the ideological paramore of many who now so eagerly reject freedom as a principle of struggle, said “no man combats
Hierarchical power only exists because it is imposed,
freedom, he combats at most the freedom of others.”

because once concentrated power exists, it accumulates until collapse or heat death. It
is the enemy of human freedom, turning conscious beings into thoughtless instruments, an engine for suffering, a thing slaked in blood and
Because
wielding the whip and the chain, coffins proceeding to its left and obedient automatons, once called humans, to its right.

hierarchical power demands the mass sacrifice of human lives, it cannot be anything
but a death-oriented entity and it is necessarily surrounded by those who worship it, a
death cult. This can be seen in the Pyramid Texts where long passages are written about the God-Kings in the afterlife. In these passages,
we see the true visage of the Mesopotamian mega-machine, a description whose metaphors have changed and whose veil has been modified,
but which fundamentally captures the blood sacrificial nature of hierarchical power. “He it is that eateth men; that liveth on Gods, that
possesseth the carriers and despatcheth messages.... The Runner-with-all-Knives ... he that strangleth them for him; he draweth out for him
their entrails, he the messenger whom he sends death to.... He it is that eateth their magic and swalloweth their lordliness. Their great ones are
for his morning meal, their middle-sized ones for his evening meal, and their little ones for his night meal.... He hath broken up the backbones
and the spinal marrow, he hath taken away the hearts of the Gods, he hath eaten the Red Crown, he hath swallowed the Green One. He
feedeth on the lungs of the Wise Ones: he is satisfied with living on hearts and their magic.” That is the fundamental nature of the mega-
machine; a cannibal zealot, now veiled by a vast Skinner box, but its inbuilt purpose unchanged. This hierarchical apparatus is a parasite built to
consume for eternity, fueled by human misery and abject slavery. So what drives the death cult? Why do the masses contort themselves to its
needs? Said otherwise: why do we not rebel?

The Myth of the Machine “The one lasting contribution of the mega-machine was the myth of the machine itself: the notion that this machine
was, by its very nature, absolutely irresistible-and yet, provided one did not oppose it, ultimately beneficent. That magical spell still enthralls
both the controllers and the mass victims of the mega-machine today.” -Lewis Mumford Throughout the modern history of leftist ideology, the
philosophical disease of economic reductionism has permeated and undermined our movements, long masquerading as “materialism.” To
know society, they insist, is simply to work out its economic relations, external to human ideas. The ideas are but a superstructural mask on the
real driving contradiction taking place in the economic base. But this is an oafish oversimplification. The driving force is power and power is not
The
just the structurally embodied mechanisms of production and distribution. Power is also a function of perception and expectation.

belief that some power structure might bring about the existing or potential leverage
available to them, for example, is a primary component in the real exertion of power in
the world. A slave who believes they are bound to slavery and can never escape has
been successfully controlled by their master. The master has used their own power to
discourage the slave from seeking liberation. Power is also exerted by convincing
subjects that they should want to carry out the will of a power structure. These are often the
most pernicious and lasting of all such mental attitudes. Once a people can be convinced that their suffering

at the hands of the machine is both necessary and good, they can compel themselves
well beyond reason. They then actively take part in their becoming a component of
the vast machine and in dehumanizing themselves. Lewis Mumford called this vast, combined mythology of
the power system the “myth of the machine.” We will instead consider many interlocking and mutually reinforcing ideas, which we will call
philosophies of justification. One might say that Mumford’s myth of the machine was the accumulated canon of all philosophies of justification.
These mental attitudes, which have been so unscientifically separated from material reality through a false dichotomy of “idealism” and
“materialism,” are of paramount importance in the continued operation of great tyrannies. For example; many scholars have noted that the
feudal age maintained order largely through threat and use of violence. The way that bonds were formed between the lords and the monarch
was through the agreement to organize and enact violence, a stated willingness to martial and distribute troops for the needs of the monarch.
But what is said less often is that the masses were not only made into servants by fear of violence, they were made to feel that they were part
of a divine order. This is why, during the time that monarchs still reigned, liberals and leftists alike recognized the danger of religious doctrines.
One of the most primary philosophies of justification in the feudal order, was the conception that the hierarchy of society was organized and
re-organized by godly will. So then came conceptions of “just wars” of religious conquest and interpretation of the Bible which emphasized
meekness of the masses and boldness of the rulers. Napoleon, before his rise to power a staunch anti-theist said, upon coming into power:
“Society cannot exist without inequality of property and inequality not without religion. A man who is dying of hunger, next to one who has too
much, could not possibly reconcile himself to it if it were not for a power which says to him: ‘It is the will of God that here on Earth there must
be rich and poor, but yonder, in eternity, it will be different.” He was mistaken in thinking a specifically religious notion was required to do such
a task, but he was, in his crass pursuit of authority, stumbling upon the great importance of the myth of the machine in the churning of every
hierarchical system of power. Indeed, the philosophy of justification for liberalism, representationalism, was already present in its embryonic
form within feudalism. Hobbes, for example, conceived of the necessity of an absolute sovereign that he called the Leviathan, because he
imagined that it was necessary to prevent the “war of all against all.” Hobbes believed that humanity without rule was inherently contentious
and thus thought that humans in the state of nature were atomized. He said, then, that the sovereign was a sort of representation of the social
need for order, in opposition to humanity without rule, which was separate and squabbling. The Leviathan is not a cruel despot, it is a necessary
evil to countervail the inherent nastiness and selfishness of humans. The Leviathan is a sort of stand-in for God on Earth, though one need not
The representationalist mythology of the state remains one of
conceive of Godliness to justify him.

the key philosophies of justification in the liberal republic, because it legitimizes the
state through a metaphysical equivalence between subjects and rulers, such that the
subjects are made to believe that they deserve to be ruled because their rulers
“represent” them. It by no means functions alone, however. The logic of capitalism transfigures everything within modern society
and thus a complex of philosophies of justification hold up its order: bootstrap ideology, the Protestant work ethic, economic meritocracy,
rugged individualism, and many more. Through its reductive conception of the world, capitalism produces the deification of the commodity, it
splinters communities into competitive, individualistic silos, and all the while, this perverse distortion of human social conditions empowers the
most exploitative actors within the existing power structures. Fostering economic class consciousness in the workers is therefore a process by which the cogs of the
machine are made aware of how they have been constrained and disciplined for the needs of the economic elites. However, one must not stop there. The hierarchy of economic class is a result of the holistic needs of the mega-
machine to systematize the lives of its human components and accumulate a more supreme and unassailable power, not of a narrow economic striving. Economics is merely one system in feedback, although an integral component
in the great engine, churning on the blood and sweat of the masses. In the United States, for example, White supremacy is a very central philosophy of justification because, by using the mental framework of racist ideology, power
structures can exert coercion and manufacture obedience both in the duped white followers and oppressed non-white populations, by convincing the duped white followers to enforce the privilege they have been given and by
convincing the oppressed populations that their struggle is futile. Through the construct of whiteness, the white population is made to feel it is the default, the uncorrupted, original copy, and that all diversity is deviance
therefrom. In this way, and many more, non-white lives are gradually worn down through mental degradation and the further the pallor of their skin differs from the normalcy of whiteness, the more deviant they are considered.
So too is patriarchy a fundamental component of the modern machine, reformed as it has been by generation after generation of hierarchical machines. Through this mythology, the man is made the superior of woman; he is
associated with the features of the dominator and groomed to embody them. Gender roles are held in stasis and gender expressions are viciously policed creating an unnatural binary that helps stabilize a vast system of
exploitation: the man an empty automaton to be sacrificed, to be worked, to never complain; the woman a subservient, a meek supplicant to be rewarded from the table scraps. Even as women slowly regain some measure of
agency in their lives, a reactionary movement rears its head, demanding they return to a time previous to social leveling. Transgender identity, a reality observed since ancient societies, is then naturally seen as an existential threat;
a wrecking ball to the staunch systematization of gender roles in society. I give these examples not to provide an exhaustive overview but instead to echo the observations of the intersectional feminists: these philosophies of
justification are not disconnected, they are complex and overlapping, having produced unique hierarchies of privilege and justification to bolster each. By recognizing the diverse range of human struggle and in embracing both the
uniqueness of each intersection of oppression, while at the same time recognizing the grand unifying features of all these experiences, we find a revolutionary vector. As Rudolf Rocker says in Nationalism and Culture: “The desire
to bring everything under one rule, to unite mechanically and to subject to its will every social activity, is fundamental in every power. It does not matter whether we are dealing with the person of the absolute monarch of former
times, the national unity of a constitutionally elected representative government, or the centralistic aims of a party which has made the conquest of power its slogan. The fundamental principle of basing every social activity upon a
definite norm which is not subject to change is the indispensable preliminary assumption of every will to power.“ Generation after generation of exploiter has innovated to create more and more effective means to bring about
social subservience. The resulting inventions of psychological warfare, embodied together in this great myth of the machine, have now been sharpened into powerful tools of memetic self-obedience. Indeed, the reinforcement of
these philosophies of justification does not take place merely upon an interpersonal level; it is the software of a vast social hardware.

Creorder In their work, Capital as Power, Bichler and Nitzan present a concept they call “creorder.” This concept is the novel combination of the words “creation” and “order.” This is no contradiction, it is the recognition of a
dynamic process of reinforcement and evolution taking place in all systems. Read holistically, it is a recognition that both the material forces of social power structures along with their accordant philosophies of justification,
attempt to bring the pieces of that greater society into static obedience to a systemic will. However, in the structure’s need to meet the burdens of a changing world, it must also reorient itself constantly, re-ordering its constituent
parts to accommodate an eternally new environment. Or, as Bichler and Nitzan say: “Historical society is [...] both Parmenidean and Heraclitean: a state in process, a construct reconstructed, a form transformed.” This mirrors
much of what was said in the video essay Change and Revolution. There I put forth a theory of social change predicated on nested feedback cycles. But the analysis does not end with the cycles I inspected there. The systems of
human power are in mass, dynamic feedback and Bichler and Nitzan’s “creorder” can be seen as an umbrella to describe the accumulation of these cycles. The feedback cycle that this essay has laid out is both primal and ancient,
occurring between the structural programming of the system in the form of its supply lines, infrastructure, and distribution and the ideological programming of its constituent actors by way of interlocking philosophies of
justification. These forces do not function in isolation. They feed into one another, reordering society constantly, shifting their relation as one or another is countervailed. As Bichler and Nitzan say: “Power means the ability to
impose order, and imposition presupposes resistance – resistance from those on whom order is imposed and from others who wish to impose their own. This ever-present tension between force and counter-force makes a power
creorder inherently unstable. Slack on one side unleashes pressure from another, a greater force in one direction trumps over a weaker force in the other. And since to overcome resistance is to create a new order, the very
can be predicted because it has been
presence of power spells a built-in pressure for change.” Creordering is an act of dynamic regimentation, the social and economic world is turned into something which

transfigured into the form that power has preconceived. And in becoming something predictable, the capitalist comes to believe that their
ideology is a science when, in fact, they have cursed the constituents of society with a rigid uniformity which they then condescendingly
observes as confirmation of their supremacy, just as the slavemaster looked over the plantation fields and told himself he observed an eternal
order. Bichler and Nitzan continue: “To rule means to see the world from a singular viewpoint, to be locked into a unitary logic, to be
subservient to your own architecture of power. Dominant capital cannot deviate from the boundaries of this architecture, even if it wants to. Its
individual members are forced to accept the very logic they impose on the rest of humanity. And the more effective they are in imposing that
When the world fails to meet the predictions of the
logic, the more predictable they themselves become.”

arrogant machine, the only options available to that machine are to re-discipline its
components, to deny the reality of its disconfirmation, to reorganize itself into a new
predictable system, or to convey a new philosophy of justification. What it cannot do
is accept its frivolity. To do such a thing would be to undermine its foundational
principle of accumulation.
it can be seen that hierarchical power structures are
Conclusion With all of these pieces together,

massive, constantly self-perpetuating social machines which rely on material logistics,

forms of economic extraction, and systematized coercion, but each gear within them
only turns if the human components are disciplined, standardized, and made inhuman
by ideologies of justification. Every hierarchical power structure will have a tendency
to operationalize the lives of the individuals within it such that all their individual wills
are subverted and controlled. And to whose ends are the individuals’ wills subverted?
While it is true to answer “the individuals in the highest seats of power,” (indeed,
hierarchical systems are built with that express, parasitical purpose) it is even more
appropriate to say “the logic of the machine.” These machines are then built out in both a structural and
ideological sense based upon the subjugation of human beings. And, as a result, the unified design of the system’s supply chains, infrastructural
projects, and operating ideas, is a dominator’s logic and the fundamental configuration of these embodiments of power represents a sort of
territorial expansion for the mega-machine. Said otherwise: the longer this machine is allowed to materially and ideologically configure itself in
the real world and to build out its metropolises and extract the resources of our planet, the more thoroughly that the enemy system is allowed
to solidify its power and establish a real physical territory for its ideology.
 Links & Impacts
The existence of the modern state hinges upon the social contract, a selfish
amalgamation that compresses the interests of its members and glorifies it against the
foreign human species, hailing it as the epitome of morality as it consumes non-
citizens for a hearty dinner of conquest and nationalism.
Bakunin ND [Mikhail Bakunin, Chad Russian anarcho-communist, “The Immorality of the State,” (there are too many conflicting sources
about when he published this), https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/michail-bakunin-the-immorality-of-the-state#toc1] // tempeprep ov

The Theory of Social Contract. Man is not only the most individual being on earth — he is also the most social being. It was a great fallacy on the
part of Jean Jacques Rousseau to have assumed that primitive society was established by a free contract entered into by savages. But Rousseau
was not the only one to uphold such views. The majority of jurists and modern writers, whether of the Kantian school or of other individualist
and liberal schools, who do not accept the theological idea of society being founded upon divine right, nor that of the Hegelian school — of
society as the more or less mystic realization of objective morality — nor the primitive animal society of the naturalist school — take nolens
volens, for lack of any other foundation, the tacit contract, as their point of departure. A tacit contract! That is to say, a wordless, and
consequently a thoughtless and will-less contract: a revolting nonsense! An absurd fiction, and what is more, a wicked fiction! An unworthy
hoax! For it assumes that while I was in a state of not being able to will, to think, to speak,
I bound myself and all my descendants — only by virtue of having let myself be
victimized without raising any protest — into perpetual slavery. Lack of Moral Discernment in the
State Preceding the Original Social Contract. From the point of view of the system which we are now examining the

distinction between good and bad did not exist prior to the conclusion of the social
contract. At that time every individual remained isolated in his liberty or in his absolute right,
paying no attention to the freedom of others except in those cases wherein such attention was dictated by his
weakness or his relative strength — in other words, by his own prudence and interest. At that time egoism, according to the

same theory, was the supreme law, the only extant right. The good was determined by success, the bad
only by failure, and justice was simply the consecration of the accomplished fact, however horrible, cruel, or infamous it might be — as is the
The distinction
rule in the political morality which now prevails in Europe. The Social Contract as the Criterion of Good and Bad.

between good and bad, according to this system, began only with the conclusion of
the social contract. All that which had been recognized as constituting the general
interest was declared to be the good, and everything contrary to it, the bad. Members
of society who entered into this compact having become citizens, having bound
themselves by solemn obligations, assumed thereby the duty of subordinating their
private interests to the common weal, to the inseparable interest of all. They also divorced their
individual rights from public rights, the only representative of which — the State — was thereby invested with the power to suppress all the
revolts of individual egoism, having, however, the duty of protecting every one of its members in the exercise of his rights in so far as they did
not run counter to the general rights of the community. The State Formed by the Social Contract Is the Modern Atheistic State. Now we are
going to examine the nature of the relations which the State, thus constituted, is bound to enter into with other similar States, and also its
relations to the population which it governs. Such an analysis appears to us to be the more interesting and useful inasmuch as the State, as
defined here, is precisely the modern State in so far as it is divorced from the religious idea: it is the lay State or the atheist State proclaimed by
modern writers. Let us then see wherein this morality consists. The modern State, as we have said, has freed itself from the yoke of the Church
and consequently has shaken off the yoke of universal or cosmopolitan morality of the Christian religion, but it has not yet become permeated
with the humanitarian idea or ethics — which it cannot do without destroying itself, for in its detached existence and isolated concentration the
State is much too narrow to embrace, to contain the interests and consequently the morality of, humanity as a whole. Ethics Identified with
State Interests. Modern States have arrived precisely at that point. Christianity serves them only as a pretext and a phrase, only as a means to
fool the simpletons, for the aims pursued by them have nothing in common with religious goals. And the eminent statesmen of our times — the
Palmerstons, the Muravievs, the Cavours, the Bismarcks, the Napoleons, would laugh a great deal if their openly professed religious convictions
were taken seriously. They would laugh even more if anyone attributed to them humanitarian sentiments, considerations, and intentions,
which they have always treated publicly as mere silliness. Then what constitutes their morality? Only State interests. From this point of view,
which, with very few exceptions, has been the point of view of statesmen, of strong men of all times and all countries, all that is instrumental in
conserving, exalting, and consolidating the power of the State is good — sacrilegious though it might be from a religious point of view and
revolting as it might appear from the point of view of human morality — and vice versa, whatever militates against the interests of the State is
bad, even if it be in other respects the most holy and humanely just thing. Such is the true morality and secular practice of all States. The
Such also is the morality of the State
Collective Egoism of Particular Associations Raised into Ethical Categories.

founded upon the theory a of social contract. According to this system, the good and the just,
since they begin only with the social contract, are in fact nothing but the content and
the end purpose of the contract — that is to say, the common interest and the public right of all individuals who formed
this contract, with the exception of those who remained outside of it. Consequently, by good in this system is meant

only the greatest satisfaction given to the collective egoism of a particular and limited
association, which, being founded upon the partial sacrifice of the individual egoism of
every one of its members, excludes from its midst, as strangers and natural enemies, the vast majority of
the human species whether or not it is formed into similar associations. Morality Is Co-Extensive Only With the Boundaries of
Particular States. The existence of a single limited State necessarily presupposed the existence, and if necessary provokes the formation of
several States, it being quite natural that the individuals who find themselves outside of this State and who are menaced by it in their existence
and liberty, should in turn league themselves against it. Here we have humanity broken up into an indefinite number of States which are
foreign, hostile, and menacing toward one another. There is no common right, and no social contract among them, for if such a contract and
right existed, the various States would cease to be absolutely independent of one another, becoming federated members of one great State.
Unless this great State embraces humanity as a whole, it will necessarily have against it the hostility of other great States, federated internally.
Thus war would always be supreme law and the inherent necessity of the very existence of humanity. Jungle Law Governs Interrelations of
States. Every State, whether it is of a federative or a non-federative character, must seek, under the penalty of utter ruin, to become the most
powerful of States. It has to devour others in order not to be devoured in turn, to conquer in order not to be conquered, to enslave in order not
to be enslaved — for two similar and at the same time alien powers, cannot co-exist without destroying each other. The Universal Solidarity of
The state then is the most flagrant negation, the most cynical and complete
Humanity Disrupted by the State.

negation of humanity. It rends apart the universal solidarity of all men upon earth, and it

unites some of them only in order to destroy, conquer, and enslave all the rest. It takes
under its protection only its own citizens, and it recognizes human right, humanity, and
civilization only within the confines of its own boundaries. And since it does not recognize
any right outside of its own confines, it quite logically arrogated to itself the right to
treat with the most ferocious inhumanity all the foreign populations whom it can
pillage, exterminate, or subordinate to its will. If it displays generosity or humanity
toward them, it does it in no case out of any sense of duty: and that is because it has
no duty but to itself, and toward those of its members who formed it by an act of free agreement,
who continue constituting it on the same free bases, or, as it happens in the long run,
have become its subjects. Since international law does not exist, and since it never can exist in a serious
and real manner without undermining the very foundations of the principle of absolute State

sovereignty, the State cannot have any duties toward foreign populations. If then it
treats humanely a conquered people, if it does not go to the full length in pillaging and exterminating it, and does
not reduce it to the last degree of slavery, it does so perhaps because of considerations
of political expediency and prudence, or even because of pure magnanimity, but never because of duty
— for it has an absolute right to dispose of them in any way it deems fit.
The state’s ultimate tool of biopolitical discipline is the Prison, accusing the subject of
transgressing its norms and locking them up in a state of bare life, all with an easy
wager for the prisoner’s freedom: To zip their mouth tight and hand over all agency
and political power to the dominant state.
Murray 13 [Rallie Murray, idk citations, “Invisible Bodies,” http://www.antoniocasella.eu/salute/murray_invisible_bodies_2013.pdf] //
tempeprep ov

Supermax prisons in the United States are constructed as spaces that are meant to deprive
prisoners of all connection to their humanity. Pelican Bay State Prison has no windows, while portions of
Oklahoma State Penitentiary, McAlester and US Penitentiary Florence ADMAX are entirely underground. Prisoners have no

unmanaged human contact while in solitary confinement, because in the words of Susan
Jones, the warden of Colorado State Penitentiary, “the ability to touch somebody in a

positive manner is something that our offenders have to earn…we believe in the
ability to modify behavior and change individuals, to make them more productive and
more safe” (Solitary Confinement). Thus, the maximum security prison materially constructs a space in
which prisoners are robbed of the rights and privileges associated with the category of
“humanity” or the “human”. As Michel Foucault famously outlines in his lectures at the Collège de France, biopolitics
are a politics of exclusion, a technology of power through which the state attempts to
define which lives are considered valuable enough to be protected by the laws of a
state. Biopolitics were used paradigmatically by the totalitarian governments of pre-WWII (most notably, the Third Reich in Germany)
though they persists today in less obvious ways: the bodies of the citizens and inhabitants of the modern state are owned by the state, and it is
up to the state to enforce policies to ostensibly protect (certain) bodies of the citizenry. Life is thus redefined as a political object. Biopolitics, in
short, is a proxy for the state’s total control over an individual human body – the state’s total power to make a body live or let it die. A key
moment of transition to the biopolitical state is the transformation of the concept of the state itself. At one time, states were defined by
territory, marking anyone within a state’s territorial boundaries a sovereign citizen of that state. The modern state, however, defines citizenship
as a means of drawing ideological and metaphorical boundaries (rather than purely geographical ones) between peoples. In defining
who constitutes a citizen, the state also specifies which bodies are worthy of life – and
the allegedly inalienable (human) rights associated with (legitimate) life – and which are
not. The concept of biopolitics helps us to better understand the rapid growth of maximum security prisons in the United States and the
inhumane treatment of prisoners in isolation. The discourse and guarantees of human rights are adopted by the state in ways that differentiate
legitimate life – those people for whom the state expends energy to make live – from bodies with no social or political value to the body politic.
The exercise of punishment in the modern prison “is intended to apply the law not so
much to a real body capable of feeling pain as to a juridical subject, the possessor,
among other rights, of the right to exist” (Foucault 13). Prisons are enclosed spaces
that house illegitimate bodies, which is to say, bodies that must be disciplined
(rehabilitated) before they can effectively function in society as “juridical subject[s]”,
or agents with the right to exist. By co-opting the bodies of criminals and designating
when, where, and how they can function in specific capacities, the state is able to
redefine them in ways that make them better able to serve the interests of the state.
But rehabilitation is not afforded to all prisoners; despite the fact that some prisons
still ostensibly operate as spaces of rehabilitation, the explosion of supermax prisons
across the United States points to a shift in the way punishment is understood and
carried out – not as discipline or rehabilitation, but as a means to permanently exclude
illegitimate bodies, or bodies that refuse to subject themselves to the will of the state.
As Foucault notes, “The body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a

subjected body” (Foucault 26). It is through indefinite solitary confinement that those who
are unwilling or unable to be both productive and subjected, to relinquish their
personal power and agency to the power of the state, are removed from the category
of subject and are instead relegated to the category of object. To draw a parallel, Hannah Arendt
describes prisoners in concentration camps in the Third Reich in this way: “Their plight is not that they are not equal

before the law, but that no law exists for them” (Arendt 375). Similarly, no law exists for prisoners detained
indefinitely in solitary confinement because they are discursively constructed as outside the realm of juridical law and political or qualified
existence. The supermax creates a hierarchization of criminals in which some are still deserving of a return to life, but others, the “worst of the
worst”, are left to languish in a zone of social abandonment. This creates a state of exception wherein bodies in solitary confinement are
The least desirable criminals – those who cannot or
stripped of their rights as humans and reduced to objects.

will not submit to the power of the state to define and control their bodies – are
redefined as the enemy of the state, and placed in isolation. In short, maximum security prisons become
a means of making “undesirables disappear from the face of the earth” (Arendt 559). Punishment without end is not punishment that has any
significant ability to discipline an individual; instead, it is a means of getting rid of surplus people who are of no further use to the state.

The state is built upon a series of dominant hierarchies, wielding a strong arm of
centralized power to crush dissent. It prima facie endorses all social hierarchies,
promoting economic, gender, and racial division. The ills of the state are not flaws, but
designs.
Newman 10 {Saul, associate professor in the Department of Government in the School of Public
Affairs at American University in Washington, DC, “Politics of Postanarchism” (2010), Edinburgh
University Press, pp. 107-109}

The state is seen as a violent institution of

Central to anarchism, as we have seen, is the repudiation of state authority.

domination – as a structure which sustains and intensifies other hierarchies and

relations of power and exploitation, including economic relations. The state is always
accompanied by a statist mind-set or political logic which affirms the idea of the
necessity and inevitability of the state, particularly at revolutionary junctures, and
prevents us thinking beyond it. Yet thinking beyond the state is something we must do. Indeed, I see this as being the
central task for radical politics today. As Badiou also recognises, the state, and the failure to transcend or escape its thrall, is one of the
fundamental problems of radical politics: More precisely, we must ask the question that, without a doubt, constitutes the great enigma of the
century: why does the subsumption of politics, either through the form of the immediate bond (the masses), or the mediate bond (the party)
ultimately give rise to bureaucratic submission and the cult of the State? 5 What must be explained, in other words, is the relation that ties us
the state as more than simply an
to the state and which leads to the perpetuation of state power. Like the anarchists, Badiou sees

institution or series of institutions; it is also a certain relationship of domination to which people are

bound through mechanisms like parliamentary democracy or organisations like the

vanguard party. This is why, for Badiou, there is a certain link between the party and the state – the revolutionary party is a
centralised and disciplined organisation structured around the aim of seizing state power; indeed, he refers to it as if it were the one entity –
the party-state. 6 This critique of the state and the party has clear resonances with anarchism. As we saw in Chapter 3, anarchists regard the
party as an authoritarian structure which is organised around the future goal of gaining state power; indeed, the party is a microcosm of the
state itself, and an instance of the state even before it gets into power. If radical politics is to escape the pitfalls of state power and its inevitable
authoritarianism, it must also eschew the form of the party. We also find further parallels with anarchism in Badiou’s understanding of the state
and its relation to society. In Badiou’s analysis, the state is seen as a certain way of representing a social situation, a way of including and
counting as one – say through categories of citizenship, practices such as voting – the multiple elements or parts of that situation. Here, Badiou
the state has no regard for the individual, for differences; 7 it simply
maintains, much like Stirner, that

incorporates the individual as an anonymous element in an overall structure, through

the ordering and assigning of places and roles. We could say, for instance, that the
state’s surveillance of public places, its obsession with identification and information
gathering, its management of crowds and movements of people, are measures
designed to ensure that everyone stays put, that everyone is counted, that nothing
escapes its incorporation. Furthermore, according to Badiou, while the state is a re-presentation of a situation structured by a
particular set of social relations – say those of bourgeois society with its class hierarchies and capitalist economic exchanges – at the same time
it is also distinct and separate from it, forming a kind of excrescence. For Badiou, however, the problem with the Marxist analysis of the state is
that by focusing on this point of excess – on seeing the state as a coercive apparatus that can simply be seized in a revolutionary upheaval and
later suppressed – is that the state is much more intransigent and inexorable than Marxists imagined, and that the revolution would simply lead
to a changing of the guard: This is because even if the route of political change . . . is bordered by the State, it cannot in any way let itself be
guided by the latter, for the State is precisely non-political, insofar as it cannot change, save hands, and it is well known that there is little
strategic signification in such a change. 8 Instead, radical politics must bear witness to the event, in which is revealed what Badiou calls the void
of the situation: that which is not counted or formally included in the situation, its radical and destabilising excess. 9 I shall return to this idea of
the event and its political consequences later; but it would appear at this stage that there are certain parallels with anarchism in Badiou’s
approach to the question of the state in revolutionary politics. The idea that the Marxist seizure of state power will produce only a changing of
the guard is, as we saw in Chapter 3, precisely the same warning given by anarchists in the nineteenth century. Rather than the state having a
class or ‘political’ character – so that if the right class controlled it its oppressive character would be transformed – the state is, as Badiou
non-political’ in the sense that it cannot change in this way. In anarchist terms, this refers to the
puts it, ‘

way that the state has its own specific structural logic of domination and self-perpetuation

that is not reducible to class, and that cannot be displaced simply because
representatives of a different class are at the helm. So, anarchists would share Badiou’s point that what is
needed is a different form of politics which is not ‘guided’ by the state: that is, which does not have as its aim the revolutionary seizure of state
power through the vanguard party, but rather which seeks to overcome state power through the construction of a different set of relations. In
other words, there is a need for a politics situated outside the state. Indeed, Badiou talks about the need for a politics that ‘puts the State at a
distance’. 10 This might take the form of non-party political organisations which shun involvement in parliamentary processes and which focus
on specific issues, such as the status and rights of illegal migrants, 11 or an autonomous commune where new, egalitarian relations are made
possible and whose existence constitutes a fundamental rupture with state-ordered society. 12
 Advocacy
The affirmative advocates for anarchist prefigurative politics and revolution,
constructing alternative societies and systems to counter the hegemony of the system
or in other terms, “building the new in the belly of the old.”
Abolish the prisons! Abolish the state!
Uri 5 (Gordon, Uri. 2005 “LIBERATION NOW: PRESENT-TENSE DIMENSIONS OF CONTEMPORARY ANARCHISM “ BT)
From a strategical perspective, the pursuit of prefigurative politics indicates most clearly a politic of the here and
now, and is seen by many anarchists as an inseparable aspect of their projects. This is informed by a critique of reformist and
authoritarian revolutionary models of social change. For the latter to be successful, anarchists
believe, the modes of organisation that will replace capitalism, the state, gendered
divisions of labour and so on need to be prepared alongside (though not instead of)
the attack on present institutions. On such a reading, if people want a society that is
characterised by non- hierarchical cooperation and the erosion of dominatory
institutions and behaviours, then such a society directly proceeds from the realities
that present-day movements develop. “The very process of building an anarchist movement from below is viewed as
the process of consociation, self-activity and self- management that must ultimately yield that revolutionary self that can act upon, change and
2
revolution
manage an authentic society”. Anarchists by and large no longer tend to understand , if they even use the term, as a horizon
event but as an ongoing process. This, as opposed to traditional anarchism’s political imaginary which
unmistakably included the notion of revolution as an event, a moment of large scale
qualitative change in social life. Bakunin spoke of “a universal, worldwide revolution...[the] formidable reactionary
coalition can be destroyed only by the greater power of the simultaneous revolutionary alliance and action of all the people of the civilized
3
world”. It is certainly true that anarchists carried this view of revolution one step away from gross millenarianism, by insisting that the
revolutionary horizon can be and was traversed during exceptional moments. The Paris Commune of 1871, the Italian factory occupations of
1919-1920, the Spanish Revolution of 1936 and the French May 1968 uprisings are the most obvious examples of events that were interpreted
4
by anarchists in this way, with their transience and localisation doing nothing to diminish their qualitative significance. Still, these were
the deterioration of rare revolutionary
exceptional moments. The ultimate failure of these events and
“successes” into authoritarian nightmares debased the coin of Revolution for anarchist
movement. With the re-emergence of anarchism in later decades, the revolutionary horizon would become more and more attracted into the
present tense, culminating in its complete absorption as a potential dimension of everyday life. Colin Ward’s focus on the pedestrian
interactions which function without hierarchy and alienation, and the many Situationist-influenced explorations of an anarchist micro- politics
5
of resistance and reconstruction in everyday life, are prominent contributions to this process. In the words of U.S. anarchist publishing
Our revolution must be an immediate revolution in our daily lives;
collective CrimethInc.,
anything else is not a revolution but a demand that once again people do what they
do not want to do and hope that this time, somehow, the compensation will be
enough. Those who assume, often unconsciously, that it is impossible to achieve their
own desires – and thus, that it is futile to fight for themselves – often end up fighting
for an ideal or cause instead. But it is still possible to fight for ourselves, or at least the experiment must be worth a try; so it
is crucial that we seek change not in the name of some doctrine or grand cause, but on
behalf of ourselves, so that we will be able to live more meaningful lives. Similarly we
must seek first and foremost to alter the contents of our own lives in a revolutionary
manner, rather than direct our struggle towards world-historical changes which we
will not live to witness. In this way we will avoid the feelings of worthlessness and
alienation that result from believing that it is necessary to “sacrifice oneself for the
cause”, and instead live to experience the fruits of our labors...in our labors
themselves.6 Is such an approach sustainable? What kind of political understandings can ground it, beyond just “explaining” it on the
level of social movements' construction of “collective action frameworks”? And what significance does this present-tense orientation have for
the concrete choices that anarchists make about their political projects, as well as about the sensibilities ?HE CONTINUES As the
anarchist revolutionary horizon constricts itself into the present tense, revolutionary commitments, in turn, come to reflect and respond to the
aspirations of living, experiencing individuals. Utterances that militate against the individual’s unfreedom and celebrate her or his self-
They must insist on the centrality of immediate
realisation are no longer content to do so in the abstract.
liberation, to the extent to which it can be achieved, in order to have any relevance for an anarchist
“revolution in everyday life”. At the same time, the re-contextualisation of anarchist individualism in the present tense and its
concretion in empirical subjects reflects back on its (anti-)political content. An anarchist individualism which demands realisation within society
as it exists today, rather than as it could be, defines its realisation as-against this existing society and serves as an immediate motivation for
the point of their struggles is not only to help bring about
action. Anarchists are increasingly stressing that
social transformation along anarchist lines, but also to liberate themselves to the greatest
degree possible. On such a reading, a central motivation for anarchist action – not least so in its prefigurative idiom – lies in the
desire to inhabit, to the greatest extent possible, social relations that approximate anarchists' ideals for society as a whole. Hence
personal liberation and the confrontation with a homogenising and oppressive social
order can be seen to each supply the other’s motivation: the individual’s own
experience of restriction supplies a direct impulse for social action, whereas the
experience of struggle itself becomes a site of present-tense liberation. The revolution
is now, and we must let the desires we have about the future manifest themselves in
the here and now as best as we can. When we start doing that, we stop fighting for
some abstract condition for the future and instead start fighting to see those desires
realized in the present. Through this process we start pushing back the veil of
submission and domination towards the periphery of our lives, we start reclaiming
control over our own lives...Whether the project is a squat, a sharing of free food, an
act of sabotage, a pirate radio station, a periodical, a demonstration, or an attack
against one of the institutions of domination, it will not be entered into as a political
obligation, but as a part of the life one is striving to create, as a flowering of one's self-
determined existence.21 Feeding back into such an individualist grounding , we can say that anarchist modes of
interaction – non-hierarchical, voluntary, cooperative, solidaric and playful – are no
longer seen as features on which to model a future society, but rather as an ever-
present potential of social interaction here and now. Such an approach promotes anarchy as culture, as a
lived reality that pops up everywhere in new guises, adapts to different cultural climates, and should be extended and developed
experimentally for its own sake, whether or not we believe it can become, in some sense, the prevailing mode of society. Also, it amounts to
promoting the view of anarchy as a feature of everyday life, in mundane settings such as “a quilting bee, a dinner party, a black market...a
22
The task for anarchists, then, is not to
neighborhood protection society, an enthusiasts' club, a nude beach”.
introduce a new society but to realise an alternative society as much as possible in the
present tense.
With the successful creation of anarchy, the view on crime will turn from the arm of
the retributivist state to the helping hand of the stranger. Rehabilitative measures
inspired by restorative and transformative justice will be the cornerstone of
mediation, intervening when conflict flickers to help heal the wounds of the offender
and victim.
Anarchist Agency 23 [Anarchist Agency, idk citations, “Press Brief: Illuminating Anarchist Perspectives on Restorative Justice &
Transformative Justice,” https://www.anarchistagency.com/press-briefs/press-releases/press-brief-illuminating-anarchist-perspectives-on-
restorative-justice-transformative-justice/] // tempeprep ov

Anarchists
Why do anarchists advocate for restorative justice and transformative justice as alternatives to policing and prisons?

reject State authority in all its forms, including the criminal legal system. They believe
in self-organization, autonomy, and finding ways to address social conflict and harmful
behavior through restorative justice and transformative justice practices that
emphasize individual and collective healing and accountability, rather than
criminalizing and incarcerating people through a punitive system that perpetuates
cycles of harm. While the concepts of restorative justice and transformative justice and criticisms of policing and prison systems have
gained visibility over the past few years, misconceptions of the terms are common, with many believing they equate to “no justice.” In fact,
restorative and transformative frameworks seek to address the root causes of harm,
and find meaningful ways to bring justice and peace to all involved, unlike the criminal
legal system, which often only exacerbates the problems and trauma.
 ROTB
The Role of the Ballot is to: Vote for the debater who best deconstructs oppression.
While obviously signing the ballot won’t make the state or prison system disappear,
voting for strategies to deconstruct oppression in this round makes us better activists
in the future and encourages further research into otherwise unknown perspectives
about our world.
Giroux 13 (Henry, American scholar and cultural critic. One of the founding theorists of critical pedagogy in the United States, he is best known for his pioneering work in public
pedagogy, “Public Intellectuals Against the Neoliberal University,” 29 October 2013, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/19654-public-intellectuals-against-the-neoliberal-university)//ghs-
VA

Increasingly, as universities are shaped by an audit culture, the call to be objective and impartial, whatever one's
intentions, can easily echo what George Orwell called the official truth or the establishment point of view.

Lacking a self-consciously democratic political focus, teachers are often reduced, or reduce
themselves, to the role of a technician or functionary engaged in formalistic rituals,

unconcerned with the disturbing and urgent problems that confront the larger society or
the consequences of one's pedagogical practices and research undertakings. Hiding behind
appeals to balance and objectivity, too many scholars refuse to recognize that being
committed to something does not cancel out what C. Wright Mills once called hard thinking. Teaching
needs to be rigorous, self-reflective, and committed not to the dead zone of instrumental rationality but to the practice
of freedom, to a critical sensibility capable of advancing the parameters of knowledge, addressing crucial social
issues, and connecting private troubles and public issues. In opposition to the instrumental model of teaching, with its conceit of political
neutrality and its fetishization of measurement, I argue that academics should combine the mutually

interdependent roles of critical educator and active citizen. This requires finding ways to connect the
practice of classroom teaching with important social problems and the operation of power in the larger society while providing the conditions
for students to view themselves as critical agents capable of making those who exercise authority and power answerable for their actions.
Higher education cannot be decoupled from what Jacques Derrida calls a democracy to come, that is,
a democracy that must always "be open to the possibility of being contested, of contesting itself, of criticizing and indefinitely improving
itself."33Within this project of possibility and impossibility, critical pedagogy must be
understood as a deliberately informed and purposeful political and moral practice, as opposed to one
that is either doctrinaire, instrumentalized or both. Moreover, a critical pedagogy should
also gain part of its momentum in higher education among students who will go back to the
schools, churches, synagogues and workplaces to produce new ideas, concepts and critical ways of

understanding the world in which young people and adults live. This is a notion of intellectual
practice and responsibility that refuses the professional neutrality and privileged isolation of
the academy. It also affirms a broader vision of learning that links knowledge to the
power of self-definition and to the capacities of students to expand the scope of
democratic freedoms, particularly those that address the crisis of education , politics, and the
social as part and parcel of the crisis of democracy itself. In order for critical pedagogy, dialogue and thought to have real effects, they must
advocate that all citizens, old and young, are equally entitled, if not equally empowered, to shape the society in which they live. This is a
commitment we heard articulated by the brave students who fought tuition hikes and the destruction of civil liberties and social provisions in
Quebec and to a lesser degree in the Occupy Wall Street movement. If educators are to function as public intellectuals, they need to listen to
young people who are producing a new language in order to talk about inequality and power relations, attempting to create alternative
democratic public spaces, rethinking the very nature of politics, and asking serious questions about what democracy is and why it no longer
exists in many neoliberal societies. These young people who are protesting the 1% recognize that they have been written out of the discourses
they are arguing for
of justice, equality and democracy and are not only resisting how neoliberalism has made them expendable,

a collective future very different from the one that is on display in the current political
and economic systems in which they feel trapped. These brave youth are insisting that the relationship
between knowledge and power can be emancipatory, that their histories and experiences matter, and that what they say and do counts in their
struggle to unlearn dominating privileges, productively reconstruct their relations with others, and transform, when necessary, the world
around them.

1) This is best for critical education— This role of the judge allows us to have
nuanced debates about social issues of our time.
2) Best for activism— Talking about methodologies to combat oppressive
structures makes us better advocates in the future—this is a key pre-requisite
to education and fairness claims, even if we learn from debate, that education
is useless without the ability to put it to use.

Anarchy is a critical framework for intersectional theory. Many have recognized the
everlasting importance of abolishing hierarchies and centralized power structures,
synthesizing into important movements like black anarchism, anarcha-feminism,
queer-anarchism, and much more. Hierarchies must be fought at every confrontation.
Anark 20 [Daniel Baryon or aka Anark, Popular anarchist writer and organizer “Power,” https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anark-
power] // tempeprep ov

In the United States, for example, White supremacy is a very central philosophy of justification because, by using the mental framework of
racist ideology, power structures can exert coercion and manufacture obedience both in the duped white followers and oppressed non-white
populations, by convincing the duped white followers to enforce the privilege they have been given and by convincing the oppressed
Through the construct of whiteness, the white population is
populations that their struggle is futile.

made to feel it is the default, the uncorrupted, original copy, and that all diversity is
deviance therefrom. In this way, and many more, non-white lives are gradually worn
down through mental degradation and the further the pallor of their skin differs from
the normalcy of whiteness, the more deviant they are considered.
So too is patriarchy a fundamental component of the modern machine, reformed as it
has been by generation after generation of hierarchical machines. Through this
mythology, the man is made the superior of woman; he is associated with the features of the dominator
and groomed to embody them. Gender roles are held in stasis and gender expressions are viciously
policed creating an unnatural binary that helps stabilize a vast system of exploitation: the man an
empty automaton to be sacrificed, to be worked, to never complain; the woman a
subservient, a meek supplicant to be rewarded from the table scraps. Even as women
slowly regain some measure of agency in their lives, a reactionary movement rears its
head, demanding they return to a time previous to social leveling. Transgender identity,
a reality observed since ancient societies, is then naturally seen as an existential
threat; a wrecking ball to the staunch systematization of gender roles in society.
I give these examples not to provide an exhaustive overview but instead to echo the
observations of the intersectional feminists: these philosophies of justification are not
disconnected, they are complex and overlapping, having produced unique hierarchies of privilege and
justification to bolster each. By recognizing the diverse range of human struggle and in embracing both
the uniqueness of each intersection of oppression, while at the same time recognizing the grand
unifying features of all these experiences, we find a revolutionary vector.