Anarchist Revolution and the Middle Class

The State was not born a capitalist state: it was feudal and colonial, but not capitalist. The State was not born a capitalist state: it was feudal and colonial, but not capitalist. The State spread through colonialism and the accumulation of wealth to itself. It dispossessed (and still does dispossess) peoples of the land held in common …appropriating it and creating class societies of slaves, peasants, priests, artisans, merchants, and lords. It also encouraged Subjectification. The rulers were often legitimized by religious moralities: systems of representation that in this case specifically, were systems that justified those in a position of rule with the concept of Divine Right. As the merchant classes were able to slowly accumulate wealth (primitive accumulation) and become capitalist through the ownership of the means of production, eventually overthrowing the Religious State…

their power was still predicated on the need for systems of subjectification: they needed to be identities to associate themselves with wealth that was beyond the reach of their own personal force. Indeed, everyone needed to be an identity to maintain the order of things. With the bourgeois revolutions came both the rule of the capitalist classes and Objectification. In other words, the rationalization imminent to capitalist production and distribution encourages a different worldview: one that is peopled with objects more than it is peopled with subjects. In the centuries since, socialism was born and took many forms. The forms that socialism was to take were to various extents rooted more-or-less in Subjectification and Objectification, Nationalism and Statism, Representation and Rationalization. Of socialism was born anarchism. In all of this and especially after the many attempts at socialism through revolutionary practice, reformism, and dictatorship …Statism and Capitalism spread to a point at which the most Capitalist and Statist countries have been able to outsource production to those less successful in the practices of Capital and State. It is at this point that what we now call the Middle Class lost its old meaning and has become a propagandist tool for the ruling classes.

The Middle Class

In relation to wealth and the means of production in class societies, there have always been middling classes. In capitalist society, the middling classes are professionals (sometimes capitalist), small industrial capitalists, and small business capitalists (business owners who do not own the means of production, but do own the means of distribution and rely on wage labor for profit). With the outsourcing of production and the growing monopolization of corporations, there are now less small industrial capitalists amongst the middle class: more professionals (highly skilled laborers, etc.) and small business capitalists. The middle class is thus more unstable, more competitive amongst themselves, and with more potential to be open to small forms of socializing wealth. Their politics are often in favor of the Welfare State because of the precarity inherent in their social position. In one generation, a working class individual can take part in this new form of middle class many times over; and, someone born into the homes of the middle class is likely to descend from it: to become unskilled and without the capacity to run a small business. It is only in the upper brackets of the middle class that inherited wealth can provide the children of middle class parents with an advantage in becoming skilled or starting their own business (or taking over the business of their parents). The Middle Class is basically a zone of temporary success for those with capitalist ambitions. It is thus realistic to consider those in or of the middle class with anarchist ambitions as honest revolutionaries just as much as those who remain unskilled and of the lowest class brackets.

Anarchist Revolution

Anarchists are in opposition to both the State and Capital; many today, comprehending the Subjectification of Statism and the Objectification of Capitalism are also opposed to institutions that rule through such mechanisms but aren’t themselves necessary for the Capitalist State to exist (but are in a sense, necessary for the ruling class to maintain power): patriarchy, psychiatry, heteronormativity, marriage, etc. Anarchism (anarchist practice and theory) spreads on two levels: psychologically and economically – through the destruction of Objectification (and Subjectification) and through the socialization of wealth. An anarchist revolution would effectively be both the expropriation and socialization of the means of production as well as the destruction of those institutions that are inherently hierarchical or a form of Power. Many socialists, while considering the working class as the likely agents of a socialist revolution, also considered it of vital importance to gain the allegiances of the middle class: the intellectuals, artists, skilled workers, distributors, and such.

Anarchists have often had a different view of things but by far not all anarchists: Kropotkin, for instance, was very interested in winning over those of the middling classes to anarchism. This may be because they have been particularly concerned with both the destruction of the State and Capital and have rejected the politics of winning over the middle class as a useless endeavor since the middle class is hardly in a position to expropriate the means of production any more than the rest of the working class and gaining their ideological allegiance would be more useful for the usurpation of the State than its destruction. But as things are now with this rather new composition of the middle class, it isn’t so easy to find a clear position on their capacity to be agents of an anarchist revolution. Since anarchism spreads on the above mentioned two levels, the allegiance of those from the middle class (at one point or another) is a gain and puts a revolution in a less compromised situation since the middle class now, for the most part, has no real economic interest in maintaining capitalism. Also, the middle class as a class with more wealth has a potential to socialize more wealth. Either way, the spread of anarchism on the economic level (socialization of wealth) is extraordinarily challenging: the means of production have been outsourced and are rather inaccessible physically, the capacity of the ruling class is great (militarily, psychologically, politically, culturally, and economically), and attempts to socialize wealth in the forms of communes, free distribution, and expropriation of commodities is harder because of the former growth in ruling class powers. So at this point, we mostly make our gains psychologically. Whether these psychological gains are the result of riots, academic work, or literature distribution is less relevant than the fact that these psychological gains are a double-edged sword: they provide the ruling class with ideas for managing revolutionary desires and with insight into revolutionary practices that are illegal and/or subversive. This increases the ruling classes capacity to propagate counter-information in an attempt to discredit claims about their own position as a ruling class and ours as a ruled class. At the same time, it does change the ways in which we relate to each other, wealth, and power.

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