Anarchists tend to pose our core differences with marxists in terms of degrees of radicalism or rootedness. One of the classic ways this gets stated is that marxism deals with the political whereas we deal with the ethical.
These terms to the disagreement, once posed, are almost always immediately acknowledged and indeed embraced by both marxists and anarchists.
The marxists tend to be delighted by the framing because it smoothly follows their narrative of being the pragmatists. And additionally by and large most marxists are explicit moral nihilists — they don’t believe there’s a point to the investigations of ethical philosophy. They’re not interested in interrogating what values or desires they *should* hold, they’re interested in pursuing the desires they already have, or that they see as roughly uncontroversial. And those few marxists that do see value to ethical philosophy tend to oppose rigor in it, and also tend to disconnect it from their political work. Or else, when they do consider ethics, they tend to end up very close to anarchists.
Conversely anarchists tend to embrace this distinction because it’s obviously a distinction of radicalism. The super-structures that the marxist would typically speak entirely in terms of are ultimately simplistic macroscopic abstractions floating above a far more complicated and dynamic reality. The marxist loves to talk in terms of classes, the anarchist prioritizes talking in terms of interpersonal relationships and interactions. In such a sense we anarchists are both more universalist and more particularist. We seek the more fundamental and foundational dynamics, less bound to the vagaries of any specific historical context, but in so doing we obtain the means to analyze specific contexts with greater detail and insight. Of course we recognize the frequent practical utility of analysis in terms of oppressed/oppressor classes, but we see the fuzziness of such abstractions for what it is and are happy to go deeper than such simple frameworks. The radical position is that you can retain the insights offered by hasty generalizations — at the molar level — while also recognizing that these are ultimately not as fundamental and can be superseded by deeper dynamics — at the molecular level.
If marxism looks rather like engineering, anarchism looks a lot like physics. It should come as little surprise that I think the physics perspective ultimately trumps the “common sense” practicality of the engineering perspective. And it should be just as unsurprising that the marxists see “common sense” as the ideal starting point. You start with what you already know and only update that model once it starts clearly breaking down and you’re forced to. This explains the very modular way marxist discourse has updated itself to consider things beyond their original proletariat v bourgeoisie focus. New discourses on liberation and oppression (similarly simplified into tales of relatively simple class conflicts) get grafted on to marxist thought in ungainly ways and the whole discourse lumbers on.
What is now starting to be more widely characterized in a negative manner as identity politics or “idpol” is in many respects just a continuation of this kind of simplistic sort of conceptual schematization. Modern social justice is the product of liberatory insights expanding from the discourse of a small number of radicals and becoming very rapidly adopted by millions. It’s only natural that some compression or simplification occurs, and that those so overwhelmed by the onrush of new considerations try to parse it all into rigid frameworks.
Social justice has — on the whole — thus become in many regards a rather pragmatic attempt to hash out an etiquette or legal system (albeit a decentralized one largely enforced through reputation rather than state violence). This is an undertaking quite different from ethics. Indeed the biggest advantage and disadvantage of social justice is that it seeks to be as motivation-independent as it can be. It doesn’t attempt to establish *why* one should be for example opposed to misogyny. It either takes for granted that its audience already shares the same values (naturally causing some confusion from slight differences in these assumed values), or it seeks to arrange a sociocultural state of affairs independent of people’s underlying values. “Who cares what people actually believe, let’s find ways of browbeating them into at least acting decently.”
One can see why, as with marxism, most anarchists find the mainstream of social justice profoundly incomplete and insufficiently audacious. It often gives up before going deeper into challenging all power relations in and of themselves, settling instead for an incomplete intersectionality, and it shies away from th.....