Anarchies in collision.

Abstract

The understanding of East and West and the confrontation of western capitalism in its nomadic development is compounded by fundamentalisms which are inherently nomadic. Both forms of nomadisms have their own power to produce violence. The understanding of East and West nomadism cannot be adequately comprehended at the cultural level but must be addressed at the civilizational level in which anarchistic power is an arbitrary creating collisions in their wake.

Introduction

It has been said that the global process is designed to eliminate anarchistic and even terroristic violence, and replace it by market based democracy as the new world order. There is no need to debate the contradictory phrase "market based democracy," since the task of this discussion is to explicate the way that this phrase (and more basic ontological-metaphysical preunderstandings) belong to anarchistic violence. To make sense of anarchistic violence it is necessary to distinguish among its various forms and locate the arche of anarchy as it appears in various modifications. Once this task is accomplished, the globalizing processes will appear in a very different light than the one that is paraded by the protagonists (including "objective" journalists) who regard globalization as a bearer of universal French fries and potato chips made from genetically enhanced, although locally grown spuds by indigenous peasants, and reaped by colorfully dressed native maidens. In brief, the modifications of such violence will show to what extent there arise confrontations among anarchies and, in the final analysis, how they might belong to the same metaphysics. But before this confrontation can be understood, a brief logic of anarchistic violence should be sketched in order to show its unique characteristics that are different from other modes of violence, such as revolutionary--despite the fact that anarchists invariably are defined as revolutionaries. It must be noted that as other modes of violence, anarchistic is also a phenomenon that first of all belongs to experience and not to some assumed "ground." This is to say, it is part of human conscious life. Therefore the term "consciousness" will be used to designate a given mode of perception that is basically a theoretical or a philosophical system. Another term that is relevant for this investigation is "conscience," and it stands for ethical awareness. Although there are theoretical efforts to separate consciousness from conscience, in daily discourses the two are closely interrelated. Each basic consciousness--theory--is closely intertwined with its attendant conscience--ethics. For this reason Latin unites the two terms as consciencia. This term will be used throughout this essay.

Logic of Anarchistic Violence

As complex civilizations are in permanent flux, every consciencia is intent to govern the whole. Hence there is a tension among them, since each has an intent of its own dictatorship. Skinnerians have their Walden II, the fundamentalists have their holy wars, the capitalists have their market, and the Marxists have their utopia. Complex civilization is a continuous balancing among different types of consciencia, and the price each pays its conscience is inauthentic and hence potentially a bad conscience. Inauthenticity is a matter of justifying consciousness: we would like to impose our consciencia absolutely, but the weakness of human nature does not allow us to enact our aims, or the fulfillment of our aims must be postponed to some future while we wait for the right signs from heaven, from historical conditions, or from the wise leaders.

Inauthentic consciencia lack stability and can awaken the authentic purity. The tolerance of other types of consciencia and one's own position will be regarded as unethical conscience and all the justifications of such tolerance as false consciousness. Anarchism, in its authentic mode, demands the destruction of all given social structures and the bodily practices which exhibit such structures. Anarchistic violence is basically terrorism. It is nonetheless necessary to distinguish anarchistic terrorism from another major form of terrorism--that of social revolutions. The latter are instigated by groups which attack the established powers and violate a given law. Hence, they are defined as criminal. Yet revolutionary terrorism is accompanied by a consciousness that such actions will be legal in post-revolutionary society. What a group suppresses by terror today, will be suppressed by law tomorrow. Legalized exploitation and slavery are solid examples. A revolutionary group terrorizes established centers of power, both political and economic and thus commits a crime by attempting to abolish exploitation and slavery, with a justifying consciousness that in a post-revolutionary society exploitation and slavery will be forbidden by law. Phenomenologically, this is called horizontal intentionality, allowing temporal justification, such that the disruption of permanently imposed laws is designed to enhance and establish different laws in the future. Terrorism in this type of consciencia is not grounded in anarchistic consciencia, since the good conscience of a revolutionary is grounded in a consciousness both of the current social, economic, and political factors and the future remedies. The latter might point to an invariant that has some overlapping features with the rules even of the currenetly established laws and relationships--specifically in today's general adherence to scientific consciousness.