Identity and Lineage, Inherent in Class

The State is kind of like music: it’s not quite the people making it happen, nor is it the structures set onto paper that help them to do that; it’s not exactly the recording of a given moment which persists the moment itself, but it’s not really the moment either. We can tell it ‘exists’, but it doesn’t exist in the way that we can say things we can point to exist—and the things we can point to themselves, somehow, point to the thing itself, music, or, the State.

As a musician, I’m happy to say that music exists, it’s real, and it’s everywhere (and nowhere, because I can’t really point to it). As someone with anarchistic tendencies, which I temper in order to question toward the true nature of the State, I’m unhappy to say that the State exists and am more likely to argue that its transient, constructed quality points to its ‘artifice’. It’s real in the same way that a lie is real.

So how does this line of questioning relate to class, identity, and lineage, per the title? Well, I’m actively wondering that. I’m also wondering why it’s so hard to ‘take revolutionary action’, whether it can’t be easier or more obviously effective, and why it is when it happens to be both those things.
It’s kind of like wondering what makes some music ‘good’—which I feel in my bones, my heart, my soul—and some ‘bad’ (and why can my heart change the way it feels about that which I previously felt was ‘bad’?).

Well, how it relates: here, per the title, I’m going to ‘tell a story’ about how class is wrapped up in identity and lineage. However, it’s a story that is neither finished nor up to me to finish. Therefore, I feel it is necessary to pose these questions, since they are the basis of beginning storytelling. Every organizer, from the outset and immediately prior to beginning the work of organizing, faces and passes through these questions in order to tell the stories of which their work consists.

It’s pretty easy to point out how our lives fit into the framework of the State, just like it’s easy to point out how each and every of our actions makes music. Listen to the rhythm of your walk; consider where your money comes from (and where it goes). However, there’s a clear difference between ‘noticing music happening’ and ‘making music happen’. If the State exists somewhere in the world, in the form of physical exchanges and agreements to perpetuate those exchanges, then it’s likely that even if I’ve divorced myself from a life that fits neatly within that system of exchanges and agreements, the basis of my life and its material/ideal ramifications still likely ‘travel back to’ the State.

So, what’s an organizer to do? Whatever it is, the State, and the questions its existence is capable of posing, are of fundamental importance to arriving at an answer.
Let me put it this way. In a similar way to how there’s a difference between ‘noticing music’ and ‘making music’, there’s a difference between ‘what the State is doing’ and ‘what life outside the State does’.
For example, the State (and its constituent, local states) tends to have, specific to its history, certain achievements and stories. All wrapped up in the question of the State is its achievements, which we within it benefit from. These achievements form a kind of tradition, since it is told that the State is capable of providing these things, and by providing these things it is actually capable of providing more, further things. Within this tradition, it is possible for specific hero-types to be upheld, since it is clearly the people within the State who are actually creating and ‘providing’ these things—and, by rhetorical convolutions, the contribution of a specific person tends to come back to the tradition of providership of which it is told that the State, alone, upholds. It is the communication (and the observation that follows this) of the State’s productive tradition that provides the basis for a specific person’s achievement being recognized as ‘theirs’, ‘their achievement’. The analogy is: it’s like saying ‘the achievement of Music’ and ‘the achievement of Yo Yo Ma, the musician,’ are one and the same achievement.
The odd aspect of all of this is that the tendency of the State is not to put forth achievements prior to its existence as its own. This seems like common sense—it’s the recognition of the break that occurs in order for something like the State to come about, whereby the State is a Unique occurrence and its own achievement. The achievement of a State is simultaneously the achievement of its people and ‘its own achievement’, otherwise it could be said that the people could ‘put down’ the State whenever they wished, since they, its creator, persist it, and it is the State that requires them and not the other way around. Thus, in order that the State can persist, it is told (in ways that are always obvious once the trick is spotted) that the people require the State for their own persistence, and because of that it is the State that arranged for its own creation (in earlier times as the agentic and conquesting King who was the half-human half-State mediator of its existence, in modern times as the historical-economic forces which political actors can align with or be obliterated against by their more-inevitable opponents) of which the people only incidentally participated in.

That ‘the people require the State for their own persistence’ is a fiction that the State itself, as the systemic reality it works hard to materialize as exchanges and agreements, presents as its basis and as the ‘obstacle’ to those organizing.
This much is almost laughably clear, the obstacles: it is told that everyone has to earn a living, and those doing so have ‘their time’ taken up by work activities; moreover, working for most people is almost always efforted rather than easeful, and at the end of their ‘time apportioned’ for work these people feel exhausted in a way that makes organizing seem impossible; moreover, there remains the legality of opposing the State (and its specific, local state) through organizing work, which is really to question the efficacy and ease of organizing—if there’s potential to be killed then it’s ‘hard’, and if it’s not obviously and directly effective then it’s ‘hard’—if it’s hard then it might just not be worth it, especially if it would simply be ‘easier’ to commit to, say, earning a living and relieving exhaustion at the end of the day by collapsing.

Besides, what even is the work of organizing? Say we maintain the State—what does it benefit me to have ‘more control’ of its apparatuses from within it? Contained in that question are many stories about what is and what might; some of the work of organizing is telling stories that counteract, subvert, combat the existing stories that generate the State. Different organizers make different tradeoffs regarding which stories persist, and which should be altered or barred altogether from being told.
For example: inherent to the State is its history, which is the tradition of production. This much is clear when an organizer makes the case for reappropriating the abundant product of the State’s apparatuses—the story of the State being necessary for daily persistence is subverted by pointing out that it does not do a good job of this, see, look how many in poverty and remember or imagine how easy it would be to join that swathe. And doesn’t that swathe work hard, like you work hard? And look, we make so much, and so much is wasted rather than given to us, those who make and are responsible for making being a thing that’s happening. This machinery we power, we could use it to our own benefit, since currently it mostly solely benefits those above us. We, all of us, have so little and could have so much.
The pointing out of class, of being part of those who make or make making happen, is an identification in the intertwined sense of seeing something and being the thing that’s seen. Like pointing out something that’s alive and saying ‘I am alive too!’ or the reverse, saying ‘it is alive like me!’, but in any case what’s being pointed out above is wrapped up in the State, its productive tradition. So, let me return to the odd aspect of the State wherein its achievements, the productive tradition which occurs within its structures and lifespan, are the State’s identification of itself—here, for the workers who attempt to tell a story wherein it could be that the State exist for and by workers, it happens to be that the workers do the same thing as the State, identifying themselves as and of the productive tradition. In other words, the workers have identified themselves as the State, which is to say that the State has identified itself as the workers. This is at all possible because by identifying with the productive tradition, by doing the same thing, they are being the same thing, and the organizing process which follows this identification can only end up becoming the same thing. The State reconstitutes, the workers are no more or less under or over the thing they animate.

And why not? For a musician, there is no escaping music. A ‘non-musician’ has some hope—they can escape music merely by being beyond hearing distance of a cafe speaker, or a street performer, or by walking past a conservatory campus and paying it no heed. A musician next to them cannot help but hear music in the steps, in the cars honking, in the birds, the wind, the breath, and all these things mixing with the music of the street performer and the cafe speakers. Some people become musicians only when it’s time to sit down for some recital, whether to play or listen, and then become normal people on the train home, or whatever.
It’s the same for the worker. It is told that communism is stateless (and cannot be ‘programmatic’, that is, told before its happening), and sometimes it is told that to get to statelessness there must still be a state that transitions the people into communism. Is this state by and of the State? It depends: the person, capable of being a worker and a ‘non-worker’, when do they stop being worker, and when does the spacetime within which they can be and become normal people, doing normal people things, expand to encompass the whole land and its people? What is a normal person? I’ll say: it’s a bird, a bird is a normal person, like a tree is, and a rock—well, a rock can be a normal person, but not all rocks are being normal people, being that so many of them are tasked with being rocks, doing rock things. A musician has no hope of being a normal person, the whole of their life is filtered through Music, for Music’s sake and not their own. The story of a person taking hold of Music to turn the product of its machinery to their own ends is laughable—they can’t even point out Music proper, and only being able to point out the things that point to Music itself, they have no hope of possessing Music. It’s the same for the worker: there is no hope of possessing the State, it is only the State which is capable of possessing, precisely because it’s not there at all, even as you can say it’s real and effectual and terribly significant to our lives. In fact, the only way the worker’s revolution, as a story, makes sense at all is to say that within oneself is the State, and Music, or, really you are like these things, and everything that you typically point to in order to say ‘this is me’, such as your body, is not the thing and only something which points to the thing; the story of revolution only makes sense by realizing that You are the thing which is capable of possessing, and this thing is not capable of ‘possessing’ like things, such as the State, or Music, since you are the same thing.

So, back to the question of the work of organizing: if all that is the case, what hope is there of revolution? What is the meaning of revolution? It’s like asking ‘what is the meaning of the State’, and ‘what is the meaning of Music’. Any of these things will leave a normal person in poverty, since it deprives their life of all things ‘normal people’ do to be what they are, since these things reorient the contents of life toward the reflection of the thing. Moreover, the thing is not exactly a thing: I will tell that the State and Music happen to be specific, distinct things in themselves only insofar as the thing can be, at once, in and of distinct things. By talking about the State, and Music, and You and I, I am really talking about the thing, and still talking about these things.
Continuing, the question of revolution and organizing: really, in organizing we are talking about particulars, exoteric things that point to the esoteric. The exchanges and agreements that materialize the State. We’re saying that we can reappropriate these things when we say that we can reappropriate the State—we can be the ones who are really making exchanges and agreements. It is like Jean-Pierre Voyer, whose work An Inquiry Into the Causes and Nature of the Misery of People I am so glad and thankful is finally published to The Anarchist Library^[1], says, paraphrased: within the State, and Economy, it is really commodities which talk and have meaningful things to say to each other, given that they are the ones really making exchanges, really making decisions, and thus are the only ones with things that really matter to say—the workers, merely in charge of carrying out the material side of these exchanges, are left with nothing meaningful to say to each other; they are not the ones who are actively creating, deciding, the basis of exchange.

So, here’s a little story, contained in a question: I, the organizer, what am I without the State’s tradition of production? What am I without the commodities I identify and connect with—which is to say, what am I without my money, my job, my hobbies, the scenes and experiences I enjoy which the State provides through its money-job-extraction-production-consumption apparatus? If I were to throw off all these things for the sake of revolution, what would I be—and what would come next? For after all there can be no revolution without what comes next, and if I hold to what is current I cannot move on, and yet, I have to accept what is current in order to let go. I have to accept that I am holding, actively and not passively, in order to let go, thereby freeing up the energy that was both holding and being held. In order to accept what is current, can I really satisfy myself with merely and only accepting the history of the State? Don’t I have to recognize that this productive tradition, it is neither special enough that it’s truly a break (such that I can say the State was created and exists distinctly from its prehistory), nor is it special enough that its functions and contents are to be held tightly for the sake of being carried forth into where and when they might otherwise be lost? And for as long as revolution, the ability and situation wherein and of the people reappropriating their right to decide for themselves, for as long as that doesn’t happen, can’t I say it’s because there is something compelling enough about what’s happening that those involved, both myself and the people, cannot yet bear to look away? After all—if I look away and find someplace else to be, to do different things that make me someone else, does here, before the revolution, really cease to exist such that I can’t find it, the miserable people within the State, again if I so choose to find it? (Keep in mind, though I am asking many questions—are they really many? Aren’t they all, after all, the same question?) And if I can find it again, and it hasn’t really gone away, wherever it is, then is revolution even a thing? Surely it is, if I find that my ‘daily existence’ persists in some new fashion, someplace else, and still, what of the miserable people still there? What if I want to see it out that it is overturned for all of us, and not only myself? Only then can I say that organizing is possible—in the sense that I, myself, am already there, and in fact we all are, but the work consists of, slowly, materializing this place, doing and being consisting of place, that I have already found in and of myself; and materializing means doing and being this place, and in so doing bringing it forth for the liberation of us all, the people.
In that last sense, ‘I’ am ‘not there’. There is work to be done regarding the daily, constant bringing forth of liberation as it exists; hence it can be said that organizing is meaningful, as I am here where we are still because it has not been seen through yet that the ‘place’ of liberation can indeed be materialized, that ‘daily life’ can actually consist of the liberation of people consisting their liberation.

And what does this work consist of? In some sense, it is telling stories. It is also letting go of these. Telling stories and taking action—these are linked intimately, hence that the work consists of letting go of stories in order to engender new and different actions; and, conversely, letting go of actions in order to engender new and different stories.

and maybe you’d benefit from checking out Jean-Pierre Voyer’s analysis of the situation in addition to mine, linked below:

1. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jean-pierre-voyer-an-inquiry-into-the-causes-and-nature-of-the-misery-of-people↩︎