'How to Change the World Without Taking Power’ is one of the most controversial insights on anti-capitalist revolutionary politics to date. At the basis of this thesis is the theory of ‘anti-power’, the notion that no struggle against the injustices and global inequalities manifested particularly in neo-liberal economic hierarchical structures will be achieved by first ‘taking power and then changing it’. This strategy of ‘capturing power in order to abolish power’ it proclaims, is the basis behind the failure of previously revolutionary actors, such as Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky, Gramsci, Mao and Che Guevara.
The meaning of revolution then, to build a society of ‘non-power relations’, cannot be achieved by ‘conquering power [because] once the logic of power is adopted, the struggle against power is already lost... And if we manage to become powerful by building a party or taking up arms or winning an election, then we shall be no different from all the other powerful in history’. Furthermore, once such a ‘hierachy of struggles is established, conquering political power is put at the top and all else - relations, sensuality, playing, laughing, loving is put aside because it doesn’t contribute to the ‘goal’’.
The vision of ‘anti-power’ has been much criticised, most frequently for its lack of pragmatism: ‘reality and power are so mutually encrusted that even to raise the question of dissolving power is to step off the edge of reality’. This is acknowledged by the author, who admits that ‘to ask for a theory of anti-power is to try to see the invisible.’ Yet, he also urges us to ‘forget our ‘fear of ridicule’ and ask then: how can we even begin to think about changing the world without taking power?’
Despite extensive ridicule, since its conception in 2002, physical manifestations of ‘anti-power’ are apparent. Firstly, in the post-1994 strategies of the Mexican Zapatista movement, a landless peoples struggle of armed actors, who not only abstain from using such arms, but have as their central manifesto to create ‘a world of dignity, or humanity, but without taking power’. In addition, the development of the World Social Forum, the first civil society ‘movement’ structured completely around a non-hierarchical, anti-power basis.
Whether such struggles can indeed achieve their goals is yet to be seen. For the ‘anti-power’ movement, the current point is simply not to dismiss ‘anti-power’ as an absurd impossibility simply because it is has never previously been (properly) attempted.
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This theory is neither as absurd nor undeveloped as the author would claim. In fact, a near-contemporary of Marx, Peter Kropotkin, would have perhaps not objected to this type of label being placed upon his work. However, Kropotkin did not gain traction while Marx did, and so Socialism's infatuation with power began.
The ends of socialism can not be in the seizure of power, as such a seizure inevitably first obfuscates and then eventually redraws the class divisions through which power is allowed to operate within society. Rather, socialism will only be achieved through an understanding of social relations which, perhaps paradoxically but nonetheless harmoniously, engages in the particulars of individual human existence.
I would argue that anti-power has been attempted, countless times over - where the stranger has been met with faith in the name of humanity, an act of charity practiced countless times daily, in which the end of socialism is also made manifest again, and again, and again! The tragedy of modern liberalism is the lack of realization of how many times on a daily basis WE HAVE ALREADY WON!
— Chris Peterson, January 19th, 2012