Destruction and Spontaneity

 In the previously-mentioned discussion between Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky, the former made the following assertion about Marxist revolution:

"What the proletariat will achieve by expelling the class which is at present in power and by taking over power itself, is precisely the suppression of the power of class in general."

This statement represents more sophism than philosophy. It contains an inescapable contradiction that is masked by a category error. Foucault asserted that if the proletariat (a class) took power and suppressed those who had been ejected from power (another class), that this would not be oppression of a class (which it is by definition) but "suppression of the power of class." In schematic terms, Foucault's claim is that if A oppresses B, what A is achieving is not oppression of B but "suppression of the power" that allows oppressing by class. This is non-sense.

The occult assumption in Foucault's argument is that destruction, e.g. by violent revolution, will result in spontaneous improvement. This is the dubious assumption currently in fashion among many progressives who advocate for "burning it all down," defunding the police, and denigrating established institutions. For his part, Chomsky had previously been impressed with his perception that the communist takeover of North Vietnam had resulted in spontaneous emergence of small democracies in villages and hamlets. The idea that destruction of current institutions will inevitably result in their replacement by "better" ones appears to be a widely held, if seldom defended assumption. It is something like believing that if one smashes a porcelain vase on the floor, the pieces will reassemble into a better vase, and not, say a figurine of a Confederate General.

This idea of spontaneous improvement after catastrophic destruction can be supported somewhat by the observation that human progress has proceeded despite calamitous ruin, for example after the fall of the Roman Empire, or the rebuilding of post-war Germany and Japan. To infer from this that improvement is inevitable however overlooks such events as the Red Terror or the Killing Fields of Cambodia. 

The fantasy that sustains the illusion of inevitable spontaneous improvement is noted in the Marxist idea of the state eventually fading away, of ideas of classless society, or of eradicating oppression. This fantasy is undone however by a point repeatedly made by Jordan Peterson, for which the empiric evidence is overwhelming: hierarchies emerge spontaneously. This is observed in the animal kingdom, in human societies of every type and size, and as Professor Peterson frequently points out, was present in human society at least as far back as the paleolithic age. Hierarchies are a fact of life. One encounters no difficulty in describing the hierarchies present in Chinese society, among the Khmer Rouge, in Native American Tribes, the management of Facebook, the Roman Catholic Church, etc., etc. Destruction is accompanied by spontaneous emergence of social structures, and will always be accompanied by the emergence of hierarchies. Whether these are improvement or not depends on what those hierarchies are. If those hierarchies are reprises of Lenin and Pol Pot, misery will follow and the revolution will fail, to be replaced by new hierarchies, and new institutions, and the cycle will repeat.

Foucault was wrong, perhaps deceptively so. Power held by one group does not negate the idea of power in general. Violence and bloody revolution does not inevitably result in the "suppression of the power of class," or any other change in the immutable factors that govern the relationships between groups of people. Power is power. A change in who holds it does not automatically guarantee the emergence of improvement.