The state fails often, but retreat into subjectivity confuses history with potential---creating an institutional program recaptures progressive potential of the state

(Gregory, “Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics,” p. 141-143)

Neo-anarchism may not be the primary idiom through which the Left practices politics, but its emphasis on conduct as expressive of freedom is already showing its broader detrimental implications. If the broader Left continues to embrace this stance, it will abandon any practical means for establishing goals and, consequently, debilitate its politics. Without goals, the Left cannot assess its strength or success. The only measure becomes how free one subjectively feels. Freedom ceases to be something objective. Only the subject can determine whether or not she is free. Neo-anarchism is not only problematic in theory. It is fatal for political praxis. The historic means by which political change has been achieved, specifically the mobilization of movements and the formation of parties, are foreclosed because Of their hierarchical Structures. Measurable gains—whether in terms of policy or legislative change—lose their historic significance as exemplifying antiradical reformism. Utility of parties is denigrated because they are held to entirely subjective standards. This conception of politics only allows the policies that the Left has battled against to flourish. Ultimately, neo-anarchism upholds the very politics it claims to oppose. Its emphasis on subjectivity and community are contemporary manifestations of the reactionary antimodernism that has perennially plagued politics on both the Left and the Right for over a century and a half. The emphasis on subjectivity breeds irrationalism, outbursts of anguished populism, mysticism, and vitalism. The retreat from politics into subjectivity leads to its antipode. Neo-anarchism's talk about consensus-building leads to either political inaction or, worse, an antiliberal conception of political participation that fails to defend differing views. Its refusal to distinguish between the illegitimate and legitimate exercise of authority is prone to a conspiratorial mind-set. Its rejection of intermediary political bodies abolishes the institutions that mediate political control. Against all this, the neo-anarchist and other extremist elements on the Left can rightly cite myriad cases in which institutions have acted as instruments of oppression and domination. But this is to willfully confuse the issues at stake. The point is not that the problems they identify do not exist, but that their solutions pose serious dangers. In a critique of Simone Weil, Daniel Bensaid provided a prescient warning about the kind of disengage- ment from politics that has been advocated by the neo-anarchists: The refusal of profane politics, with its impurities, uncertainties, and wobbly conventions, leads ineluctably back to theology and its jumble of graces, miracles, revelations, repentances, and pardons. Illusory flights from the sordidness of politics actually perpetuate impotence. Instead Of pretending to write out of the contradictions between unconditional principles and the conditionality of practical living, politics means taking a stand there and working to surmount it without ever suppressing it. Get rid of mediation by political parties and you will have the single party— even the single State—of the "partyless."63 Neo-anarchism's rejection of "profane politics" carries reactionary impli- cations. The insistence on the immanence of freedom is an expression of political impotence, which becomes all the more disconcerting as defenses of left-wing violence abound. 64 As the Left copes with a worsening political terrain, it would not only be ill advised, but also potentially seriously detrimental to the Left's capac- icy to reassert its relevance, for it to continue on its current trajectory. The solution does not lie in more abstract principles, but more concrete ones. It does not lie in political disengagement, but a more active role in real politics. This means organizing movements with clear demands. It means building think tanks to inform policies, which, consequently, means more intellectuals not fewer. It also means building constituencies for political parties and cultivating political candidates who can be held accountable to their constituents. These are the kinds of measures that would allow the Left to work progressively within the framework Of mod- ern politics instead of engaging in the kind of illusory triumphalism that neo-anarchism endorses. The work of radical politics is to realize political programs and not to retreat into fantastical worlds of the imagination and exaggerated subjectivity.