Article

Dancing With the Devil

on the politics of Green Anarchist, again!

In issue 215 of Black Flag we ran a critique of the politics of GreenAnarchist, "Irrationalism - Steve Booth Against the Machine", which attackedpropositions by Steve Booth (in Green Anarchist 51) in favour of "acts ofintense violence against the system with no obvious motives, no pattern".Booth stated that "The Oklahoma bombers had the right idea. The pity was thatthey did not blast any more government offices...The Tokyo sarin cult had theright idea. The pity was that in testing the gas a year prior to the attackthey gave themselves away." Our polemic argued that Booth's Irrationalism isthe logical end-point for the "primitivist" project; that "the primitivistshave not been able to identify any positive agent for the 'destruction ofcivilisation' and so their politics becomes a counsel of despair...With norational agent for primitivist change, GA are left with...making Aum and theOklahoma fascists vehicles for 'the absolute physical destruction of themachine.'"

In Green Anarchist 54-55,we get GA's "response." Two Articles, "False Flag"and "The Return of the Irrationalists", take on the task of replying to theBlack Flag critique. Or rather, they don't. Black Flag is denounced as"opportunistic and power hungry" (the misrepresentations about the historyand politics of the Black Flag Collective are dealt with elsewhere). GA alsoget excited about our question "would Booth endorse, say, the fascist bombingof Bologna railway station" (although their excitement is a bit misplaced, asthey have a go at point scoring about how we appear to believe there wereseveral Bologna bombings, when the article clearly employs the word"bombing", in the singular).

As to whether Booth would endorse such tactics, or whether primitivism has aconcept of human agency in any positive sense, we're told that Booth, and GA,reject "all ideology", and hence the question is meaningless. Which begs 2questions. If the GA project is "non-ideological" then why publish a paper,set up a contacts list, or reply to our articles at all. More importantly, if"Irrationalists" reject "all ideology" isn't it strange that Booth 'snon-ideological examples of "resistance" were the Aum and the militias, notthe IRA, ETA, the Angry Brigade, the Black Liberation Army, and so on? Aswe'll illustrate, this isn't just coincidence. The primitivist projectrejects all notions of positive agency, of a human subject attempting tochange the world, as "re-ifying" -- alienative. Hence, any act of resistancewhich has a positive, "socialistic" goal (however poorly defined) has to berejected, while groups which have purely negative or destructive goals areseen as "decivilising" and hence embraced. The logic of primitivism leads itsproponents ultimately into the camp of those who would advocate "Long LiveDeath".

We are not suggesting that GA are fascists; what we do suggest is that themethod of primitivism, and the notion of the "non-ideological" lead preciselyto a situation where questions of means and ends are buried beneath thedesire for "the destruction of civilisation." That they can dismiss thequestion of whether or not they would, as we raised, "endorse, say, thefascist bombings of Bologna railway station, or a far right militia usingpoison gas on a black community in the US" as "ideological" suggests ourconcern, and anger, is justified. To argue that, as Booth's article "rejectsall ideology, it necessarily rejects fascist ideology" is bullshit. Boothsays the Aum had the right idea and that "Joe and Edna Couch Potato...caneither join in somewhere or fuck off and die". It seems that his rejection of"fascist ideology" implies only a belief that the ideology of an organisationis irrelevant, so long as it is engaged in acts of "intense violence againstthe system." Booth (and whoever wrote "False Flag") don't reject fascism --they just deny that it matters whether an organisation is fascist or not.

Given this, we wonder if GA will conclude that the fascist bombers in Londonalso had "the right idea."

Class an irrelevance?

We are told that Black Flag's contention that any effective resistance has tobe grounded in an understanding of class is an "irrelevant 80s dogma", a"crude workerism". GA, apparently, call "for our actions to be unmediatedthrough the working class." Class-struggle anarchism is a "secular 'religionof slaves.'"

Class, contra GA, whether fashionable in the 80s or irrelevant in the 90s,isthe fundamental issue of our time -- the relationship between those who ownthe means of production and those forced to sell their labour to theproperty-owning class underpins every aspect of our society. The New Labourgovernment has taken office committed to the utilisation of the welfare stateas a weapon of coercion to drive the unemployed off the dole and into theworkplace, to drag down wages, in the interests of capital. New Labour'sattacks on working class living standards affect the majority of people inthe UK. Irrelevant, though, according to GA. Environmental crisis has as itscause the industrial/technological practices of capitalism-either in the formof production techniques used or pollutants sold to the consumer in thepursuit of profit. Still, who cares, eh?

So why is class important? Because class analysis indicates who hasrevolutionary potential, the potential to transform society. Thus the workingclass is not a potential agent of revolutionary change because its memberssuffer a great deal. As far as suffering goes, there are many bettercandidates for revolutionary agency than the working class: vagrants,perhaps, or impoverished students or prisoners or senior citizens. Many ofthese individuals suffer more than your average worker. But none of them iseven potentially an agent of social transformation, as the working class is.Unlike the latter, these groups are not so objectively located within thecapitalist mode of production. This means that they do not have the power totransform the economic system into a non-exploitative and libertarian one("only a productive class may be libertarian in nature, because it does notneed to exploit" in the words of Albert Meltzer). And without taking over themeans of life, you cannot stop capital accumulating nor can workers abolishwork.

It is undeniably true that trade unionism and social democratic reformismhave, as GA assert, "emasculated authentically revolutionary currents." It istherefore, as Rudolf Rocker incited, the objective of "anarcho-syndicalism toprepare the toiling masses in the city and country for this great goal[social revolution] and to bind them together as a militant force." The classwar has, too often, been mediated through reformism. It is part of BlackFlag's objective to explore ways and means of making the working class, forcapitalism, "the modern Satan, the great rebel" (to use Bakunin's phrase)again. In doing so, we do not intend to distance ourselves from questions ofrevolutionary violence, and our movement's embrace at times of the propagandaof the deed. However, to equate such acts as the assassination of the Empressof Austria by Lucheni, President Carnot of France by Santo Caserio, or theassassination of Alexander II by the Russian nihilists with the Aum's desireto murder a train full of Japanese commuters as GA does, is to reduce thepropaganda of the deed to the pornography of the deed. As Emile Henry put it"we are involved in a merciless war; we mete out death and we must face it".The war, though, is "declared on the bourgeoisie" -- not Joe and Edna CouchPotato, Steve Booth's cynical dismissal of any ordinary person who's not partof GA's sorry little grouping.

Which helps explain why GA does not identify any agent for social change andinstead relies on "irrationalist" acts. It is probable that the return to a"Hunter-Gatherer" style society would result in mass starvation in almost allcountries as the social infrastructure collapses. Indeed it is tempting toinsist that the primitivists have ceded the right to be taken seriously untilthey come up with a consistent response to the key question asked by BrianMorris of John Zerzan in Morris's article "Anthropology and Anarchism "(Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed 45): "The future we are told is'primitive'. How this is to be achieved in a world that presently sustainsalmost six billion people (for evidence suggests that the hunter-gathererlifestyle is only able to support 1 or 2 people per sq. mile)...Zerzan doesnot tell us." Green Anarchist's responses throw up too many issues, though,for us to embrace that luxury.

So, due to the inherent unattractiveness of GAs "Primitivist" ideas for mostpeople ("Joe and Edna Couch Potato," in other words), it could never comeabout by libertarian means (i.e. by the free choice of individuals who createit by their own acts). Which partly explains their rejection of an agent forchange as very few people would actually voluntarily embrace such asituation. This, we suggest, leads to GA developing a form of eco-vanguardismin order, to use Rousseau's evil expression, to "force people to be free" (ascan be seen from the articles published celebrating terrorist acts). Assubjective choice is ruled out, there can only be objective pressures whichforce people, against their will, into "anarchy" (namely "irrationalist" actswhich destroy civilisation). This explains their support for "irrationalism"-- it is the only means by which a "primitivist" society could come about.

Maximalist Anarchism?

Printed alongside GA's articles attacking the "self-appointed moralisticanarcho-vanguard" (anyone who presumes to question the authority of GA!!) isan article by John Moore "Maximalist Anarchism, Anarchist Maximalism" ,acelebration by the author of "those forms of anarchism which aim at theexponential exposure, challenging and abolition of power." Moore is alsoauthor of "The Primitivist Primer". His "Maximalist Anarchism" is helpful,because it locates for us the theoretical bankruptcy of the primitivistproject, the philosophical crisis which underpins the disordered musings ofBooth and co. It has always been part of the anarchist project to oppose thedominion of man over man. That dominion, though, has always been understoodas historically grounded in the development of the State as the guarantor ofman's exploitation by man; the guarantor of property. Moore's conception ofpower, though, is a-historical, and anti-materialist: "Power is not seen aslocated in any single institution such as patriarchy or the state, but aspervasive in everyday life."

Remember the film "The Usual Suspects"? At one point in the film there's avoice over from Kevin Spacey along the lines of "The greatest trick the devilever played was convincing the world he didn't exist." Moore's view of poweras "pervasive in everyday life" is "The Usual Suspects" as political theory.The greatest trick that capitalism could play is convincing those oppressedunder it that their oppression is natural, inevitable. Power is everywhereand all-corrupting. What does Moore mean? If Person A robs Person B andPerson C intervenes to physically prevent him, is Person C's action asoppressive as Person A's? Is the state in seeking to murder Mumia Abu-Jamalno more or less oppressive than those who would seek to organise collectivelyto exercise the power to stop them? Moore conflates power, and hence agency,with oppression. Not all power is oppressive. The power to resist cannot beequated with the power to oppress. In 1793 the French revolutionary JacquesRoux petitioned that "Liberty is but a phantom when one class of men canstarve another with impunity." Moore would add that liberty is but a phantomwhen one class of men has the power to resist the fate delegated to it by thewhim of another. Power, for Moore, becomes as one with our subjectivity, ourpower to act. What we are left with is bourgeois individualism dressed up asfreedom. "Central to the emancipation of life from governance and controlremains the exploration of desire and the free, joyful pursuit of individuallines of interest." Bakunin argued that "man only becomes man and achievesconsciousness only to the extent that he realises his humanity within societyand then only through the collective endeavours of society as a whole."Moore's "struggle against micro-fascism", the reduction of social struggle tothe "anti-politics of everyday life", is a retreat from the collectivestruggle for a free society of Bakunin to the deconstructive agenda ofpost-modernism. As he concedes "The arts, due to their capacity to bypassinhibitions and connect with or even liberate unconscious concerns anddesires, thus remain far more appropriate than political discourse as a meansof promoting and expressing the development of autonomy andanti-authoritarian rebellion." This is not, then, a politics of resistance inthe sense one might understand a politics of everyday life as embodyingstrategies of resistance to the encroachments of capital upon everyday life;resistance is substituted by play, artistic self-expression (why notshopping?). As Moore himself concedes; real issues of strategy and tactics inthe battle to regain control of our lives are abandoned to "the very sciencefictional question of 'what if...?'"

Zerzan and Reification

Moore is not the only primitivist to have a problem with the issue of agency.John Zerzan, by far the most engaged and stimulating of the primitivistthinkers, in an article "Reification: That Thing We Do" (Anarchy 45) startswith an examination of the use of the term "reification" as employed by theMarxist Georg Lukacs "namely, a form of alienation issuing from the commodityfetishism of modern market relations. Social conditions and the plight of theindividual have become mysterious and impenetrable as a function of what wenow commonly refer to as consumerist capitalism. We are crushed and blindedby the reifying force of the stage of capital that began in the 20thcentury." Lukac's observations are based on Marx's contention in Grundrissethat "Money...directly and simultaneously becomes the real community...Moneydissolve(s) the community" His use of the term "reification" is historicallyspecific. Zerzan argues "however, that it may be useful to re-castreification so as to establish a much deeper meaning and dynamic. The merelyand directly human is in fact being drained away as surely as nature itselfhas been tamed into an object." It would be reasonable here to anticipate anattack upon Enlightenment views of the human subject, the Descartean notionthat we can "render ourselves the masters and possessors of nature." Zerzangoes much further. He argues that we are "exiled from immediacy" by ourcapacity for abstract thought, that "the reification aspect of thought is afurther cognitive "fall from grace. It is the human subject acting assubject that leads to our alienation from ourselves. "objectification is thetake off point for culture, in that it makes domestication possible. Itreaches its full potential with the onset of division of labour; the exchangeprinciple itself moves on the level of objectification."

Raymond Williams once argued that "communication is community", that man associal being is defined by interaction through language. Zerzan has it that"the reification act of language impoverishes existence by creating auniverse of meaning sufficient unto itself." As Brian Morris describes it"All those products of the human creative imagination -- farming, art,philosophy, technology, science, urban living, symbolic culture -- are viewednegatively by Zerzan -- in a monolithic sense." Zerzan is a committedactivist and capable of writings of both insight and beauty. His writingsagainst our "evermore standardised, massified lost world" stand as powerfulindictments of modern life. Yet a contradiction stands at the centre of histhought. If the "dreadfulness of our postmodernity" is constituted by the"denial of human choice and effective agency" how can we go forward, how canwe change the world, except by our own hands and how can it be possible to sochange the world if by acting we "render ourselves as objects"? If whatCassirer called the process of creative destruction, of "man" as subject,"doubting and seeking, tearing down and building up" has led us to "thesedark days" then there is no way forward. Power pervades everywhere, again.All that is left is to live quietly in the world, the "reverential listening"of Martin Heidegger, or "living-in-place" as the deep ecologists Berg andDasmann put it. But living-in-place seems much like knowing your place, andnot much of a recipe for change, and even Arne Naess acknowledges that "onlylook at" nature is extremely peculiar behaviour. Experiencing of anenvironment happens by doing something in it, by living in it, meditating andacting" (Ecology, Community and Lifestyle).

In practice, Zerzan draws back from embracing the notion of "living-in-place" in the here and now, faced with the rottenness of "place" as itstands. His best writings are full of celebrations of worker resistance towork life, luddism, the 1977 New York blackout lootings and riots. For GreenAnarchism though, it is not so simple. The contradictions of primativism --Zerzan's theoretical abandonment of the revolutionary subject, Moore'sbourgeois individualism -- lead practical, direct action politics down ablind alley. We can't stand where we are -- we can't go forward because poweris everywhere and human agency is ultimately reifying. The dead end ofprimitivism lies precisely in the fact that there can be no positive agencyfor the primitivist transformation. All that's left then is what Booth and Colike to pretend is the "non-ideological". When Zerzan talks about theun-mediated/un-ideologized he means, as Paul Simons put it in Anarchy 44 "theparticipants in riots and insurrections throughout history; luddites,Regulators, Whiskey Rebels, Rebecca and her Sisters, Captain Swing, King Mob,the Paris Commune of 187l, Makhnovists, the New York City boogie till youpuke party and power outrage of 1977, the MLK assassination riots, May 68 inFrance and so forth." In this, he stands as part of the best of ourmovement's tradition, anarchism as the voice of the "swinish multitude."

Booth's idea of "non-ideological", contra Zerzan, is not non-ideological atall. Both the Aum and the Oklahoma bombers had clear ideological ends. Boothwants to pretend their ends don't count (so why not, then, the FN or theBNP?) As GA concede, (and in doing so concede their own irrelevance) "allSteve did was write." And it's all he's ever likely to do. There is anelement of "The Irrationalists" which reeks of middle class posturing andvicarious rebellion (the comprehensive I went to school in had a few middleclass twats who liked to pretend they were in the NF to wind up "the rougherelements", until they realised that there was a price to pay for posturing asfascists!). Nevertheless, their politics have some resonance within thedirect action environmental movement and they have to be taken seriously tothat extent. Booth's "Irrationalism " is the dead end of primitivism -- theabandonment of any notion of positive human agency. Whether they like it ornot, all that's then left is the passive surrender of "living in place" orlooking to the forces of reaction to bring about the death of civilisation;the barbarism Rosa Luxemburg warned against.