A text dump on Green Anarchist

Before people were debating the utility of eco-extremist philosophy in the Anarchist News comment section, before people were debating the utility of Ted Kaczynski’s philosophy in the pages of the Earth First! Journal, before people were debating about all the things that people were debating about that I missed, people were debating the utility of various political strategies promoted by the editors of Green Anarchist.

Skim read the introduction below, or skip to the section that interests you most:

Wikipedia Page

Source: <wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Anarchist>

Established in Oxford, UK.

Early years

Founded after the 1984 Stop the City protests, the magazine was launched in the summer of that year by an editorial collective consisting of Alan Albon, Richard Hunt and Marcus Christo. Albon had been an editor of Freedom whilst Hunt had become frustrated with the more mainstream green magazine Green Line for which he had been writing. The younger Christo had come from a more anarcho-punk background – he was also a member of Green CND, and had been involved in the blockade of Ronald Reagan’s car at the 1984 Lancaster House summit meeting.

Early issues featured a range of broadly anarchist and ecological ideas, bringing together groups and individuals as varied as Class War, veteran anarchist writer Colin Ward, anarcho-punk band Crass, as well as the Peace Convoy, anti-nuclear campaigners, animal rights activists and so on. However the diversity that many saw as the publication’s greatest strength quickly led to irreconcilable arguments between the essentially pacifist approach of Albon and Christo, and the advocacy of violent confrontation with the State favoured by Hunt.

Albon and Christo left Green Anarchist shortly afterwards, and the magazine saw a succession of editorial collectives, although Hunt remained in overall control. During this period he published articles which were increasingly alienating much of the magazine’s readership. Matters came to a head after Hunt wrote an editorial which expressed support for British troops in the Gulf War and extolled the virtues of patriotism. Hunt has stated that the rest of the editorial collective wished to bring to Green Anarchist a more left-wing political approach, while Hunt wanted it to remain non-aligned.[1] Shortly afterwards he left to start another magazine Alternative Green, which continued to promote his own particular view of green anarchism, and eventually became closely linked to the National-Anarchist movement from the mid-90s onwards.

The Nineties

During the 1990s Green Anarchist came under the helm of an editorial collective that included Paul Rogers, Steve Booth and others, during which period the publication became increasingly aligned with primitivism, an anti-civilization philosophy advocated by writers such as John Zerzan, Bob Black and Fredy Perlman.

During this period the magazine expressed sympathy for the criminal activities of Ted Kaczynski and published a notorious article entitled “The Irrationalists” that supported actions like the Oklahoma City bombing and the sarin gas attacks carried out by the Tokyo based Aum cult. This once again alienated much of the UK anarchist movement, and led to strong criticism of the magazine by Stewart Home, Counter Information,[2] the Anarchist Communist Federation[3][4][5] and others. Steven Booth, the writer of the article, has since renounced the views expressed in it, as well as the primitivist movement altogether.

The GANDALF trial

Starting in 1995, Hampshire Police began a series of at least 56 raids, code named ‘Operation Washington’, that eventually resulted in the August to November 1997 Portsmouth trial of Green Anarchist editors Booth, Saxon Wood, Noel Molland and Paul Rogers, as well as Animal Liberation Front (ALF) Press Officer Robin Webb and Animal Liberation Front Supporters Group (ALFSG) newsletter editor Simon Russell. The defendants organised the GANDALF Defence campaign. Three of the editors of Green Anarchist, Noel Molland, Saxon Wood and Booth were jailed for ‘conspiracy to incite’. However, all three were shortly afterwards released on appeal.

Booth and Rogers’ Green Anarchists

In the late 1990s there was a further split amongst the GA collective, leading to the existence of two entirely separate magazines using the Green Anarchist title. These are respectively published by an editorial team that includes Paul Rogers and ‘John Connor’ (who subtitle their version of the paper as the original and best), and Steve Booth, who has publicly renounced some of his earlier published views and expressed a wish to ‘return to the magazine’s roots’.

The Left Overs: How Fascists Court the Post-Left

Date: March 29, 2017

A few months ago, the radical publication, Fifth Estate, solicited an article from me discussing the rise of fascism in recent years. Following their decision to withdraw the piece, I accepted the invitation of Anti-Fascist News to publish an expanded version here, with some changes, at the urging of friends and fellow writers.

In Solidarity, ARR

Chapter 1: The Early Composition of Fascist Individualism

A friendly editor recently told me via email, “if anti-capitalism and pro individual liberty [sic] are clearly stated in the books or articles, they won’t be used by those on the right.” If this were true, fascism simply would vanish from the earth. Fascism comes from a mixture of left and right-wing positions, and some on the left pursue aspects of collectivism, syndicalism, ecology, and authoritarianism that intersect with fascist enterprises. Partially in response to the tendencies of left authoritarianism, a distinct antifascist movement emerged in the 1970s to create what has became known as “post-left” thought. Yet in imagining that anti-capitalism and “individual liberty” maintain ideological purity, radicals such as my own dear editor tend to ignore critical convergences with and vulnerabilities to fascist ideology.

The post-left developed largely out of a tendency to favor individual freedom autonomous from political ideology of left and right while retaining some elements of leftism. Although it is a rich milieu with many contrasting positions, post-leftists often trace their roots to individualist Max Stirner, whose belief in the supremacy of the European individual over and against nation, class, and creed was heavily influenced by philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. After Stirner’s death in 1856, the popularity of collectivism and neo-Kantianism obscured his individualist philosophy until Friedrich Nietzsche raised its profile again during the later part of the century. Influenced by Stirner, Nietzsche argued for the overcoming of socialism and the “modern world” by the iconoclastic, aristocratic philosopher known as the “Superman” or “übermensch.”

During the late-19^th Century, Stirnerists conflated the “Superman” with the assumed responsibility of women to bear a superior European race—a “New Man” to produce, and be produced by, a “New Age.” Similarly, right-wing aristocrats who loathed the notions of liberty and equality turned to Nietzsche and Stirner to support their sense of elitism and hatred of left-wing populism and mass-based civilization. Some anarchists and individualists influenced by Stirner and Nietzsche looked to right-wing figures like Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky, who developed the idea of a “conservative revolution” that would upend the spiritual crises of the modern world and the age of the masses. In the words of anarchist, Victor Serge, “Dostoevsky: the best and the worst, inseparable. He really looks for the truth and fears to find it; he often finds it all the same and then he is terrified… a poor great man…”

History’s “great man” or “New Man” was neither left nor right; he strove to destroy the modern world and replace it with his own ever-improving image—but what form would that image take? In Italy, reactionaries associated with the Futurist movement and various romantic nationalist strains expressed affinity with the individualist current identified with Nietzsche and Stirner. Anticipating tremendous catastrophes that would bring the modern world to its knees and install the New Age of the New Man, the Futurists sought to fuse the “destructive gesture of the anarchists” with the bombast of empire.

A hugely popular figure among these tendencies of individualism and “conservative revolution,” the Italian aesthete Gabrielle D’Annunzio summoned 2,600 soldiers in a daring 1919 attack on the port city of Fiume to reclaim it for Italy after World War I. During their exploit, the occupying force hoisted the black flag emblazoned by skull and crossbones and sang songs of national unity. Italy disavowed the imperial occupation, leaving the City-State in the hands of its romantic nationalist leadership. A constitution, drawn up by national syndicalist, Alceste De Ambris, provided the basis for national solidarity around a corporative economy mediated through collaborating syndicates. D’Annunzio was prophetic and eschatological, presenting poetry during convocations from the balcony. He was masculine. He was Imperial and majestic, yet radical and rooted in fraternal affection. He called forth sacrifice and love of the nation.

When he returned to Italy after the military uprooted his enclave in Fiume, ultranationalists, Futurists, artists, and intellectuals greeted D’Annunzio as a leader of the growing Fascist movement. The aesthetic ceremonies and radical violence contributed to a sacralization of politics invoked by the spirit of Fascism. Though Mussolini likely saw himself as a competitor to D’Annunzio for the role of supreme leader, he could not deny the style and mood, the high aesthetic appeal that reached so many through the Fiume misadventure. Fascism, Mussolini insisted, was an anti-party, a movement. The Fascist Blackshirts, or squadristi, adopted D’Annunzio’s flare, the black uniforms, the skull and crossbones, the dagger at the hip, the “devil may care” attitude expressed by the anthem, “Me ne frego” or “I don’t give a damn.” Some of those who participated in the Fiume exploit abandoned D’Annunzio as he joined the Fascist movement, drifting to the Arditi del Popolo to fight the Fascist menace. Others would join the ranks of the Blackshirts.

Originally a man of the left, Mussolini had no difficulty joining the symbolism of revolution with ultranationalist rebirth. “Down with the state in all its species and incarnations,” he declared in a 1920 speech. “The state of yesterday, of today, of tomorrow. The bourgeois state and the socialist. For those of us, the doomed (morituri) of individualism, through the darkness of the present and the gloom of tomorrow, all that remains is the by-now-absurd, but ever consoling, religion of anarchy!” In another statement, he asked, “why should Stirner not have a comeback?”

Mussolini’s concept of anarchism was critical, because he saw anarchism as prefiguring fascism. “If anarchist authors have discovered the importance of the mythical from an opposition to authority and unity,” declared Nazi jurist, Carl Schmitt, drawing on Mussolini’s concept of myth, “then they have also cooperated in establishing the foundation of another authority, however unwillingly, an authority based on the new feeling for order, discipline, and hierarchy.” The dialectics of fascism here are two-fold: only the anarchist destruction of the modern world in every milieu would open the potential for Fascism, but the mythic stateless society of anarchism, for Mussolini, could only emerge, paradoxically, from a self-disciplining state of total order.

Antifascist anarchist individualists and nihilists like Renzo Novatore represented for Mussolini a kind of “passive nihilism,” which Nietzsche understood as the decadence and weakness of modernity. The veterans that would fight for Mussolini rejected the suppression of individualism under the Bolsheviks and favored “an anti-party of fighters,” according to historian Emilio Gentile. Fascism would exploit the rampant misogyny of men like Novatore while turning the “passive nihilism” of their vision of total collapse toward “active nihilism” through a rebirth of the New Age at the hands of the New Man.

The “drift” toward fascism that took place throughout Europe during the 1920s and 1930s was not restricted to the collectivist left of former Communists, Syndicalists, and Socialists; it also included the more ambiguous politics of the European avant-garde and intellectual elites. In France, literary figures like Georges Bataille and Antonin Artaud began experimenting with fascist aesthetics of cruelty, irrationalism, and elitism. In 1934, Bataille declared his hope to usher in “room for great fascist societies,” which he believed inhabited the world of “higher forms” and “makes an appeal to sentiments traditionally defined as exalted and noble.” Bataille’s admiration for Stirner did not prevent him from developing what he described decades later as a “paradoxical fascist tendency.” Other libertarian celebrities like Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Maurice Blanchot also embraced fascist themes—particularly virulent anti-Semitism.

Like Blanchot, the Nazi-supporting Expressionist poet Gottfried Benn called on an anti-humanist language of suffering and nihilism that looked inward, finding only animal impulses and irrational drives. Existentialist philosopher and Nazi Party member, Martin Heidegger, played on Nietzschean themes of nihilism and aesthetics in his phenomenology, placing angst at the core of modern life and seeking existential release through a destructive process that he saw as implicit in the production of an authentic work of art. Literary figure Ernst Jünger, who cheered on Hitler’s rise, summoned the force of “active nihilism,” seeking the collapse of the civilization through a “magic zero” that would bring about a New Age of ultra-individualist actors that he later called “Anarchs.” The influence of Stirner was as present in Jünger as it was in Mussolini’s early fascist years, and carried over to other members of the fascist movement like Carl Schmitt and Julius Evola.

Evola was perhaps the most important of those seeking the collapse of civilization and the New Age’s spiritual awakening of the “universal individual,” sacrificial dedication, and male supremacy. A dedicated fascist and individualist, Evola devoted himself to the purity of sacred violence, racism, anti-Semitism, and the occult. Asserting a doctrine of the “political soldier,” Evola regarded violence as necessary in establishing a kind of natural hierarchy that promoted the supreme individual over the multitudes. Occult practice distilled into an overall aristocracy of the spirit, Evola believed, which could only find expression through sacrifice and a Samurai-like code of honor. Evola shared these ideals of conquest, elitism, sacrificial pleasure with the SS, who invited the Italian esotericist to Vienna to indulge his thirst for knowledge. Following World War II, Evola’s spiritual fascism found parallels in the writings of Savitri Devi, a French esotericist of Greek descent who developed an anti-humanist practice of Nazi nature worship not unlike today’s Deep Ecology. In her rejection of human rights, Devi insisted that the world manifests a totality of interlocking life forces, none of which enjoys a particular moral prerogative over the other.

Chapter 2: The Creation of the Post-Left

It has been shown by now that fascism, in its inter-war period, attracted numerous anti-capitalists and individualists, largely through elitism, the aestheticization of politics, and the nihilist’s desire for the destruction of the modern world. After the fall of the Reich, fascists attempted to rekindle the embers of their movement by intriguing within both the state and social movements. It became popular among fascists to reject Hitler to some degree and call for a return to the original “national syndicalist” ideas mixed with the elitism of the “New Man” and the destruction of civilization. Fascists demanded “national liberation” for European ethnicities against NATO and multicultural liberalism, while the occultism of Evola and Devi began to fuse with Satanism to form new fascist hybrids. With ecology and anti-authoritarianism, such sacralization of political opposition through the occult would prove among the most intriguing conduits for fascist insinuation into subcultures after the war.

In the ’60s, left-communist groups like Socialisme ou Barbarie, Pouvoir ouvrier, and the Situationists gathered at places like bookstore-cum-publishing house, La Vielle Taupe (The Old Mole), critiquing everyday life in industrial civilization through art and transformative practices. According to Gilles Dauvé, one of the participants in this movement, “the small milieu round the bookshop La Vieille Taupe” developed the idea of “communisation,” or the revolutionary transformation of all social relations. This new movement of “ultra-leftists” helped inspire the aesthetics of a young, intellectual rebellion that culminated in a large uprising of students and workers in Paris during May 1968.

The strong anti-authoritarian current of the ultra-left and the broader uprising of May ’68 contributed to similar movements elsewhere in Europe, like the Italian Autonomia movement, which spread from a wildcat strike against the car manufacturer, Fiat, to generalized upheaval involving rent strikes, building occupations, and mass street demonstrations. While most of Autonomia remained left-wing, its participants were intensely critical of the established left, and autonomists often objected to the ham-fisted strategy of urban guerrillas. In 1977, individualist anarchist, Alfredo Bonanno, penned the text, “Armed Joy,” exhorting Italian leftists to drop patriarchal pretensions to guerrilla warfare and join popular insurrectionary struggle. The conversion of Marxist theorist, Jacques Camatte, to the pessimistic rejection of leftism and embrace of simpler life tied to nature furthered contradictions within the Italian left.

With anti-authoritarianism, ecologically-oriented critiques of civilization emerged out of the 1960s and 1970s as significant strains of a new identity that rejected both left and right. Adapting to these currents of popular social movements and exploiting blurred ideological lines between left and right, fascist ideologues developed the framework of “ethno-pluralism.” Couching their rhetoric in “the right to difference” (ethnic separatism), fascists masked themselves with labels like the “European New Right,” “national revolutionaries,” and “revolutionary traditionalists.” The “European New Right” took the rejection of the modern world advocated by the ultra-left as a proclamation of the indigeneity of Europeans and their pagan roots in the land. Fascists further produced spiritual ideas derived from a sense of rootedness in one’s native land, evoking the old “blood and soil” ecology of the German völkische movement and Nazi Party.

In Italy, this movement produced the “Hobbit Camp,” an eco-festival organized by European New Right figure Marco Tarchi and marketed to disillusioned youth via Situationist-style posters and flyers. When Italian “national revolutionary,” Roberto Fiore, fled charges of participating in a massive bombing of a train station in Bologna, he found shelter in the London apartment of Tarchi’s European New Right colleague, Michael Walker. This new location would prove transformative, as Fiore, Walker, and a group of fascist militants created a political faction called the Official National Front in 1980. This group would help promote and would benefit from a more avant-garde fascist aesthetic, bringing forward neo-folk, noise, and other experimental music genres.

While fascists entered the green movement and exploited openings in left anti-authoritarian thought, Situationism began to transform. In the early 1970s, post-Situationism emerged through US collectives that combined Stirnerist egoism with collectivist thought. In 1974, the For Ourselves group published The Right to Be Greedy, inveighing against altruism while linking egoist greed to the synthesis of social identity and welfare—in short, to surplus. The text was reprinted in 1983 by libertarian group, Loompanics Unlimited, with a preface from a little-known writer named Bob Black.

While post-Situationism turned toward individualism, a number of European ultra-leftists moved toward the right. In Paris, La Vieille Taupe went from controversial views rejecting the necessity of specialized antifascism to presenting the Holocaust as a lie necessary to maintain the capitalist order. In 1980, La Vielle Taupe published the notorious Mémoire en Défense centre ceux qui m’accusent de falsifier l’histoire by Holocaust denier, Robert Faurisson. Though La Vielle Taupe and founder, Pierre Guillaume, received international condemnation, they gained a controversial defense from left-wing professor, Noam Chomsky. Even if they have for the most part denounced Guillaume and his entourage, the ultra-leftist rejection of specialized antifascism has remained somewhat popular—particularly as expounded by Dauvé, who insisted in the early 1980s that “fascism as a specific movement has disappeared.”

The idea that fascism had become a historical artifact only helped the creep of fascism to persist undetected, while Faurisson and Guillaume became celebrities on the far-right. As the twist toward Holocaust denial would suggest, ultra-left theory was not immune from translation into ethnic terms—a reality that formed the basis of the work of Official National Front officer, Troy Southgate. Though influenced by the Situationists, along with a scramble of other left and right-wing figures, Southgate focused particularly on the ecological strain of radical politics associated with the punk-oriented journal, Green Anarchist, which called for a return to “primitive” livelihoods and the destruction of modern civilization. In 1991, the editors of Green Anarchist pushed out their co-editor, Richard Hunt, for his patriotic militarism, and Hunt’s new publication, Green Alternative, soon became associated with Southgate. Two years later, Southgate would join allied fascists like Jean-François Thiriart and Christian Bouchet to create the Liaison Committee for Revolutionary Nationalism.

In the US, the “anarcho-primitivist” or “Green Anarchist” tendency had been taken up by former ultra-leftist, John Zerzan. Identifying civilization as an enemy of the earth, Zerzan called for a return to sustainable livelihoods that rejected modernity. Zerzan rejected racism but relied in no small part on the thought of Martin Heidegger, seeking a return authentic relations between humans and the world unmediated by symbolic thought. This desired return, some have pointed out, would require a collapse of civilization so profound that millions, if not billions, would likely perish. Zerzan, himself, seems somewhat ambiguous with regards to the potential death toll, regardless of his support for the unibomber, Ted Kaczynsky.

Joining with Zerzan to confront authoritarianism and return to a more tribal, hunter-gatherer social organization, an occultist named Hakim Bey developed the idea of the “Temporary Autonomous Zone” (TAZ). For Bey, a TAZ would actualize a liberated and erotic space of orgiastic, revolutionary poesis. Yet within his 1991 text, Temporary Autonomous Zone, Bey included extensive praise for D’Annunzio’s proto-fascist occupation of Fiume, revealing the disturbing historical trends of attempts to transcend right and left.

Along with Zerzan and Bey, Bob Black would prove instrumental to the foundation of what is today called the “post-left.” In his 1997 text, Anarchy After Leftism, Black responded to left-wing anarchist Murray Bookchin, who accused individualists of “lifestyle anarchism.” Drawing from Zerzan’s critique of civilization as well as from Stirner and Nietzsche, Black presented his rejection of work as a nostrum for authoritarian left tendencies that he identified with Bookchin (apparently Jew-baiting Bookchin in the process).[6]

Thus, the post-left began to assemble through the writings of ultra-leftists, green anarchists, spiritualists, and egoists published in zines, books, and journals like Anarchy: Journal of Desire Armed and Fifth Estate. Although these thinkers and publications differ in many ways, key tenets of the post-left included an eschatological anticipation of the collapse of civilization accompanied by a synthesis of individualism and collectivism that rejected left, right, and center in favor of a deep connection with the earth and more organic, tribal communities as opposed to humanism, the Enlightenment tradition, and democracy. That post-left texts included copious references to Stirner, Nietzsche, Jünger, Heidegger, Artaud, and Bataille suggests that they form a syncretic intellectual tendency that unites left and right, individualism and “conservative revolution.” As we will see, this situation has provided ample space for the fascist creep.

Chapter 3: The Fascist Creep

During the 1990s, the “national revolutionary” network of Southgate, Thiriart, and Bouchet, later renamed the European Liberation Front, linked up with the American Front, a San Francisco skinhead group exploring connections between counterculture and the avant-garde. Like prior efforts to develop a Satanic Nazism, American Front leader Bob Heick supported a mix of Satanism, occultism, and paganism, making friends with fascist musician Boyd Rice. A noise musician and avant-gardist, Rice developed a “fascist think tank” called the Abraxas Foundation, which echoed the fusion of the cult ideas of Charles Manson, fascism, and Satanism brought together by 1970s fascist militant James Mason. Rice’s protégé and fellow Abraxas member, Michael Moynihan, joined the radical publishing company, Feral House, which publishes texts along the lines of Abraxas, covering a range of themes from Charles Manson Scandinavian black metal, and militant Islam to books by Evola, James Mason, Bob Black, and John Zerzan.

In similar efforts, Southgate’s French ally, Christian Bouchet, generated distribution networks and magazines dedicated to supporting a miniature industry growing around neo-folk and the new, ”anarchic” Scandinavian black metal scene. Further, national anarchists attempted to set up and/or infiltrate e-groups devoted to green anarchism. As Southgate and Bouchet’s network spread to Russia, notorious Russian fascist, Alexander Dugin, emerged as another leading ideologue who admired Zerzan’s work.

Post-leftists were somewhat knowledgable about these developments. In a 1999 post-script to one of Bob Black’s works, co-editor of Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, Lawrence Jarach, cautioned against the rise of “national anarchism.” In 2005, Zerzan’s journal, Green Anarchy, published a longer critique of Southgate’s “national anarchism.” These warnings were significant, considering that they came in the context of active direct action movements and groups like the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), a green anarchist group dedicated to large-scale acts of sabotage and property destruction with the intention of bringing about the ultimate collapse of industrial civilization.

As their ELF group executed arsons during the late-1990s and early-2000s, a former ELF member told me that two comrades, Nathan “Exile” Block and Joyanna “Sadie” Zacher, shared an unusual love of Scandinavian black metal, made disturbing references to Charles Manson, and promoted an elitist, anti-left mentality. While their obscure references evoked Abraxas, Feral House, and Bouchet’s distribution networks, their politics could not be recognized within the milieu of fascism at the time. However, their general ideas became clearer, the former ELF member told me, when antifascist researchers later discovered that a Tumblr account run by Block contained numerous occult fascist references, including national anarchist symbology, swastikas, and quotes from Evola and Jünger. These were only two members of a larger group, but their presence serves as food for thought regarding important radical cross-over points and how to approach them.

To wit, the decisions of John Zerzan and Bob Black to publish books with Feral House, seem peculiar—especially in light of the fact that two of the four books Zerzan has published there came out in 2005, the same year as Green Anarchy’s noteworthy warning against national anarchism. It would appear that, although in some cases prescient about the subcultural cross-overs between fascism and the post-left, post-leftists have, on a number of occasions, engaged in collaborative relationships.

As Green Anarchy cautioned against entryism and Zerzan simultaneously published with Feral House, controversy descended on an online forum known as the Anti-Politics Board. An outgrowth of the insurrectionist publication Killing King Abacus, the Anti-Politics Board was used by over 1,000 registered members and had dozens of regular contributors. The online platform presented a flourishing site of debate for post-leftists, yet discussions over insurrectionism, communisation, green anarchy, and egoism often produced a strangely competitive iconoclastism. Attempts to produce the edgiest take often led to the popularization of topics like “‘anti-sexism’ as collectivist moralism” and “critique of autonomous anti-fascism.” Attacks on morality and moralism tended to encourage radicals to abandon the “identity politics” and “white guilt” often associated with left-wing anti-racism.

Amid these discussions, a young radical named Andrew Yeoman began to post national anarchist positions. When asked repeatedly to remove Yeoman from the forum, a site administrator refused, insisting that removing the white nationalist would have meant behaving like leftists. They needed to try something else. Whatever they tried, however, it didn’t work, and Yeoman later became notorious for forming a group called the Bay Area National Anarchists, showing up to anarchist events like book fairs, and promoting anarchist collaboration with the Minutemen and American Front.

An important aspect of the Anti-Politics Board was the articulation of nihilist and insurrectionary theories, both of which gained popularity after the 2008 financial crisis. In an article titled, “The New Nihilism,” Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey) pointed out that the rising wave of nihilism that emerged during the late 2000s and into the second decade could not immediately be distinguished from the far right, due to myriad cross-over points. Indeed, Stormfront is riddled with users like “TAZriot” and “whitepunx” who promote the basic, individualist tenets of post-leftism from the original, racist position of Stirnerism. Rejecting “political correctness” and “white guilt,” these post-left racists desire separate, radical spaces and autonomous zones for whites.

Through dogged research, Rose City Antifa in Portland, Oregon, discovered whitepunx’s identity: “Trigger” Tom Christensen, a known member of the local punk scene. “I was never an anti [antifascist] but I’ve hung out with a few of them,” Christensen wrote on Stormfront. “I used to be a big punk rocker in the music scene and there were some antis that ran around in the same scene. I was friends with a few. They weren’t trying to recruit me, or anybody really. They did not, however, know I was a WN [white nationalist]. I kept my beliefs to myself and would shut down any opinions the[y] expressed that seemed to have holes in them. It’s been fairly useful to know some of these people. I now know who all the major players are in the anti and SHARP [Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice] scene.”

For a time, Christensen says he hung out with post-leftists and debated them like Yeoman had done. Less than a year later, however, Christensen followed up in a chilling post titled, “Do You Think It Would Be Acceptable To Be A ‘Rat’ If It Was Against Our Enemies.” He wrote, “I had an interesting thought the other day and wanted peoples opinions. If you were asked by the Police to provide or find evidence that would incriminate people who are enemy’s [sic] of the movement, i.e. Leftists, reds, anarchists. Would you do it? Would you ‘rat’ or ‘narc’ on the Left side?” Twenty one responses came beckoning from the recesses of the white nationalist world. While some encouraged Christensen to snitch, others insisted that he keep gang loyalty. It is uncertain as to whether or not he went to the police, but the May 2013 discovery of his Stormfront activity took place shortly before a grand jury subpoenaed four anarchists who were subsequently arrested and held for contempt of court.

In another unsettling example of crossover between post-leftists and fascists, radicals associated with a nihilist group named Ultra harshly rebuked Rose City Antifa of Portland, Oregon, for releasing an exposé about Jack Donovan. An open member of the violent white nationalist group, Wolves of Vinland, Donovan also runs a gym called the Kabuki Strength Lab, which produces “manosphere” videos. As of November 2016, when the exposé was published, one member of Ultra was a member of the Kabuki Strength Lab. Although Donovan runs a tattoo shop out of the gym and gave Libertarian Party fascist Augustus Sol Invictus a tattoo of the fasces there, a fellow gym member wrote, “Obviously Jack has very controversial beliefs and practices that most disagree with; but I don’t believe it affects his behavior in the gym.” Donovan, who has publicly parroted “race realist” statistics at white nationalist gatherings like the National Policy Institute and the Pressure Project podcast, also embraces bioregionalism and the anticipation of a collapse of civilization that will lead to a reversion of identity-bound tribal structures at war with one another and reliant on natural hierarchies—an ideology that resonates with Ultra and some members of the broader post-left milieu.

It stands to reason that defending fascists and collaborating with them are not the same, and they are both separate from having incidental ideological cross-over points. However the cross-over points, when unchecked, frequently indicate a tendency to ignore, defend, or collaborate. Defense and collaboration can, and do, also converge. For instance, also in Portland, Oregon, the founder of a UK ultra-leftist splinter group called Wildcat began to participate in a reading group involving prominent post-leftists before sliding toward anti-Semitism. Soon he was participating in the former-leftist-turned-fascist Pacifica Forum in Eugene, Oregon, and defending anti-Semitic co-op leader, Tim Calvert. He was last seen by antifas creeping into an event for Holocaust denier, David Irving.

Perhaps the most troubling instance of collaboration, or rather synthesis, of post-left nihilism and the far right is taking place currently in the alt-right. Donovan is considered a member of the alt-right, while Christensen’s latest visible Facebook post hails from the misogynistic Proud Boys group. These groups and individuals connected to the alt-right are described as having been “red-pilled,” a term taken from the movie, The Matrix, in which the protagonist is awakened to a dystopian reality after choosing to take a red pill. For the alt-right, being “red-pilled” means waking up to the “reality” offered by anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, misogyny, and white nationalism—usually through online forums where the competitive iconoclasm of “edge-lords” mutates into ironic anti-Semitism and hatred. Among the most extreme forms of this phenomenon occurring in recent years is the so-called “black pill”—red-pillers who have turning toward the celebration of indiscriminate violence via the same trends of individualism and nihilism outlined above.

“Black-pillers” claim to have shed their attachments to all theories entirely. This tendency evokes the attitude of militant anti-civilization group, Individuals Tending to the Wild, which is popular among some post-leftist groups and advocates indiscriminate violence against any targets manifesting the modern world. Another influence for “black-pillers” is Adam Lanza, the infamous mass shooter who phoned John Zerzan a year before murdering his mother, 20 children, and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Zerzan has condemned Individuals Tending Toward the Wild, and months after Lanza’s horrifying actions, he penned a piece imploring post-left nihilists to find hope: “Egoism and nihilism are evidently in vogue among anarchists and I’m hoping that those who so identify are not without hope. Illusions no, hope yes.” Unfortunately, Zerzan developed his short communiqué into a book published by Feral House on November 10, 2015—the day after Feral House published The White Nationalist Skinhead Movement co-authored by Eddie Stampton, a Nazi skinhead.

Conclusion

In light of these cross-overs, many individualist anarchists, post-leftists, and nihilists tend not to deny that they share nodal networks with fascists. In many cases, they seek to struggle against them and reclaim their movement. Yet, there tends to be another permissive sense that anarchists bear no responsibility for distinguishing themselves from fascists. If there are numerous points in which radical milieus become a blur of fascists, anarchists, and romantics, some claim that throwing shade on such associations only propagates fallacious thinking, or “guilt by association.”

However, recalling the information in this essay, we might note that complex cross-overs seem to include, in particular, aspects of egoism and radical green theory. Derived from Stirnerism and Nietzschean philosophy, egoism can reify the social alienation felt by an individual, leading to an elitist sense of self-empowerment and delusions of grandeur. When mixed with insurrectionism and radical green thought, egoism can translate into “hunter versus prey” or “wolves versus sheep” elitism, in which compassion for others is rejected as moralistic. This kind of alienated elitism can also develop estranged aesthetic and affective positions tied to cruelty, vengeance, and hatred.

Emerging out of a rejection of humanism and urban modernism, the particular form of radical green theory often embraced by the post-left can relativize human losses by looking at the larger waves of mass extinctions. By doing this, radical greens anticipate a collapse that would “cull the herd” or cause a mass human die off of millions, if not billions, of people throughout the world. This aspect of radical green theory comes very close to, and sometimes intertwines with, ideas about over-population compiled and produced by white nationalists and anti-immigration activists tied to the infamous Tanton Network. Some radical green egoists (or nihilists) insist that their role should be to provoke such a collapse, through anti-moralist strikes against civilization.

As examples like Hakim Bey’s TAZ and the lionization of the Fiume misadventure, Zerzan and Black’s publishing with Feral House, and Ultra’s defense of Donovan indicate, the post-left’s relation to white nationalism is sometimes ambiguous and occasionally even collaborative. Other examples, like those of Yeoman and Christensen, indicate that the tolerance for fascist ideas on the post-left can result in unwittingly accepting them, providing a platform for white nationalism, and increasing vulnerability to entryism. Specific ideas that are sometimes tolerated under the rubric of the “critique of the left” include the approval of “natural hierarchies,” ultranationalism understood as ethno-biological and spiritual ties to homeland and ancestry, rejection of feminism and antifascism, and the fetishization of violence and cruelty.

It is more important today than ever before to recognize how radical movements develop intersections with fascists if we are to discover how to expose creeping fascism and develop stronger, more direct networks. Anarchists must abandon the equivocations that invite the fascist creep and reclaim anarchy as the integral struggle for freedom and equality. Sectarian polemics are the result of extensive learning processes, but are less important than engaging in solidarity to struggle against fascism in all its forms and various disguises.

https://twitter.com/areidross is a former co-editor of the Earth First! Journal and the author of Against the Fascist Creep. He teaches in the Geography Department at Portland State University and can be reached at aross@pdx.edu.

— Primary Source Material —

Richard Hunt’s Vanguardism

Editorial: Pieces of Silver by Alan Albon

Author: Alan Albon

Source: Green Anarchist issue 10, Spring 1987, page 2.
<thesparrowsnest.org.uk/collections/public_archive/6332.pdf>

Note: Quoting a past editor of Green Anarchist: “[This text] marked a decline in the magazine. It was an attack on the print workers, who were at that time engaged in a long-running and vicious dispute with Rupert Murdoch at Fortress Wapping. This editorial created a sectarian gulf between GA and class struggle anarchists.”

The printers who are accusing the people who are working in Murdoch’s concentration camp to print the rubbish they have been printing for years, of accepting Judas thirty pieces, should consider their own responsibilities.

The popular press can hardly be said to have contributed to a balanced discussion of the problems that humanity has to face. Indeed it could be said that the media and the popular press have contributed to the situation in which these printers find themselves in which a pirate like Murdoch and his ilk are able to rape the world. Is it necessary to destroy forests to print this crap? I believe that Odhams Press at one time had a large trade union share in it, and one time was in a position to produce a paper that could discuss serious issues. ‘Freedom’ our contemporary, was at one time printed by an ordinary printer, but owing to the fact that they could only afford to do the artwork voluntarily, the printers refused to print it. So they lost the printing work. The alternative press not only has to deal with the censorship imposed by the distribution magnates but also the print workers.

Advocates of real change suffer from the biased popular press that our printers have been content to print for years, which contributed to the type of attitudes of “I’m alright, Jack” that have made racism, destruction of the environment, starvation in the Third World more difficult to solve.

I was told the other day by an SWP supporter of the printers that they had no responsibility for what is printed in the papers. This is an attitude that has landed the world on the brink of ecological disaster or nuclear holocaust.

Alan Albon

Industrial Slavery or Rural Freedom

Author: Paul Whymark

Source: Green Anarchist Issue #16, Late Spring ’87, pages 10–11.
<thesparrowsnest.org.uk/collections/public_archive/9948.pdf>

Green Anarchist annoyed many people when it stated that it did not support the sacked Sun printers at Wapping. Maybe this can help explain why we should think twice before supporting the so-called “workers” in their industrial disputes.

It is not always the case that people must either be for something or against it. It is also possible to be indifferent and to view something as irrelevant, as was the case with the recent struggle between the printers and Murdoch.

If you are a slave, of course it is better to have good working conditions rather than bad ones, but it is better still to be free. With this simple truth in mind we can see that the Sun printers dispute, like so many other industrial disputes, was not about obtaining freedom but merely to obtain the right to be a wage slave, working to support the system of wage slavery.

Of course printers have families to support, mortgages to pay etc, and of course they now face hardship because of Murdoch crapping all over them, but if you work for an arsehole, surely you will be shat on.

The printers have, by working for the Sun and the Times helped the ruling class crap on many people not only in this country but throughout the world. They have helped glorify the murder of Argentine conscripts on the Belgrano with their headline “GOTCHA”, they have helped encourage racist and sexist ideas and values and have made attacks on both the working and unemployed classes who have been unable to respond. They have done all this and more in return for their wage packets and their right to be wage slaves.

The printers and their supporters argue that they have no control over what is printed and are therefore not responsible for the lies produced. “They are only doing their job”, or “only following orders”. It’s an old excuse and one used by many different groups of people through the years. The SS gaurds who worked in Hitler’s death camps used it. The US soldiers in Vietnam used it. The police in this country still use it.

Sometimes it’s hard to disobey orders. The SS guards and maybe even the US soldiers would have been shot for doing so. The policeman and the printer would be sacked from their jobs and probably face a certain amount of hardship. Disobedience to a powerful authority is never an easy option.

Whilst we can sympathise with the predicament people find themselves in, we surely cannot advocate and support them struggling to maintain themselves in this situation. This is however exactly what the Trade Unions are doing.

It is because people are willing to work for other people as wage slaves that we are stuck with the present capitalist system. We must seek to find ways of changing people’s attitude and philosophy towards work and society in general. Higher pay, better working conditions and job security may seem like things worth fighting for in the short term, but if the end result is merely to strengthen the system in the long term then we should reject these goals.

We need to reject all work which is socially worthless and especially work which helps to maintain an exploitative society such as ours. All Fleet Street jobs fit into this category along with the bulk of most other jobs in this country. There is simply no point in fighting for one group of worker’s right to do this work rather than another.

Instead we continue to work towards achieving a society where all people can share in the production and enjoyment of the necessities of life.

The basic needs of food, clothes and shelter can only be met for all the people of the world if we abandon our faith in our present industrial society and instead move on towards a system based on small self supporting communities and villages.

In such a system everyone would share in the work of producing things which are necessary and which enhance the quality of life for their village and their community. People would share as equals. They would make decisions about matters which directly affect their lives and community. No one would want to, or need to, work for another person. Of course, to many people this all sounds too good to be true. Too idealistic. Pie in the sky which can never happen.

Well, of course it never will happen whilst ever people reject it as fantasy and pour scorn on the idea. It can and will come about however as and when people begin to believe in it and work towards it as their goal.

The Trades Unions called for a boycott of the Sun and the Times. This is easy to support whether there is 2 printer’s dispute or not. It is a pity that they don’t extend their boycott to the rest of Fleet Street and the media in general. They could then go on to boycott producing and using the majority of the socially worthless junk in industrial society. Capitalists would then cease to function and so then too would the Trades Unions. Perhaps this is one reason why unions restrict themselves to merely fighting for improved conditions of work. It is for this reason we restrict ourselves to rejecting the present attitudes towards work. It is not the right to jobs we fight for but the right to land and resources to make such jobs unnecessary. Only then will all people be able to work for and share in the necessities of life. Only then will all people be free from exploitation and free from being crapped on. Sun printers included.

By rejecting the right to do such work as print the Sun or similar socially worthless jobs we are helping to change long accepted attitudes towards work which we cannot do merely by arguing for such work to be better paid, or more secure, more abundant, etc. It is for this reason that we cannot support the printers in their present situation, or other workers in similar situations.

This in no way prevents us from feeling sympathy and pity for those who find themselves being crapped on by the present system, whether they be unemployed people, women, black and other minorities or even Sun printers. It does however prevent us from supporting demands by people for their right to work to preserve and maintain such a system.

Paul Whymark

How Adam Smith’s Theory of ‘Division of Labour’ Is Used to Exploit the Third World

Both Capitalism and Marxism derive from ‘Division of Labour’.

Author: Richard Hunt

Source: Green Anarchist Issue #16, Late Spring ’87, pages 10–11.
<thesparrowsnest.org.uk/collections/public_archive/9948.pdf>

IN 1776 ADAM SMITH published his ‘Wealth of Nations’ to identify what is wealth and how to increase it. He got it all wrong. He worked from two false premises, first that the lives of ‘primitive’ societies was ‘nasty, dull, poor, brutish and short’. We now know that this is untrue. Marshall Sahlins has called them the ‘original affluent society’. Food and fuel is plentiful and free. They are long living, wel-fed and peaceful. So although Smith could see the poverty of the peasants, he still thought, wrongly, that it was an advance on ‘primitivism’. Smith’s second mistake was to see the evident wealth of British towns and cities but not to realize that the wealth was built by workers fed with food extracted from the peasants and that the wealth of the towns was only created by the poverty of the countryside.

Adam Smith said that the urban wealth, instead of being created by the food, was created by trade and industry. The rich loved this, ft gave them the intellectual justification to screw the peasants even harder. They could take the peasants land to grow cash crops for trade which ‘increased the country’s wealth’. Adam Smith said so. The peasants starved but the country as a whole was supposed to be wealthier. The rich could make lots of wealth from trade and industry which would ‘trickle down’ to the middle classes in return for their professional services, and some of the food would ‘trickle down’ from the middle classes to the artisans. Smith assumed that it continued to ‘trickle down’ back to the peasants, ft never did. It had all been eaten. All that was left of the raw materials looted from the countryside to ‘trickle down’ back to the peasants was soot, shit, scrap and second-hand clothes.

In some things Adam Smith was right. If people work together specialising in different jobs of production, more is produced in shorter time. He was right that many of the workers and all of the middle classes benefit from this increased production. (Nevertheless, if a new machine is brought in to increase production, the worker must still work just as long for his pay. And the level of pay is determined by the hungriest -which is why work is being transferred to the low-wage Third World, kept non-unionised by our guns.

So, with the blessing of Adam Smith’s theories, Ethiopians are driven off their land in order that beef and coffee can be grown to sell abroad to increase Ethiopia’s wealth. The Ethiopian elite, its middle and artisan class benefit. The peasants starve.

In France Louis XIV forced his peasants to supply him with food. At his glittering court at Versailes he distributed the food to his ministers, mistresses, soldiers, cooks; even the beggars at his gates benefited from this ‘trickle down’. The French peasants starved. ‘Division of Labour’ showed that the cooks could produce more and better cakes for the King, and the artisans could make more and better baubles for his mistresses. But Smith was wrong to think that therefore the whole of France was wealthier. It was the expropriation of the crops which produced the wealth, not ‘Division of Labour’. And after the French Revolution the new government had to send out the army to force the peasants to continue sending their crops to the cities. After the Russian Revolution the Bolsheviks had to do exactly the same, and are still doing so.

The theory of ‘Division of Labour’ was expanded by Ricardo to work at an international level, the theory of ‘Comparative Advantage’. He assumed that everyone benefits if one country specialises in making cakes, one in making baubles and one, the sucker, in growing the food. Our governments, quoting Smith and Ricardo, send in development ‘aid’ to force the suckers to grow the food. And they send in the guns as an extra encouragement. The Third World elites benefit, so do their middle and working classes. Their peasants starve.

Richard Hunt

Shovels or Guns

Author: Richard Hunt

Date: Autumn 1987

Source: Green Anarchist #17.
<thesparrowsnest.org.uk/collections/public_archive/16089.pdf>

SHOULD WE SUPPORT THE WORKERS?

Revolutions are won by guns, not shovels. The Russian Revolution succeeded because it had the support of the soldiers and sailors. The Spanish Revolution got off the ground because Russia was supplying guns to the socialists. It was lost because Germany and others was supplying even more guns to Franco. So if we wanted a revolution in the cities, we would need to get support not from the workers but from the soldiers.

The workers in western industrial societies are among the richest 10 or 20% of the world’s population. Most of the workers within Britain are in the richest 50%. Are the rich going to spearhead the revolution? Are they, fuck.

In the Philippines the New Peoples Army have got their guns from the army, buying them from the soldiers, taking them from dead soldiers, raiding armouries. They’ve got no guns from abroad. The New Peoples Army are fighting in the hills. And that’s the way it’s going to have to be.

The workers are rich and irrelevant. Theoretically, strategically and tactically, supporting the workers is daft. Just trendy.

Richard Hunt.

On The Periphery

Author: P.N. Rogers.

Date: Autumn 1987

Source: Green Anarchist #17.
<thesparrowsnest.org.uk/collections/public_archive/16089.pdf>

GREEN ANARCHIST’S manifesto calls for revolution on the periphery — what does this mean?

The Geographical Periphery

The manifesto calls for ‘the destruction of the system from outside inwards starting in the Third World’, and GREEN ANARCHIST has repeatedly argued that if the agrarian in the Third World won control over their own resources they could both starve out the industrialised north and rob them of the means to retaliate against this.

The motives of the Third World to do this are simple: starve or be starved. Those facing this dilemma are the peasants driven from their lands by the cities in their own country or cities in the affluent north. If they are so powerless to lose their land in the first place, it seems doubly unlikely that they will have the power to take them back. Rather than fight against the overwhelming military power of their own cities, many disinherited peasants opt for the squalor of shanty life and migrate from their lands to the borders of urban industrialised production.

Only when the burdens of debt imposed by the north so cripple this Third World industrialism that migration there ceases to be an option and the cities of the Third World lack the military resources to bring regional groups in line when they attempt to take back their ‘ land is a green anarchist option in the Third World open.

However, to argue that ’the worse the situation is, the better it is’ is to condemn the Third World as a whole to disinheritance and starvation — in the despair of social collapse, nationalist/anti-imperialist struggles against the north are far more common than regional autonomism: moves towards green anarchism in the Third World are seen as a stab in the back to be crushed either by the cities, if the nationalist struggle rebuilds the power of the nation, or by the north (for example, through the use of Rapid Deployment Forces) if it is not.

To call for division, despair and powerlessness as the motors of social change in the Third World is likely to consign green anarchism to the despised and impotent political periphery of the third world.

The Political Periphery

The manifesto also calls for the building of an autonomous and alternative green productive base in the North-as people find only squalor and unemployment in the cities, they are supposed to take to the hills and build their own communities in opposition to the industrialism they have left behind.

Committing your life to growing your own crops on your own land is the very opposite of a soft option — it means working long hours, foregoing ’luxury goods’ that cannot be locally produced and ‘getting your hands dirty’. The only proper motive for doing this is a strong commitment to green anarchism as the road to the future.

If these green anarchist communities succeeded in undermining industrialism, those living on the city are certain to react to the threat they posed to their way of life. As with nationalism in the Third World, city dwellers are more likely to blame the green ‘outsiders’ for the problems of living they face rather than looking at the way they themselves live as the real difficulty.

Faced with the persecution of mob opinion, the law and ultimately even the military, communities would either be forced back off the land or adopt a ‘seige mentality’ of ‘them and us’, which will marginalise both autonomous production and the ability to attract others to such communities or to develop their own as they will simply not get the chance to be exposed to green anarchist ideas.

The Mental Periphery

If green anarchism is to become influential, it is important that everyone understands both what it is and how they can get involved in it. Rather than a strategy of confrontation that says ’Either go with us all the way or go to hell. common ground between all people has to be found showing how all can benefit from a greener and more anarchist attitude and lifestyle.

To argue that someone can only be a green anarchist by ‘going all the way’ is admirable for the small minority that are prepared to toil on the land for the whole of the lives and forego cars, telephones and modern medical resources, but the vast majority of people in our society are simply not prepared to do that.

Robert Owens communes in America in the last century gathered only a few hundred people and despite removing the temptations of a more effluent industrial society by ’setting up shop’ in the middle of the wilderness, these communities usually collapsed in under a decade.

Conversely, Owen’s industrial reforms in his cotton mills — shorter working hours for his employees and more control by them over their workplace — not only made these mills more productive and a more pleasant i environment to work in (something that suited everyone) but also spawned the whole idea of the co-operative movement. A small gain, but one that is now accepted as a fact of life.

If it properly explained how these small gains benefit all and áre tinged with green anarchism, people are more likely to see green anarchist ideas as something both workable and something that they can get directly involved in. They become an asset rather than a threat to the way people live.

As part of green anarchism is recognising how our selfish and mindless consumption exploits peasants in the Third World, more local production would reduce the burden we impose on them. It is the North’s power over the Third World and our willingness to play along with this that is the problem. We are in the best position to lift the burden from their shoulders by such simply acheived actions as choosing to buy locally produced goods rather than those imported from the Third World.

So how can we set about spreading green anarchist ideas? If, rather than focusing on a final utopia and offering no real workable way of acheiving it, we think out ways of solving immediate problems in the community and then push these both locally through personal contacts and nationally by feeding the green anarchist perspective into the centres of decision making (Universities, think tanks, the more thoughtful and sympathetic elements of the State), a current for real social change will be created which can accomodate those willing to ‘go all the way’ as well as those only able to ‘make a step in the right direction’.

P.N. Rogers.

Two Decades of Disobedience: A retrospective on Green Anarchist’s first twenty years

Author: John Connor

Date: March 2004

Source: Green Anarchist Issue 71–72.
<web.archive.org/web/http://www.greenanarchist.org:80/pdf/ga71.pdf>

Few anarchist publications survive to their 20^th year, and then typically spoil it by resounding triumphant about their minuscule ‘great achievements’. At risk of sounding pious, it is not our role as revolutionaries to holiday from criticism — especially essential selfcriticism — or to publish propaganda, which implies an unequal, manipulative relationship between writer and reader. Like the Trotskyites of yore, there are ‘Walter Mittys’ in the movement that go over the in-house press with a fine-toothed comb for any portent — however tiny or obscure — of their imminent ‘achievement of historical destiny’, a tendency that actually only emphasises their risible, self-deluded megalomania and pathetic insignificance. For all the postSeattle myth-making, Leviathan’s enemies have achieved little on global terms, so it is more appropriate to present ourselves with modest humility, as learners rather than teachers.

Our Origins

London Greenpeace presented the Easter 1984 Stop the City (STC) as a forerunner to such anti-globalisation spectacles as J18. With hindsight, this is nothing to boast about and GA’s role in it less so. As others were penned outside the Bank of England trading smoke flares with the Met, veteran Freedom columnist and owner of the Keverall Farm organic commune Alan Albon and a young Green CND herbalist Marcus Christo met in a nearby pub, quietly agreeing to found a “green” anarchist publication to join the Green wave of the time. Donations from one Poison Girls benefit later, they did so. The first issue featured articles by Colin Ward, London Greenpeace’s Dave Morris and a cringe-inducing cover portraying the wished-for coming together of two dissident youth counter-cultures — hippies and punks — but was a pretty mixed bag.

The first cover was by one Richard Hunt, bought in as GA’s artist and record-keeper. An odd customer even by movement terms, Hunt had been variously a SIGINT operative during his national service in Hong Kong and a torture victim of the psychiatric establishment (‘aversion therapy’), but most relevantly here had quit both the Green Party and John Carpenter’s dissident splinter, Green Line, for failure to adopt what he portentiously described as “my economic analysis”.[7] He was one of the first to latch onto Richard Lee / Marshall Sahlin’s ‘primitive affluence’ thesis, that whilst band-societies are typically commodity-poor, they are time-rich and use their leisure to live full, harmonious, egalitarian lives. Despite Sahlins also noting agriculturalists were worse off in all respects than forager bands, Hunt’s mid-1970s pamphlet The Natural Society argued in terms typical of that decade’s utopianism for the decentralisation of society to the level of small, selfsufficient communities (tweely rendered as “villages”), with any losses in technology and high culture written off as inevitable, if not desirable.

The Hunt Years

Hunt’s extreme dogmatism led him to demand the informal GA adopt his analysis as “policy” and then, come 1986, to use his control of the zine’s records to force the other editors out when they would not. He later claimed the sticking point for his blatant take-over was “violence”, the peace movement dominating the protest milieu and the minds of the other two editors at the time. In this, Hunt — fresh from crawling through a hedge to escape a battering at the battle of the Beanfield, where Thatcher’s rompersuited storm troopers trapped and physically smashed the Peace Convoy — was probably more in touch with social reality. Lacking coworkers, in 1987 he formed an editorial collective from prominent Stonehenge Campaign veterans, Oxford students and the odd local pagan, but this fell apart after one issue, largely as they were unwilling to subordinate themselves to Hunt as his ‘mere mouthpieces’.

Ploughing on regardless, Hunt halved GA’s already feeble circulation gratuitously attacking pacifists, theists and workerists — though the latter with considerable provocation. With the Rekjavik accords and the end of Soviet power in sight, the peace movement was failing and a Leftism that shared his dogmatism — if not his non-analysis of class conflict — was filling the vacuum. At this time, many of the workerist high-ups were unashamedly sectarian Leftists and Platformists, fetishising (their) organisation and ideology. Many of their followers were ex-vegan/peace police asserting their new proletarian Cause with convert zeal, despite their professional parents and public school educations (i.e. they themselves were the “middle class wankers”).

Despite this, Hunt formed a second ‘collective’ the next year, consisting of Chris Laughton, a libertarian who made a living as the test subject of medical experiments rather than draw the dole, and Paul Rogers, an expeace camper and Peace Studies student disillusioned with all that following Peace News’ denunciation of direct action by Autonomous Peace Action. Laughton left for Keverall Farm following his failure to establish Earth First! in the UK, being replaced by our resident doctor of programmes geekery, ANSLIM’s Kevin Lano (Anarchist Sexual Liberation Movement), someone Hunt evidently found inappropriately disturbing.

Hunt wanted to leave GA to them so he’d have more time to expand The Natural Society to book length, finally published as a result of an inheritance from his unbeloved mother in 1998 as To End Poverty. He left sooner than intended in 1991 when his confused support for the first Gulf War saw him criticised in print by the other editors, who had been repeatedly arrested for actively opposing the war. To this day, Hunt takes massive umbrage at this ‘peasants’ revolt’, being treated as he treated the original editors. He went on to edit what he hoped would be a rival publication, Alternative Green, on which sadly more below.

The 4^th Collective

As Lano left for computer business in Australia, Rogers had to get out GA29 on his own before being joined by fourth editorial collective. This included a young Camberley punk whose brother was involved in animal rights, Saxon Wood, who did the distribution; obsessive ALF / ELF list-keeper and editor of Rabbixian Anarchist Times (RAT, later Ecovegan) in the West Country, Noel Molland, who did the direct action listings; and ex-RAF helicopter maintenance man Steve Booth, a former anti-poll tax bailiff buster who also edited the Lancaster Anarchist Bomber. All were to become the ‘GA’ portion of the GAndALF defendants, but this was only the culmination of a Stateorchestrated campaign of spookery directed against GA from 1992 or so.

With Booth came his fellow NW bailiff busters Ray Hill and Tim Hepple, both fascists-turnedSearchlight assets. Because Hunt was even then making disturbing noises about “not Left or Right, but centralist or decentralist” — he invariably spoke axiomatically, further illustrating his ideological rigidity — we were more open to the ‘gruesome twosome’s blandishments than was wise, even publicising Hill’s ‘Creating a Community’ scam about readers sending money to buy a Scottish island (we were later told he was a notorious fraudster, something he grudgingly admitted himself in his autobiography). With Hunt’s resignation, Searchlight had no need to infiltrate GA to spy on the far-Right (quite the opposite in fact), so we can only assume it was to fulfil some State agenda.

With huge Green Party gains in the Euro elections and GA principally reporting EF!UK,[8] we were a natural target for infiltration and manipulation. When the BNP finally cottoned on to Tim Hepple’s infiltration of their infamous Welling bookshop by early-1993,[9] he insisted GA publish a hit list of fascists he claimed were involved in Combat 18, a neo-Nazi street gang given endless sensationalist and lucrative publicity in Searchlight for publishing their own hit lists in Target magazine, something Hepple also knew suspiciously too much about. Needless to say, this would have been legally and physically dangerous, but what really set alarm bells ringing was Hepple’s claim that details of antifascists had been supplied to C18 not by him but by an ex-NF figure then prominent in Class War, Tim Scargill. As we’d been building bridges since the Hunt years,[10] we knew Scargill personally and meeting him through the auspices of Searchlight’s most single-minded foe, the spook-obsessed anti-fascist researcher Larry O’Hara, it was obvious to us he was being framed to create a three-way street war between GA, CW and C18 and — not incidentally — slap Class War for their reversing their Searchlight-sponsored expulsion from Anti-Fascist Action (AFA) on absurd smear grounds in 1985.

With input from the others being set up, O’Hara published the first of a series of pamphlets exposing Hepple’s provocateur tactics, A Lie Too Far, which provoked a campaign of intimidation, smears and threats of violence from those reliant on Searchlight’s dubious intelligence to maintain their position in AFA.[11] Aside from transparent Stalinist garbage like Terry Liddle, whose exwife is a Searchlight photographer, this realignment was done by early1995 or so, though the State were hardly done with GA.

The Gandalf Trial

Although the smear campaign by Stewart Home, Fabian Tompsett and their fans began as early as 1994, I’m leaving that for later. It’s noteworthy here that they didn’t hesitate to use the same language (“terrorists”, etc) as journalists fed anti-GA smears directly by the State — Home even claiming to know one of them personally, Jason Benetto — and when marginalised or desperate enough, used facts (e.g. numbers, personal details) that could only have been available from police surveillance sources.

Having exposed Hepple (and a portion of the State’s strategy to demonise the militant Green movement as “ecoterrorists”) and refused the arms and communications equipment we would probably have needed to survive the street war he was manoeuvring GA into as a small group, his MI5 masters started planting incredible stories on an “ecoterrorist” theme about GA and EF! in the mainstream media from mid1993. John Harlow of the Times (and Construction News...), for example, was claiming protesters “threw babies under bulldozers” in his coverage of the Solsbury Hill and M11 protests. It was pretty obvious the journalists were getting a common briefing as all consistently rendered ‘ELF’ as ‘Environmental Liberation Front’ rather than the wittier, less wordy accepted movement form, ‘Earth Liberation Front’.

With the start of the Newbury bypass campaign in early-1995,[12] the State turned bluster into action with raids on PO boxes and then homes under Operation Washington. Eventually over fifty homes, bookshops and printworks were to be raided, some repeatedly and some for such trivial reasons as having written goodwill cards to defendants, and some 10,000 pages of ‘evidence’ seized. As GA’s editors, we were surprised to discover we had ‘conspired to incite criminal damage by fire’ with ALF press officer Robin Webb and his younger, semi-retired sidekick Simon Russell. Evidence of ‘association’ included such nonsense as Sax Wood selling GA at a meeting Robin Webb spoke at half a decade before. At no time was there any suggestion contact between any GA and ALF-supporting ‘conspirators’ went beyond normal exchange of journalistic information — in the direction of a book of matches, for example....

What was Operation Washington about? It’s important in understanding it to know that it had been running a couple of years before anyone from GA was even arrested. Operation Washington Mk. I (for want of a better designation) featured an attempt to frame Webb for possession of a wrapped shotgun passed him as a ‘tool’ by a Sussex animal sanctuary owner Dave Hammond, who later mainstream media ‘exposés’ of the ALF implied had turned State asset. Webb’s trial at Lewes collapsed when police refused to name their sources.[13]

Operation Washington Mk.II started out as an attempt to pin Barry Horne’s arson wave on the Isle of Wight — a resounding success inasmuch as it forced Boots to close their Thurgatton vivisection lab and made their ‘cruelty-free’ labels authentically cruelty-free — by reasoning that anyone knowing about it must have directly or indirectly been informed by the fire-starter, supposedly a ‘conspiratorial association’. Unfortunately, Horne was arrested placing devices in Bristol before we were first dragged into court, so evidence about him was removed from the bundles and the brief expanded to suggest that any reporting of direct action implied prosecutable ‘conspiratorial association’ with its unknown perpetrators. As Robin Webb and GA (though its Direct Action Diary) were then just about the only publications carrying such reports in UK without added ‘police spin’, how much this all suited the State as a weapon in the propaganda war was pretty obvious.

This is not the place to give a blowbyblow account of a prosecution process (including Operation Washington I) that ran from 1993- 1999, included three major trials and ended up costing the State nearly £10m.[14] However, this new weapon of political repression’s first outing was ill-served by its advocates, ailing CPS prosecutor Alan Ventnor insisting at our first hearing at Portsmouth in early 1997 that his definition of conspiracy had been ignored and that Hampshire Constabulary’s ‘broad definition’ threatened free speech — until he was literally dragged out of the court between two cops and ‘spoken to’. Then the acting prosecutor, the portly, florid Dick Onslow whose family may have been associated with the 1977 Persons Unknown conspiracy trial, got so badly muddled by his legal definitions that the State’s prime target, Robin Webb, had to be acquitted — and the chronically scared Simon Russell should have been then too, as any supposed ‘association’ with GA defendants was through Webb. Of course, not to let the law interfere with a good show trial, Robin was thrown back into the legal process for the unsuccessful 2^nd and 3^rd trials of 1998 anyway.

Rogers felt most strongly that a political prosecution needed to be fought politically (even pragmatically speaking, ‘conspiracy’ was such a catch-all it could hardly be fought legally!), and was backed in this most strongly by Booth. The GAndALF (GA-and-ALF) Defendants Campaign was formed over Simon Russell’s typically unsussed objection that his poor, sick mother might find out about the case in consequence, and was backed administratively by the Stevenage-based National Anti-Hunt Campaign. Much of the GDC’s limited (giro-level!) resources went into trying to publicise the case including two (chaotic and ill-attended) national speaking tours, but the mainstream media consistently pleaded sub judice rather than admit their own tacit complicity with police censorship by acknowledging others uncowed by it. It took the start of the 1^st GAndALF trial in Portsmouth, August 1997, for the liberal NCCL to send even a token observer and for Stephen Hancock, a principled NVDAer once jailed for UK’s first Ploughshares action and who knew Rogers personally, to kickstart movement media coverage at an alternative media gathering in Oxford — not least as they realised they were next. Only after the end of the first trial did we see a second support group formed by London Greenpeace and solidarity actions ‘to make prosecuting more trouble than not prosecuting’ such as the bricking of butchers’ shops in Portsmouth and Dr. Margaret Jones’ disruption of Bristol’s intercollegiate boat race.

Another important element in fighting a political prosecution is to have lawyers prepared to argue a case politically in court, for all the restrictions imposed by the Law Society. The firm most commonly used by activists then, Bindmans, were rejected out of hand as Jeffrey Bindman is lawyer to Gerry Gable, Searchlight’s editor, but the alternative Birnbergs proved almost as bad. They agreed to argue direct action — and incidentally reporting on it — was necessary selfdefence against State threats to established liberties, which would give us scope to drag spooks, their assets and compromised journalists into court, ask Hepple about his home-made sabotage manual, the Ecodefenders Handbook, dig up highly embarrassing dirt about 1970s coup plots like Wilsongate, etc, at a time when a new Labour administration was thinking of butchering MI5’s budget. When the case came to court, all Birnbergs barristers did was get a few off-therecord admissions PIIs (public interest immunity certificates) were being used to cover up MI5’s role in the case and then did their best to play one defendant off against the others and get them to denounce their own politics in best US ‘client management’ manner, in the hope the jury would find them too disunited, pathetic and stupid to ever conspire together. Naive defendants — and none of GA’s editors other than Rogers had ever even been arrested before Operation Washington — such as Noel Molland identified so strongly with the lawyers that he allowed himself to be destroyed by prosecutor Onslow on the stand for days on his lawyer’s advice, ran to them at first hint of counter-demos against the trial (in the hope organisers would be arrested — as documented in Grassy Noel, a post-GAndALF pamphlet endorsed by Robin Webb) and continued to defend their conduct even from jail! In the long term, the lawyers did more damage to GA than the police, their only apology coming through word of mouth and a third party at the 2000 Mayday events in London.

Because Rogers only insisted the lawyers do what they were hired to do, he was presented as a paranoid endangering other defendants liberty, with his lawyer Ken McDonald QC [15] quitting mid-trial rather than represent him, insisting “I’d be struck off” for running the agreed defence. When military judge David Selwood refused to allow him new representation, Rogers made it quite clear he would call every spook he could lay a writ on, deliberately picked out all proof of complicity (e.g. Hepple and police references to “PO Box 100”, MI5’s drop) in reviewing the evidence under their noses [16] and tried to contact David Shayler, the dissident MI5 officer then hiding out in Paris, via the Daily Mail’s Mark Hollingsworth. Returning to court the following Tuesday, Rogers was immediately severed from the case by Selwood, as originally requested.

Other than Simon Russell — who really had nothing to do with it and damn all to actually worry about — the other, more naive defendants were all convicted after a three month-long trial. Selwood deliberately span out his blatantly hostile summing-up three days to ensure Barry Horne was sentenced the day before the jury began their deliberations. Sax Wood’s parents saw them reading about it in the paper on the train to court. They each got 3 1/2 years, lucky as Barry Horne got 18 and the laws of conspiracy make them as culpable as he supposedly was. In fact, arson can carry a life term, even if all you did was write up a report on it gleaned from the Net. Consistent with MI5’s “ecoterrorist” smear strategy, what national press deigned to report the story at all (no longer sub judice now it suited them) ran ‘Anarchists Jailed for Bomb Plot’ headlines conveniently omitting any reference to their true ‘crime’, writing, and pretending it was them there with the candles and pop bottles full of petrol the whole time.

Determined GA should continue, Steve Booth continued to contribute articles and Community Resistance Diary listings from Lancaster Castle, hidden in the body of his prison letters. Rogers was arrested four times and had phones, papers and computer seized twice in the next three months, all supposedly ‘unrelated’ hunt sab stuff. A back-up editorial collective was briefed, but as it was, the paper continued. Plans were made with new lawyers to ambush then-MI5 director Stella Rimington at a meeting in Brighton to serve a writ on her and Rogers and O’Hara tracked Tim Hepple — then living under the pseudonym Tim Matthews — to a UFO meeting in Southport where he was preparing grounds to launch his book on the subject. They exposed his past to ufologists, who were shocked by the ex-fascist’s immediate resort to strong arm tactics.[17] Attempts to force through a 2^nd trial of Webb and Rogers, who escaped the first, before the jailed editors could appeal foundered when Rogers’ lawyer, Tim Murphy, turned out not to be a lawyer after all. An active hunt sab and no friend of the police, Murphy had been disbarred by the Law Society but had taken the case regardless by way of revenging himself on the Establishment.

In the three months granted to instruct a new lawyer, the furore was getting unmanageable for the authorities with even two Nobel Prize winners signing up to the Alternative Media Gathering’s anticensorship declaration,[18] and the jailed editors were released on a technicality to do with ambiguity of the wording of the indictment after less than four months inside. Thanks to a stream of supportive letters, the defendants had done better than might be expected in jail — except Molland whose shrill, ‘holierthan-thou’ attitude antagonised otherwise sympathetic prisoners and who had his cell trashed by fascists on arrival at HMP Totnes.

Just how thin the technicality was as an excuse to release the editors was shown up by the 3^rd trial, where it proved impossible for the prosecution to find any indictment wording that wasn’t deemed “ambiguous”, meaning both Webb and Rogers also finally got to walk free. There followed a standoff into early-1999 where police threatened an appeal and we threatened to sue. They blinked first — and the paper, of course, kept on coming out.

The Home Clones

Steward Home flooded London with his ‘Green and Brown Anarchist’ leaflet in mid-1994, arguing GA’s supposed support for “Green death camps” because of Hunt’s former involvement.[19] He continued churning this crap out at least until 1998, deliberately trying to blur the distinction between ‘ecofascists’ (a Lyndon Larouche-coined term for those favouring authoritarian environmental measures, particularly re. population control) and ‘common or garden’ fascists (those committed to a fuhrerprinzip and so related supremacisms), as if we at GA — as anarchists, consistently antistatist and anti-fascist — were either. We were naively inclined to dismiss the first one or two leaflets as the sort of scandalous publicity-seeking initiated by the Surrealists and decidedly tired by the Situationists, who Home affected to ape in the hope his association with their techniques would discredit them, not him. After all, Home — a deliberately execrable writer, as if he could be any other kind — was seeking an ‘in’ to the early-1990s notoriety of Brit lit that followed Irving Welsh’s Trainspotting.

After that, we responded with a ‘pot calls kettle black’ editorial paragraph noting Home’s association with National Front member Tony Wakeford and to date have so far had three different claims from Home as to when he disassociated himself from him as well as insubstantial, self-serving claims that Wakeford has left off fascism, each disproved by a subsequently discovered document. This sounded like someone with something to hide to us... When we collared Home’s space cadet sidekick Fabian ‘Fuckwit’ Tompsett at one of their artsy do’s at the Oval two years into this crap, he couldn’t even define ‘fascism’, insisting it was “a matter for sociologists”. This didn’t stop them throwing similarly incoherent mud for another half-decade.

By 1997, the ‘who said what’ of this manufactured scandal was so bewilderingly convoluted that people thought it all poor entertainment at best — with a few opportunistic lice like AK Press also seeing it as a bulwark against anarcho-primitivist supersession of their antique ideologies. Then Home and his clones — I won’t call them Neoists as he did, following Neoist founder tentatively a convenience’s denunciation of their attempt to discredit Neoism by appropriation — started to broaden their aim. Fuckwit issued a pamphlet denouncing ‘anarchist saint’ Stuart Christie, a veteran Black Flag editor who tried to assassinate Spain’s generalissimo Franco, as a “fascist” for advocating anarchist militias. As typical with this crowd, Christie’s distinction between classic anarchist militias in Spain and racist, Christian fundamentalist ones in the US was deliberately blurred. At the 1997 Anarchist Bookfair, when they prematurely hoped GA’s editors would already be safely jailed and not there to answer back, Home and his clones issued Anarchist Integralism, a pamphlet claiming all anarchists as tainted by anti-Semitic “Bakuninism”, although neither this nor ‘integralism’ were ever defined. Of course, the anarcho-Establishment sat there and meekly took it, not knowing the ‘joke’ (such as it was) was on them.

Surrounded by a fan base of exceptional sycophancy and stupidity — typically college kids dressed up as skinheads, as if they think this fools anyone — Home is used to passing outrageous remarks that go over their heads and, I suspect, enjoys trying to worm his way round criticism if confronted over any of them. He’s happy to use the Evolian slogan “Long live Death!” in one of his AK-published booklets, claiming it to be an anarchist Civil War slogan when challenged. It may well have been. Incidentally. Which I doubt is the reason Home used it. Similarly, we knew what integralism was, an irrational ultra-nationalist belief promulgated by the darling of the ‘political soldier’ far-Right as ‘more extreme than the Nazis’, Cornlieu Codreanu, fuhrer of the Romanian Iron Guard during World War 2. We knew what “Bakuninism” was too, an alternate term for so-called nationalanarchism, a far-Right attempt wellestablished in Germany and Russia to appropriate anarchism, much as national Bolshevism was a fascist attempt to appropriate Stalinism in the run-up to World War 2.

How did we know all this stuff, other than Home’s suspicious interest in the obscure byways of the farRight and as a consequence of our ongoing association with the train/ fascistspotterish Larry O’Hara since the Hepple affair? Because we had to. Flattered by political attention from anyone at all, Richard Hunt (remember him?) had let his Alternative Green (and his mind) grow rank with fascist weeds, opening its columns to ‘political soldiers’ like Patrick Harrington (a big chum of Wakeford’s), Richard Lawson and Troy Southgate. Pretty soon, Hunt himself was arguing the same sort of meaningless distinctions as them between ‘racial nationalists’ and Nazis and claiming the Strasser brothers “weren’t Nazis” despite years of being card-carrying NSDAP members, albeit a tad more proletarian than usually accepted into its upper ranks. Southgate is happy to call himself a ‘national-anarchist’ and ‘Bakuninist’ and is welcome to provided he doesn’t attempt — as Home and his clones have not coincidentally consistently tried to do — to confuse this with any authentic, nonbogus, anti-statist form of anarchism. Lawson edited a publication called Perspectives, using the old Mosley study group trick of suckering in the middle class by never overtly using the ‘F’ word. Long-since exposed — not least by GA — Lawson then moved in on Alternative Green as founded by someone authentically Green and guaranteed to cry long and hard if his appropriation of it was ever challenged. The fascist tactic of convergence is to lay claim to juicy terms (“freedom”, “ecology”, “anarchism”) and hope that those already using them will drop them like poison rather than be poisoned by association with those misappropriating them. This cultural ‘war of position’ has been meat and drink to the ‘political soldiers’ for at least a quarter century now.

We’d been actively discouraging sales of Alternative Green since it started to go rotten at its 2^nd issue. But Hunt’s new chums were ambitious, having him front a series of ‘Anarchist Heretic Fairs’ in contrast to the annual Anarchist Bookfair in London, as showcases for one species of convergence after another. Trouble — for them — was this didn’t get very far, with venues consistently crying off when told what sort was really planning to show up and eventually even the mainstream anti-fascist movement — which typically can only spot the sort of fascist that wears jackboots and says “sieg heil” — woke up to what was going on and shooed a frustrated Hunt and his stall off the front of the 2000 Bookfair, sans stock. They showed less enthusiasm for moving on those promoting a convergence agenda within the Bookfair, organisers Martin Peacock and Carol Saunders being longstanding chums of the ‘avant garde’ Home and Fuckwit. In fact, Peacock showed more enthusiasm for beating up a GA leafleteer alerting Fair-goers to convergence than barring those promoting it from his event. Equally tellingly, other attendees have shown typical movement principle in preferring a stall at the Bookfair to challenging its organisers over this blatant incident.

And what of Home now? Virtually silent, whether because Brit lit’s star has fallen and without himself even tagged to its tail (so no publishers, no moronic pseud fan base, etc — hard life, eh?) or because the final expose of the convergers at the 2000 Bookfair — there have been no more ‘Heretics Fairs’ attempted since — means he has lost his rationalle to continue smearing GA. And he knows we have the full gen on Wakeford and he now too, of course.... Throughout this Homestyled “feud”, there has been an undercurrent of collaboration between him and the State as well as the fascists. Of course, both before and after World War 2, fascists were wellserved by their connections to intelligence as a deniable reservoir of anti-Communist brute force. It also suits both their agendas propagandawise to infiltrate militant Green circles and so have them portrayed as violent and fascistic.

Splits and Schisms

The end of the GandALF prosecutions also marked a slow, acrimonious end to GA’s fourth editorial collective.

As you’ve already read above, the obsessive Noel Molland — who had neither understanding of or sympathy with GA’s broader politics and used our pages simply to get his listings printed in the name of animal lib movement cred — moved out of our orbit even before the first trial was done and now plays on his short spell inside as an angle in publishing his Earth Liberation Prisoners newsletter. A rigid, mother-identified individual, Molland’s publication is more appreciated by the animal lib movement than he is. His compromising behaviour — including sneaking off to a hotel room to talk to a journalist that then ran one bogus anti-ALF programme after another — during the GAndALF trial is a matter of record, after all.

Sax Wood also legged it out of UK rather than get called to testify at the 3^rd GAndALF trial. This was the start of a strange odyssey indeed. EF!UK refuses all representative principles — including that there is an “EF!UK” as opposed to a scattering of distinct local groups — and yet Wood addressed his way across Canada to the Amerikan West Coast as its selfstyled “representative”. He landed a post at the Earth First! Journal then based at Eugene, Oregon, this way too. He first offered to get GA printed over there for global distribution — marginally cheaper than UK printing, much better security, and distribution inroads into the US too — and then decided to fuck us off after a couple of issues on realising he could make more money publishing his own paper from Eugene instead (that this doubled our print costs in UK meant nothing to him). Much as Molland claimed to be nonanarchist (despite years publishing something called the Rabbixian Anarchist Times) and nonviolent on lawyers’ advice during the Gandalf trial, so they had Wood dream up some ‘fundamental’ green anarchism out of the pre-Hunt primordial soup, an Albonesque mishmash of allotments and homespun pacifism. Calling it Green Anarchy, Wood touted his version from venue to venue around the States, claiming it to be “the American version of Green Anarchist” and himself to be me, John Connor. Needless to say, he prevaricated endlessly about allowing any criticism to be published in it by GA (UK) — a green anarchist publication open to all except other green anarchists, evidently! Well, it would have rather blown that little scam of his and there is no dole worth talking of Stateside.... Ironically, the Eugene-based crew he eventually recruited as co-editors — his dyslexia made it impossible to edit the publication beyond reprints on his own — took him at his word and when they, too, insisted on anarchoprimitivist content like the UK version, Wood worked himself up into a huff and walked out, compiling his more honestly titled News from Nowhere from the East Coast thereafter. A further delicious irony was that this all happened only months short of the N30 antiglobalisation protests in Seattle, which (absurdly) hyped the Eugene anarchists and their GA (USA) to worldwide attention.

Whilst at the Journal, Wood met radical archaeologist and fellow editor, Theresa Kintz. Although she’d been involved in EF! over a decade, she had only become aware of the anarcho-primitivist perspective on meeting John Zerzan in Eugene. When the Journal received the offer of a first interview with Ted Kaczynski, convicted for a 17 year campaign of antitech Unabombings and at one time Amerika’s #1 Most Wanted, Kintz took on an assignment the other largely upper-middle class, liberal editorial group wanted nothing to do with. The Journal wouldn’t publish this ‘dynamite’ material — not least on the insistence of Daryl Cherney, the big money Californian EF! supremo then suing the FBI for injuries caused by their bomb during the Redwoods Summer campaign — who subsequently had her purged from the editorial group. Kintz then left for the UK, both because GA had agreed to publish the interview without any of the official nastiness that might accompany Amerikan publication and because it was possible to write her thesis on radical archaeology and anarcho-primitivism in the British academic climate but not any Amerikan one (nice to live in a free country then...).

Unfortunately after little over a year in UK, Kintz and myself found Larry O’Hara our de facto landlord whilst doing (extended) summer work in London. O’Hara has serious, unresolved problems to do with women, particularly his deceased, adopted mother [20] and it didn’t take much prompting from a malicious neighbour (who also happened to be a copper’s wife) he’d adopted as a mothersubstitute for things to turn very nasty indeed. Things might have ended with our de facto eviction but O’Hara, never one to under-do vindictiveness, then encouraged Steve Booth to believe Kintz was (in his own words) “an agent for the American equivalent of Searchlight”. As the Irrationalist debacle during the GAndALF period demonstrated, Booth is given to inappropriate quasiautistic fixations and at this time, Larry O’Hara was one of them. He was happy to believe and / or do anything O’Hara told him, whether it made sense or not. Despite repeated public and private challenges to provide any evidence of his agentbaiting BS, none has being forthcoming with Booth himself admitting in private correspondence that his risible amalgam of paranoid surmises are “not proof”. This didn’t stop him from a covert campaign of unsubstantiated, hostile whispers and mail interception (given our precipitate move, we had to route our mail via his home before we knew of his ‘aberration’ and until a more secure alternative was available), ultimately setting up his own spoiler publication, also called Green Anarchist, ‘to save it’. Needless to say, Booth could hardly publicly admit the true reason for his ‘split’ without deserved ridicule, so he first pretended it was to do with Kintz trying to sell a second Kaczynski interview to porno mag Penthouse (surely a matter principally between Ted and her) and then later, when that didn’t get sufficient reaction in these post-feminist times, claimed it was due to “differences of approach”.

Current Issues

As early as N30 (by which I mean my time in the Euston pig pen), we at GA have been warning that the antiglobalisation movement would revive massified Leftism and that would swallow the autonomous direct action initiatives where real hope for a similarly autonomous future lies. That prediction has sadly proved largely true, militancy (if we can call it that) being largely confined to ‘mile wide, inch deep’ ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ demos that satisfied the more complacent type of liberal in the 1980s — but even then were augmented by a hard edge of clandestine ALFers, base busters, saboteurs and street fighting anti-fascists which I’m relieved to say the complacent liberals didn’t approve of. Fredy Perlman said that anarcho zine publishing represented a “reappropriation of capital” inasmuch as you always have to put money into them to keep them alive, that they never pay for themselves. One odd consequence of the massification of the movement is that outlets for alternative publications have plummeted.

A key reason I had to work in London from summer 2000 — and continue to work now, nights and / or in shit call centres — despite being opposed to work as a matter of temperament and general principle was that this was the only way remaining open to me to finance the paper. Booth — who at that time was living in a fantasy world of an ever-expanding movement and where nothing ever had to be paid for — simply couldn’t understand why he was being asked to do more of GA’s admin, only having 8+ hours a day more free time to do it than I then did. I had no objection in principle to him editing the paper fulltime, leaving me time to write and finance GA, but when I saw the first and only prebreak issue he produced, I knew there was just no way he should be allowed to ever produce another under the Green Anarchist mast head. Despite access to a perfectly good printer, he had halved its size and doubled its price, making it cheaper for readers to photocopy than buy, which I guess proofed them against further rip-offs. All mention of direct action and even prisoners listings had been dropped, replaced by diatribes in triplicate on the worth of unity with statist organisations like the Green Party, trivial reformist calls to lobby politicians for more easily recycled packaging and renationalisation of the railways, and off-the-wall conspiracy theory of the sort that so endeared O’Hara to Booth. Despite his level (indeed, strangely flat and humourless) tone, the weakening of emphasis was so pronounced that I concluded this new GA was either written by a different person from that who’d versified

Fluffy wankers make me chunder / Soon you’ll all be six feet under

(the original perhaps replaced by pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers...) or one in the grip of a profound mental illness (perhaps some sort of obsessive-compulsive reformism!).

In full auteur mode, Booth wouldn’t budge an inch, of course, so I had to deny him access to GA’s Monomarks box and activate the mag’s back-up editorial collective, those prepared to edit it had the entire 4^th collective gone down as a result of the GAndALF trial. Since the dark days of mid-2000, we have produced half a dozen new issues of the ‘original and best’ GA,[21] addressed comrades as far afield as the US, Italy and Turkey, seen AP gatherings in UK, Spain and the States and outsold Booth’s pseudo-GA two to one with more frequent publication. It is a source of particular satisfaction to me that now Booth has to go to the bother of publishing and selling the mag himself, his “trees of Reason” have been dealing him some harsh blows as to economic and movement realities that he should have been alive to four years ago. We (i.e. the new editors, largely involved as Booth is not) were especially amusing to hear he was reduced to impersonating a vegetarian so Lancaster Animal Rights Group would take him to a SHAC demo to streetsell his wretched little reformist rag there.

Of course, whilst this publication is not produced solely to spite Steve Booth, satisfying though that might be (the opposite, when it comes to his pseudo-publication, might not be the case however), it’s worth paying some attention to his “difference of approach” just to illustrate where GA is going in future.

Like Sax Wood before, Booth felt that by weakening GA’s content and consciously adopting a ‘popularist’ (i.e. propagandistic) format, he’d win more readers and influence — conventional political prosletysing tactics, in fact. This approach is flawed because whilst there are 101 reformist publications out there, all more established and better resourced than Booth’s, there is only one GA, a unique voice (not counting Booth’s GA, of course, which is unique only in its residual demented conspiracy theorising!). Revolution is not made by halves — without challenging the totality, radically and totally, nothing will ultimately change, something we all know deep down. A ‘popularist’ approach can’t even touch on these fundamental areas in case (its advocates patronisingly assume) it ‘scares the horses — and the proles’. Rather than having deep appeal, such propaganda touches on deep insecurities. It is Booth and not us that is “elitist” inasmuch as we demand full, open dialogue whereas Booth feels only some ideas are fit to be fed to his ‘limited, weak-minded’ readers as The Answer from Upon High whilst others must be rigidly censored and excluded from his publication, despite references to “free speech” on its mast head. The result is an unattractive, uninteresting monologue, and all readers hear is the drone of a wannabe boss-in-waiting lording it over them intellectually — as in the rest of the Left and anarcho-Left press.

Booth stupidly argues that an absolute position achieves nothing, as if we were a political party recruiting members according to certain criteria, with only those ‘in’ allowed to do anything politically meaningful. Sadly, perhaps Booth does now see politics in such conventional terms — but I do not. Whoever acts in an unmediated way for their own liberation is ‘in’ as far as I’m concerned and my ‘party’ — if one can so name something that does not and should not exist — is the total liberation of all, human, animal, plant and rock by the tearing down of all separation and alienation. One moment of piercing, epiphanaic love or of well-directed anger outweighs any thousand petitions addressed to the waste paper baskets of the already powerful as far as I’m concerned.

Anarcho-primitivism occupies the same place of universal evil in Booth’s wonky worldview as perhaps Searchlight, Freedom Press or (in pre-movement Cold Warrior mode) Communism once did. For those who have seen only the ‘reasonable’ face Booth puts on for public consumption, it is instructive to read him rant and rave in his anti-AP pamphlet, literally contradicting himself page by page, never mind such errors of fact as accusing John Zerzan, author of The Catastrophe of Postmodernism, of being a postmodernist just because Booth doesn’t like post-modernism either! You won’t know it to read Primitivism: An Illusion with No Future (free off the Net) that Booth was around as early as Ian Bone’s 1993 Anarchy In The UK festival when John Moore and Leigh Starcross bought out the AP latent in Hunt’s adoption of Sahlin’s ‘primitive affluence’ thesis or had read and distributed over a dozen issues since with specific AP core themes and even (hard for a hermit like Booth) met a few of them over the years, all without a word of objection and then — bang! — as soon as he breaks with revolutionism, AP is the world’s greatest evil. Those given to psychological analysis would point out here that Booth has no issues with AP, just with whatever I happen to advocate but more substantially, from his current perspective Booth has every reason to take issue with this sort of analysis. From its inception, Camatte’s critiques of ideological ‘gangs’ and Perlman’s satirical Manual for Revolutionary Leaders unequivocally rejected the sort of conventional manipulative power politics Booth has now adopted, insisting we trust the people’s own instinct for selfliberation over any that choose to ‘represent’ (dominate) them. And, of course, AP criticises the totality, the fundamentals of Civilisation and Empire, of symbolisation and separation and this, too, is poison to the partial, mediated, reformist approach. But I think what really scares Booth in his current state of mind is AP’s critique of domestication. A jazz fan, there was a time when Booth could let himself go. All that is no mystery to him, for all his petit bourgeois background. But currently, any loss of control might force him to break out of a rigid circle of selfdelusion and selfpolicing that is keeping reality and any admission of error on his part at bay — meltdown time, baby!

In this, Booth is like the ossified anarcho-Left as a whole, which already knows all the arguments about ‘the iron law of oligarchy’ that will lead to its supersession because they are applied exclusively to criticise other, like organisations and never used to criticise their own. This state of affairs can only be maintained by the most rigid ideological double-think, Booth’s sectarian ‘ins’ and ‘outs’. They know they are an obstacle to revolution but can never, ever even whisper it. Because we consistently say the unthinkable and encourage others to — ’”more goad than guide” as one lot hilariously put it — GA has been anathematised by such groups year on year, and we’d be disappointed if we were not. We don’t matter, organisations don’t matter. All that matters is the love and rage of the people, a flame that with burn away all this old world.

My future vision, then, is of a universal, all-consuming, passionate, liberating inferno. As to myself, I wish I spent more time smashing and burning (as I once did), less on writing, but more even of that than nothing. Whatever — GA or something like it will continue if I write for it or not. However big a part it’s been in my life, it is a small thing indeed in the grand scheme of things. It is a great pleasure to me to see other pro-AP groups and tendencies springing up all over the world, as it makes my — and GA’s — role all the more dispensible.

Readers of this account may no doubt be offended by the way GA’s internal politics are conducted — as if some other, more bureaucratically ‘democratic’, ‘representative’ system might work ‘better’. Reputedly, when asked on his deathbed who should inherit his empire, Alexander the Great’s dying words were that it should go to “the strongest”. Beneath the transparent tissue of civilised lies, when has this ever not been so — and gladly, honestly so, at that?

An Interview with Richard Hunt

Source: “An Interview with Richard Hunt”. Web.archive. Archived from the original on March 12, 2005. Retrieved 14 May 2015.

Note: This is an interview with an openly racist ‘national-anarchist’, so a fascist.

Richard Hunt is author of To End Poverty: The Starvation of the Periphery By the Core (1998) and Editor of Alternative Green magazine. The following interview first appeared in Issue #6 of The Crusader.

Q. By way of an introduction for people who have not yet heard of Richard Hunt, can you give us a brief history of your past political activity, your ideological development and the events that led you to establish Alternative Green?

RH: Having worked out my theory of the causes of poverty, I tried to sell it to the Left via a community newspaper in Reading. And failed. I then joined the Greens and tried to persuade their economic working party. And failed. I tried to interest the (urban) Anarchists. And failed. So I and two others started Green Anarchist, which does now accept our economic analysis; but a difference over strategy developed. The two other (different others) wanted to go further Left for short-term advantage. I wanted to hold the centre-ground between Left and Right for long-term advantage. So I had to leave and start Alternative Green.

Q. You have a specific viewpoint regarding the way in which the present economic system operates, i.e. the exploitation of what you call the periphery by the core. Again, for those who have yet to come into contact with your ideas, can you briefly explain your theory?

RH: ‘Primitive’ societies are not poor. Food and fuel are always available and free. They have been called ‘the original affluent society’. They never store food or grow it. Growing food is harder work, so unintelligent. They obey the Law of Least Effort (which is why they won’t feed the cities). Population growth is controlled by the group, otherwise they would have to work harder by growing things to feed the extra mouths. Then, it seems, chiefs or shamen invented religion to persuade, con or force others to produce a surplus and hand it over. “The gods say so”. This happened before settlement. In case they objected the peasants were disarmed (this also meant that the King/State and not the clan now had responsibility for peace and justice because the clan, disarmed, could no longer enforce a decision). The top people, with food from the peasants, were no longer constrained to keep the population low, the rich had the children. And so they demanded more food from the peasants and created the poverty. Conventional economics says that it is the lack of trade and industry which creates poverty. This is not so. Trade and industry cause further poverty by again transferring the natural resources from the periphery to the core. The periphery peoples do not choose to trade. They share resources. They do not exchange them. Barter or trade is seen as extremely anti-social and, “Far from being of a trucking disposition, primitive man was strongly averse to acts of barter” [Polanyi, 1977]. So there’s nothing natural about trade. But their periphery rulers force the peasants to produce a surplus which the rulers remove and sell to the core to buy the core’s luxuries and arms. Thus the artisans at the core who make these luxury goods are able to obtain their food. They depend on strong rulers on the periphery. The urban artisans have hardly ever made goods for periphery peoples (rather than their rulers) who are proudly self-sufficient. Nowadays, the periphery peoples are forced to produce the surplus, not by the sword, but by direct and indirect taxation. They are forced to pay an income tax or poll tax etc., in cash. Their only way to obtain cash is to grow extra crops; cash crops which they exchange for cash, which they then hand over as taxes. After the invention of money rulers found they could increase their income, and therefore their power, by taxing trade. The traders paid the taxes and increased the prices of their goods to pay for it. So the consumers paid the taxes without realising it, as we pay VAT. It was therefore in the ruler’s interests to increase trade to increase their income, and therefore the poverty of everyone else. In the Middle Ages the peasants produced a surplus to feed the priest and the soldiers because it was ‘seemly’. there was no suggestion that their crops were being exchanged for the products of the urban artisans. In the Age of Enlightenment ‘seemly’ wasn’t good enough. They had to find another excuse for forcing the peasants to feed them. Adam Smith said that entrepreneurs create wealth by trade and industry. this wealth, he says, ‘trickles down’ to the middle classes in return for their services. They consume some of it. the rest ‘trickles down’ to the workers in return for their products. They consume it. All of it. All that’s left to ‘trickle down’ to the peasants is soot, sewage, scrap and shoddy. Adam Smith in his theory of Division of Labour said that if all the members of a firm specialise in what they are best at, the firm is more successful. Correct. He then said that all the employees are better paid. Incorrect. the wage rate of the lowest paid is determined by the hungrier at the factory gate, prepared to work for less. The theory of Comparative Advantage, the justification for international trade between the core and the periphery, says that if countries specialise in what they are best at, more is produced. Correct. It then says that all the workers in both countries are therefore better paid. Incorrect. The higher wages all go to the higher developed country. The wages of the agricultural labourers in the Third World are determined by the millions of their unemployed countrymen. Since trade and industry are supposed to create wealth, the presumption is that they also create employment (by ‘trickle down’). Wrong. Employment is created by the amount of food (and the other necessities of life) which are in the market and can be bought by the workers. More food, more employment. Thus economics is a zero sum game. If we get the jobs (i.e. the food), another country doesn’t get the jobs (i.e. the food). Global employment has gone up, not because of more trade and industry, but because more cash crops are being grown. As I have shown, rulers cause the poverty. If you hand over power to rulers, you will get exploited. All power corrupts. It is only small villages of less than 500 people that don’t need rulers: “When a group exceeds 500 persons it requires some form of policing” [Pfeiffer]. So to end poverty the only option is autonomous, self-sufficient, armed villages. There are three ways of getting from here to there:
(i) Revolution on the periphery, where the periphery peoples fight for independence;
(ii) Progressive break-up of the political unit. So the European Union breaks up the individual countries, and then Britain breaks up into Scotland, Ulster, Wales and England, each with their own coinage and Final Appeal. Then these break up into regions with their own coinage and Final Appeal. Then these break up, etc.; and
(iii) Cutting taxation (first, indirect taxation on the poor) until government has no income and therefore no power. It can’t hire a shed to hold a meeting.

Q. Can you explain how, in your view, this exploitation of the periphery has led to the industrialisation of the West and the impoverishment of the Third World.

RH: When the food is taken from the peasants, it is stored in the chief’s stockade (the core), later to become castles and then cities. The poorest peasants go to these cities to earn by labour the food taken from the periphery. because of the higher cost of living in cities where water and fuel must be bought, to say nothing of infrastructure costs — policing, prisons etc. — wages would have to be higher. Because wages are higher it is necessary for the core to invent labour-saving machinery, if they are in competition to sell exports. The empires of Rome and China were not in competition with others. They were both self-sufficient. Britain was not. For centuries she was a low-wage periphery. Then Cromwell started to re-arm, financed by direct taxation. This continued for a hundred years to pay for the wars with Holland and France, by which time it was the highest-taxed country in the world with the highest cost of living and the highest wages. Its expensive clothes were being priced out of the market. So it was forced to invent labour-saving machinery, forced by poverty, by the need to import timber, food etc. Labour-saving machinery saves the amount of labour in the product. It does not save the worker labour. He has to still work the same eight hours or more to make the new machine profitable to install. In fact we’re working harder and harder. Hunter-gatherers work about two hours a day, cultivators four hours. Athenian farmers only worked half the year, in the growing season. Victorian factory workers, a small percentage of the population, certainly worked the longest hours. Today factory hours taking into account overtime are a little shorter, but the female population is working in the factories as well, so together we’re working harder and harder. Technology is always more advanced in the cities, so as long as the producers can sell enough goods to cover the cost of the machinery, goods from the city will always be cheaper than the periphery goods. Therefore if core goods are allowed in without duties to bring them up to the price of the periphery goods (free trade), the core industries will always destroy the periphery industries. This was the way Africa was de-industrialised. Having been de-industrialised, Africa was encouraged by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to concentrate on agricultural crops according to the theory of Comparative Advantage. Africa now grows food and other crops for the rest of the world. The money goes to the rulers, the peasant having no money cannot buy their own crops. And so starve.

Q. In order to redress the balance you say that the wilful exploitation of the Third World must cease. If and when this comes about it would lead to a dramatic change in our own social and economic circumstances. Can you explain how a revolt by the exploited Third World populations would affect the British Isles, and more specifically how it would force the emergence of a Natural Society?

RH: This is crystal-gazing, which is dodgy. There are far too many unknowns. How long will it take for this analysis to be discussed, let alone accepted? Because of democracy, education and more open government, it gets more difficult to hide from the workers the fact that others are starving to feed them. But how long will that take? Can people reject religion and its demand for obedience? But here’s one possible scenario. If the Third World stop sending us their oil, timber, cotton, food etc. it will stop sending them slowly. And at the same rate we can cut our population by having fewer babies. There are now two major conflicting trends, the trend towards larger economic units against the trend towards smaller national units. The trend towards national units will be stronger at the periphery, which has less to lose industrially. They will impose duties on imported goods from the core to protect their own industries. This will reduce the amount of cash crops coming into the core to pay for them, which will cause unemployment — less food to feed workers, who will migrate to the periphery countries for that food which no longer comes to the core. With less trade government will receive less indirect taxation and so will be able to afford fewer guns, both to arm periphery rulers and to control their own peripheries which will break away, reducing still further the power of the core and reducing the jobs in their cities. The workers will migrate to the countryside, country towns and other countries. And the population will decrease. This happened at the decline and fall of the Western half of the Roman Empire. The Empire had split for organisational reasons. More of the taxation went to Constantinople than to Rome, so Rome had less money for soldiers. When the barbarians came, Rome fell. When the Roman Army left Britain abruptly (and for good as it turned out) in 409–10 to defend Rome against the barbarians, the taxation could not be collected and taken to the towns. So there were no jobs in the towns. In fifty years the towns were all derelict. Industry no longer existed. They forgot the potters’ wheel. It had been the army which had produced the demand for sufficient pottery to make the investment in the pottery wheel economic. No army, no wheel. They stopped minting coins and used no money for 150 years. And, it is thought, the population collapsed. Today the army won’t leave abruptly, so regression will be much slower. What holds the economy and the nation-state together is not the army but Adam Smith’s economic theory. Who knows how long that will take to be discredited? But when that happens the demand for decentralisation of power will be irresistible. Britain will leave the European Union. Then Scotland, Ulster and Wales will get independent regions with their own coinage and Final Appeal. And they in turn will break up etc. Well, that’s a possible tidy scenario. But it takes no account of people, charismatic leaders, stubborn fear of change, epidemics, ecological crises, religion or all the other jokers in the pack. Anything could happen. And nothing at all will happen until the threat of America’s bombs is removed and America itself has broken up.

Q Can you give us a glimpse of what such a society will look like? What future is there for Capitalism and its pursuit of constant expansion, economic growth and profit-making?

RH: The shape of society will be determined by population density. If thepopulation of Britain dropped to 15,000, the people would be hunter-gatherers. Least Effort. If the population can drop to 15 million and the people are able to re-arm, they could live in autonomous, self-sufficient villages. A key moment in the renewal is at which point the population re-arms itself. During the Roman Occupation, Scotland was still not disarmed and so was free of Roman domination. When the Roman Army left, presumably some of the population of England was able to re-arm, the north certainly. Kent with links to the Continent stayed disarmed with its Romano-British aristocracy staying in control, with their henchmen and freemen maintaining their monopoly of arms and forcing the peasants to continue producing the surplus. Elsewhere the clan would take back responsibility for peace, justice and welfare. In tribal societies, if someone is murdered the whole extended family of the murderer has to pay recompense to the whole of the victim’s extended family — 50 head of cattle, for example, shared out. So the murderer would be very unpopular in his own family, which is the sanction for good behaviour in an Anarchist society. There would be ‘chiefs’, or perhaps ‘spokesmen’ would be a better word, and a peck order of respect but not obedience. The chief acts as spokesman of the group to outsiders; but within the group “one word from the chief and everyone does as they please.” Without mobility of labour, which has destroyed the extended family, that family can be rebuilt and the welfare state dispensed with. Capitalism can only exist when the strong are separate from the weak and no longer expected to help the weak in an interdependent society, so that individual greed is allowed full rein. When one depends on the rest of the group for one’s plot of land, when one is expected to share rather than exchange in an interdependent society Capitalism, economic growth and profit-making are impossible. It is money and private ownership of land which makes Capitalism invincible.

Q. Is your idea of a Natural Society built upon Natural Order? Do you believe that the world has a Natural Order dictated by nature?

RH: The only things that are natural are what you don’t have to make laws about. You don’t have to make a law that apples fall downwards. You don’t have to make a law that people should live in villages. So there are laws of nature such as gravity or survival of the fittest. But there are no laws which say that Blacks should not intermarry with Whites. And who is going to say what this Natural Order is? The Star Chamber? The Politburo? The Chairman? Professors selected for their opinions? What’s to stop the Committee of public safety decreeing that slavery was natural, as Christianity once did? It’s the high road to tyranny?

Q. In Issue #14 of Alternative Green [p.10] you state that “although racism is inevitable and universal, in a multi-racial society it is disastrous and must be suppressed. Peace is more important than racial purity. To prevent the inevitable injustice meted out to minorities, it is necessary to intermarry as quickly as possible”. Firstly, why do you advocate the destruction of that which nature has created, that is, racial diversity through intermarriage, and is this not contrary to the Natural Order? Secondly, exactly who or what is going to suppress those of us who are fundamentally opposed to racial integration?

RH: Since I don’t accept your concept of the Natural Order, it can’t be contrary to it. In order to preserve the peace in a multi-racial society, people, individually, must suppress their own racism, as nearly all people already do.

Q. A fair reflection of our position would be that racial integration is a product of the internationalist ideology of both Capitalists and Marxists, and that loyalty to Race, Nation, Region, Culture and Tradition are natural barriers to the imperialist, globalist tendency and must be encouraged, not destroyed. It would seem that you concur with this view on all points but Race. Why is Race the exception for you?

RH: Yes, I concur with your view on all points but Race, because Race alone of all these factors is all mixed in our multi-racial society. To unmix them would cause far greater unhappiness than all the capitalist exploitation. By concentrating on all the other factors we can still repel Capitalism. And anyway, you can’t use racism against Capitalism because most of the Capitalists are the same race.

Q. Internationalists, of every description, have no understanding of the relationship that exists between the people, generations of people, and the land from which they are drawn, i.e. the concept of Blood and Soil. This lack of understanding leads them to advocate a global society with a rootless populace, devoid of all sense of Ancestry, Heritage and Tradition. What, if any, is your understanding of the bond that exists between people and land, and more importantly, do you think it will have any significance in the emergence of the Natural Society?

RH: I have no attachment to any land. I only know where most of my great-grandfathers came from. So do most other people, so in Britain there is little bond between Blood and Soil nor will it have any significance in the emergence of the Natural Society. It will have great significance in its continuation; but it is an exclusive idea and it looks as if I’m going to be one of those excluded.

Q. We have a specific view of how society should be governed through what we call Meritocracy, or Natural Selection. This would appear to concur with your own view of a Natural Society being ordered through hierarchy, or the peck order. Will you please explain your understanding of hierarchy?

RH: All power corrupts. If you allow yourself to be governed, you will be exploited. The object of The Natural Society was to show how people have, and can, live without government or Meritocracy. In communities of less than 500 there is no need for policing or government. They would be, as are all ‘primitive’ societies of this size, Anarchies. There would be no Meritocracy. There would be a peck order of influence and respect, but no government, no obedience. The confusion happens because of two usages of the word ‘hierarchy’; one meaning obedience to superiors (which you, I think, mean and I don’t), the other meaning peck order as observed in all animal groups (which I mean and you don’t). But it’s necessary for me to go on about hierarchy/peck order because it explains the consumer society, whereby one’s place in the peck order is determined in an anonymous society by what can afford to buy — how big is one’s car? the function of the peck order in animal societies and ours is to minimise fighting and protect the weak by the ritual of building the peck order — conventional means to conventional goals. So we don’t have to fight every time to get the best seat. Conspicuous consumption is vital to creating the peck order and keeping the peace. But peck order doesn’t mean government.

Q. We have noticed that you place great importance on the role of the family within your vision of a Natural Society, but why is the family so central to your theory of how society will be ordered and what role will it play in keeping the peace?

RH: In an Anarchist society it is the family, the extended family, cousins, uncles, great aunts who provide the sanction for good behaviour and welfare in times of difficulty. There are no policemen in an Anarchy and no social workers. If parents don’t seem to be coping with a child, the child is moved up the road to stay with auntie, not put into a children’s home. Auntie takes the child because neighbours, friends and family think she should. There is no such pressure today. No one knows. And bringing shame on the family is the most important sanction for good behaviour.

Q. It would appear that a Natural Society based upon agrarian self-sufficiency and non- -exploitation, such as you advocate, can only work and be maintained if the population level is rigorously controlled. You have mentioned a specific figure for a ceiling limit on population growth within the British Isles for a Natural Society. What is this limit and how did you come to arrive at such a figure?

RH: About 16 million. The United Nations says (I can’t remember where) that each self-sufficient family needs 8 acres. Assuming four children, that’s four per family. There are about 33 million acres of farmland extending rough grazing which is enough for 4 million families, which is about 16 million people.

Q. You state that an increase in self-sufficient communities would see a natural decline in population. Can you explain how this would occur? More specifically, what methods would be used?

RH: It is in the community’s interest to keep the population low. With fewer mouths to feed you don’t need to grow so much food. It’s less work. About primitive societies: “It appears as if several of these societies strove to maximise labour productivity. This involved limiting the population to the number that could be supported with a fairly modest effort. The means of achieving this limitation varied. Sexual taboos — e.g. the prohibition of intercourse during a nursing period of 3–5 years was common, as were various abortion methods. Different ways of legitimising abortions also appears to have existed. The condition for the functioning of the system was that the land was collectively owned and that the food was distributed according to need” [Anell and Nygren]. Specifically, it’s impossible to say what methods would be used. That’s a judgement for each community.

Q. Can you explain whilst on the one hand you oppose the power of the State and the enforcement of the laws of obedience, and on the other you praise the “responsible lead” [AG #13, p.18] taken by China in the area of population control? Do you imagine that the Chinese populace would ever countenance supporting such a policy if people were not forced to spend the whole of their lives looking down the barrel of a gun? How do you equate decrees issued by a Marxist dictatorship with a free society?

RH: This is three different questions: (i) should I, an Anarchist, obey the law and therefore recommend others to obey the law?; (ii) is the Chinese law to have one child a good law?; and (iii) should such a law be introduced in other countries?

Let’s look at each in turn. Firstly should I, an Anarchist, obey the law? Society, without policing and the law, is only possible in communities less than about 500 people. Since i live in a city of about 50,000, law is necessary otherwise chaos would ensue and there would be no money for food, and violence would be uncontrolled. So I obey the law because otherwise I would starve or be killed. secondly, is the Chinese law to have only one child a good law? Is it a good thing that as many families as possible should have only one child (it’s not a matter of freedom. You would be no more free to have as many babies as you like in a self-sufficient village as in China. In one you are constrained by public opinion. In the other by the law)? But I just don’t know whether it is possible to make fair laws about it. So the ‘lead’ which China gives of only having one child is a good one. The law is debatable. Thirdly, because China has been under heavy rule for three thousand years (not just Marxism) the Chinese people are apparently used to obeying extreme laws. Perhaps other peoples are not. So whether it is a just law or not, it probably wouldn’t work in other countries anyway.

Q. Would you say that you were opposed to technology in the way that the nineteenth-century Luddites were, or do you see a role — possibly a limited role — for technology in a Natural Society?

RH: I would miss newspapers and the radio etc. I’ve no objection to technology itself. So in principle I’d be quite happy to see computers etc. in villages. But when everybody’s got their own land, no one is going to work in the factories. we may like computers, but they simply won’t be available.

Q. We noticed your comment about feminism being a luxury for the middle classes in a Police State. What do you mean by this and what would be the role of women in a Natural Society?

RH: The main function of the police is to preserve the property of those who have, the middle classes, from those who have not, the poor. As poor women have found, they can expect no sympathy and little protection from the police. So they need the protection of a strong male or at least one that looks strong, macho. The middle class women get, and depend on, the protection of the police so they don’t need, and can afford to denigrate, strong macho men. An Amazonian Indian, on television, said that men and women were equal, unambiguously. Probably the smaller the group, the more equality there would be between the sexes.

Q. What do you think of veganism and vegetarianism?

RH: We have incisor teeth and a short gut which means we’re designed to be omnivores. The further from the equator one gets, the more impractical is vegetarianism. Even in Britain it depends in the Winter on beans imported from warmer countries for protein. For Eskimos it’s impossible. And in temperate climates the only materials to keep warm are feathers, fur and wool. Cotton won’t be available. So animals are going to have to be exploited.

Q. You say that there are two methods of activism necessary for a change over to a Natural Society, the first being to elect MP’s who are committed to cutting government power by cutting taxation. Don’t you think it is misleading to ask people to support the System’s politicians on this basis? Do you see the System’s power simply diminishing as the new autonomous communities multiply? Do you think there is a role for revolutionary vanguards?

RH: Cutting taxes and subdividing the political units go hand in hand. No autonomous, armed, self-sufficient villages will be allowed by any sort of government. They will only happen as government loses control of its peripheries. If one is to recommend a gradualist approach such as cutting taxes, it’s no use being all purist and refusing to take part. I don’t know what a revolutionary vanguard is. If it’s persuading people of revolutionary ideas, that’s fine. But using violence won’t work. I think it will be counter-productive. It will turn people against the ideas at this point. When sufficient people agree with the ideas, violence on the periphery to fight for independence would work.

Q. The second method of activism is revolution in the exploited Third World. Accepting that the present economic system is unjust and should not, even if it could, be maintained, what is the possibility of a revolt by the Third World populace? Would not the internationalist system use everything it had to prop up friendly elements within what are effectively satellite states?

RH: Yes, the internationalist system would use everything it had. But it hasn’t worked in Somalia or Somaliland, nor in Liberia. Perhaps the Capitalists think they have less to lose in Africa? It is not true, but their economic liberty would tell them that it is. So they are not willing to risk television filming body bags coming home. So perhaps Africa will quietly drop out of sight like Somaliland? Free and no fuss. All we notice is another radio station off the air. And fewer crops coming from the Third World. Britain left India because, faced with Gandhi’s truths, it lost the will to exploit. So the important thing is to face the internationalists with the truth and undermine their convictions.

Q. Is the Natural Society inevitable?

RH: No, it depends on the death of religion.

Q. Finally, for those who wish to know more can you recommend any books or literature containing further information on self-sufficiency and ecology, etc.?

RH: Both Green and Anarchist literature is awful. the Anarchists present a view of human nature that is quite beautiful and hopelessly unconvincing. Green literature is smugly self-righteous and without answers. For self-sufficiency early John Seymour is a delight. He became the guru of self- -sufficiency, but I haven’t read his later books.

RICHARD HUNT MAY BE CONTACTED BY WRITING TO ALTERNATIVE GREEN, 20 UPPER BARR, COWLEY CENTRE, OXFORD OX4 3UX, ENGLAND.

CONCLUSION: For obvious reasons the NR Faction did not accord with some of the views put forward by Richard Hunt, and in the subsequent issue of its magazine (THE CRUSADER #7) issued the following reply.

A Reply to Richard Hunt and Alternative Green

In Issue #6 [pp.10–14] we published an extensive interview with Richard Hunt of Alternative Green. As a result of this interview and an examination of our own ideological position we have come to the conclusion that we have a great deal in common with Richard Hunt, especially with his economic theory and ruralist solution. Any astute reader of our magazine will see that this is so. However, whilst there is much agreement on economic issues there remains a conflict of opinion centred around the issue of Race and the Natural Order. In an attempt to convince Richard Hunt that he is making a fundamental error on these subjects we wish to reply to some of his comments.

We asked Mr. Hunt if his ‘Natural Society’ was built on Natural Order and he replied that he did not recognise ‘our’ concept of a Natural Order, presumably because it involves the question of Race. Our response is this: Natural Order is not man-made, nor is it something we have concocted to fit in with our ideology. It is simply a product of nature. Natural Order itself refers to the fact that differing races originate from and continue to inhabitant clearly defined areas of the planet. Orientals from the Far East, Negroes from the African continent and Whites from Europe.

From whatever perspective you look at it the planet is not naturally multi-racial, each race has its own land, its own culture, its own heritage and its own tradition. Such a state of affairs is not haphazard or a matter of chance, it is a deliberate, ordered plan. We call this naturally occurring phenomenon ‘Natural Order’.

We would also say this: Richard Hunt affirms that race-mixing is ‘natural’ and does not need to be legislated for. We reject this, multi-racialism is a product of ideological dogma and is enforced through man-made laws (Race Act), man-made ‘re-education’ programmes (Political Correctness) and man-made agendas (Forced Bussing, Affirmative Action, Unity Housing Scheme etc. etc.). Hunt puts forward the theory of ‘Least Effort’. we accept this theory wholeheartedly, but what Hunt fails to recognise is that multi-racialism does not obey the law of Least Effort. On the contrary, it takes considerable effort by all concerned to try and make it work, and even after substantial effort it still fails, leaving a fractured and divided society.

The chaos of our inner cities is not natural, it is the legacy of a failed and flawed ideology, consequently the only possible conclusion can be that multi-racialism is unnatural and against nature. Clearly it is contrary to the Natural Order.

We state that nature has created racial diversity, it therefore follows that if we are to uphold what nature has created we should strive to preserve racial diversity. A Natural Society is one which accords with nature and is not contrary to it in any way. Race-mixing destroys what nature has created, therefore it must be opposed. Specifically on the question of Race, our position is this: We are not racial supremacists, we do not wish to conquer or dominate other racial groups nor do we seek conflict with any racial group. What we do want is racial separation and a return to the Natural Order.

By this we mean every race inhabiting its own land, free to pursue its own destiny free from political, social and economic exploitation. For England this means that all non-White Europeans — including all Jews — will be expelled. The verdict of destiny has decreed that England is a White, European nation and that is the way it is going to stay. We have no argument with Blacks living in Africa, Asians living in Pakistan or Orientals living in the Far East.

Indeed, differing racial groups who are proud of their own Race and Nation are viewed by us as fellow combatants against the current system. However, we do have a problem with the political system that encourages them to live here. To successfully oppose internationalism it is necessary to oppose all its consequences and manifestations. Clearly multi-racialism is a direct manifestation of internationalism. Some further points follow.

Repatriation will not be that big a job, indeed a repatriation policy may well be irrelevant given the way we see the political situation in this country developing. What we believe we will witness in this country is an eventual slide into a bloody civil conflict, with the recourse being to paramilitary violence. Clearly it is incumbent upon us to prepare for this scenario. During any prolonged Nationalist uprising we fully expect vast numbers of immigrants to see the ‘writing on the wall’ and leave of their own accord. Inevitably some will try and stay, others will side with the Enemy. These people will seal their own fate and their resistance will be met with summary justice. A further point to be made is that all immigrants have come to our land seeking a better standard of living than they would have encountered in their racial homelands.

All immigration is economic. With the eventual degeneration of Capitalism this factor will become irrelevant as immigrants realise that they might as well live in Pakistan, Hong Kong or Africa.

Multi-racialism is a product of the current socio-political system and is central to internationalist ideology. Mass immigration is a fundamental part of the centralising tendency — destroy all races, destroy all nations, create a global society, a One-World nation and a single race. The insidious theory behind mass immigration is to break up the indigenous community, its traditions and its values. Put simply, it is a destructive agenda; once this destruction has taken place a new society can be supplanted in its place with new values, i.e. a global society built on materialism.

For decentralists such an agenda must be opposed, for we believe that Racial Nationalism is the only force with any real potential for defeating the internationalists. Why? Because the means are already to hand, with the obvious exception of America it is still the case that the vast majority of racial groups inhabit their racial homelands, i.e. Orientals are still dominant in the Far East, Blacks are still dominant in Africa and Whites, although we have a real fight on our hands, are still dominant in Europe. From this we can see that the Natural Order is still intact and we need only expel those who have voluntarily displaced themselves. We believe that there has been a grave miscalculation on the part of the Capitalist Ruling Class and that they have inadvertently created fertile ground for widespread and serious civil disorder centred around the issue of Race. All the prevailing signs of social and moral decay point to this inevitability. It is only a matter of time before the backlash begins. When it comes, the break-up of the Capitalist Empire will be along racial lines.

Another point to be made here is that Hunt confuses Nationalism and Nationhood with mere citizenship. Hunt has an internationalist outlook — “wherever I lay my hat that’s my home”. Nationhood is not determined by where you decide to live, it is determined by Race — Blood and Soil. Pakistanis living in England are still Pakistanis, there will never be English even if they decide to live here for a 1000 years. Finally, what prospect is there of the immigrants fighting to free England from the internationalists? There is no prospect, the immigrants themselves are an endorsement of internationalism and their presence on our soil is a constant vindication of the globalist agenda. The immigrants have no sense of Nationhood, they are not Nationalists; if they were they wouldn’t be here. They have abandoned their own lands for material gain, and they will never fight the existing System because they are a direct product of it.

As a result of Hunt’s comments on Race there have been some (predicable boring) criticism of us for publishing an interview with ‘an Anarchist who advocates race-mixing’. We make no apology for talking to Richard Hunt, we published the interview for one simple reason: To try and instigate a debate on some very important questions about the future of our society. Yes, the Race issue is vital — we don’t need lessons from anyone about this — but Race is just one issue out of many. Would all our problems be solved if the immigrants suddenly packed their bags and left? Clearly not. The issue of Race has come about because of a wider problem: Internationalist ideology and its centralising tendency. In order to tackle the Race issue effectively we must address the root cause, not just one of the consequences. The root cause is International Capitalism, therefore it is logical to look for ways of attacking the Capitalist System whilst at the same time striving to build a New Society. It is on this specific question that we feel Richard Hunt has much to offer.

We seek a return to the Natural Order, a society in harmony with nature, not at war with it — as is the case now. We seek a decentralised society with State power eradicated, and we seek a more rudimentary lifestyle free from the perversions of liberalism and materialism. Here we concur with Richard Hunt.

For too long the Nationalist Cause has been dogged by simplistic and narrow-minded attitudes, specifically, there has been a fundamental lack of vision on the part of unimaginative and incompetent ‘leaders’. Indeed, in certain quarters Nationalism has started to resemble some kind of historical re-enactment society, devoid of any redeeming features. In other circles it has become a vehicle for negative and nihilistic hatreds incapable of offering anything constructive.

We seek to change this and move the agenda forward. We state here and now that we will talk and work with anyone where we feel they are moving in the same direction as ourselves. Rather than look to the past, the Movement needs to look to the future. If we are to mount a serious challenge to the political System that operates out of New York, London and Tel Aviv, this must be so.

Finally, for those people who condemn individuals like Richard Hunt without fully listening to what they have to say, we offer the following list; new political battle-lines drawn up by Hunt himself [AG #14]. Hunt may be a victim of bourgeois liberalism when it comes to Race, but he still knows who is fighting the real political battle. In the years to come you may well have to decide which side of the fence you are on. Look carefully before you make your choice.

Centralists	DECENTRALISTS
1) Equality	1) Liberty
2) Economies of Scale	2) Small is Beautiful
3) Higher Taxes to Increase Government Power	3) Lower Taxes to Cut Government Power and therefore Redistribute Wealth
4) Free Trade	4) Protectionism
5) Pro-GATT	5) Anti-GATT
6) Pro-Technology	6) Anti-Technology
7) Pro-European Union	7) Anti-European Union
8) The Core	8) The Periphery
9) Capitalists	9) Nationalists
10) Liberals	10) Anarchists
11) Marxists	11) Greens/SNP
12) Conservative, Labour, Political Parties, BNP	12) Religions, Liberal Charities, Regionalists, Tribals/Hippies
13) Fascists	13) Racialists
14) Socialists	14) Third Positionists
15) Internationalists	15) Survivalists
16) Workers	16) Peasants
17) Townspeople	17) Country people
18) Third World Rulers	18) Third World People

People who wish to find out more about Richard Hunt’s ideas should read the following booklets:

The Theory of Alternative Green
The Natural Society
Who’s Starving Them?

The Irrationalists Debate

Politics and the Ethical Void

Date: Sep 1996

Source: Green Anarchist Journal, Issue #43-44, Autumn 1996, Pages 22-24.
<thesparrowsnest.org.uk/collections/public_archive/9175.pdf>

A summary of Steve Booth's ground-breaking expose of politics as technique

We cannot apply the ethical to the political. To try to do so is to be like a small boy with his finger in the dyke, while a hundred yards away, the sea rushes through a gap as wide as the Atlantic Ocean.

This is a far bolder and more emphatic thesis than saying we must value the political in a negative ethical sense (as bad or evil), although people do insist on trying to evaluate it as such. No. The case is stronger than this. The political is completely divorced from the ethical. The political is not quantitatively at odds with the ethical like a naughty child who sometimes does good, sometimes bad but qualitatively severed from it.

A HUNDRED INTERLOCKING QUESTIONS

It is meaningless to try to employ an ethical critique of politics. People nevertheless often do so. Sometimes this takes the form of an ought. “John Major ought to do something about Europe...” Perhaps one of the best ways into my thesis that it is meaningless to try to apply the ethical to the political is to make the attempt by asking specific questions:

The Unemployment Statistics Question: Unemployment statistics are systematically falsified. Politicians frequently use these lies in arguments to show how the economy is getting better. Why do politicians believe they are entitled to lie in this way?
The Genocide Jets Question: As a matter of government policy, jets are being manufactured in Britain and supplied to Indonesia for purposes of committing genocide in East Timor. Many people believe this is wrong. Why do the politicians refuse to acknowledge this and stop supplying those jets?
The Register of Sleaze Question: The Nolan Committee said that MP’s should register their earnings in public so that voters could find out who pays these so-called 'representatives’. Some MP’s declined to register their interests. If the MP’s think themselves immune and refuse to follow their own laws, why should anyone else?
The Ambulance Roulette Question: The government has cut funding to the NHS to pay for tax cuts to the well-off. At the same time the lack of funding causes hospital wards to close and reduces the number of intensive care beds. A man dies after being driven around Lancashire and Yorkshire from hospital to hospital in an ambulance. Do we consider the Tory health minister responsible for this death?
The Windscale Leukaemia Question: After several decades, radioactive material from Sellafield has contaminated Cumbria, causing people to die of leukaemia. The government ordered a full cover-up as usual, and then issued a report (a) denying there are any cases of leukaemia, and (b) blaming them on sewage from camps used to house construction workers back in 1947. Given this ‘clean bill of •health’, the plasm goes on operating. Can we give the politicians operating this system a similar clean bill of ethical health?

If you don’t like these particular examples, try to think of your own. These questions are simple attempts to apply the ethical to the political. Il is very easy to generate these sorts of questions just by looking at the newspapers. We could build up hundreds of them, thousands of them, millions of them. Eventually there comes a point where we have to stop asking and acknowledge the futility of trying to apply the ethical to the political.

POLITICIANS OUGHT TO BE ETHICAL...

The liberal at this point will seek refuge in an ought Politicians may be liars, bullshitters, crooks, embezzlers, murderers, mass murderers, mass poisoners etc, but they ought not to be like that. Instead they should behave in the best interests of their constituents...

Before we laugh contemptuously at the naïve believer in 'liberal democracy’ we ought to notice the disjunction. The only kind of politician the reformist acknowledges is one based on a theoretical projection, a picture of what ought to be. Wherever has such a politics ever been practiced on earth? The liberal reformist makes the ‘No True Scotsman’ move of declaring that proper politicians are honest Etc. The reprobate examples we are saddled with in the real worlds of Westminster or Brussels are not ‘real’ politicians at all but imposters, wolves in sheep's clothing. By defining politicians in this way and excluding the reality, the shysters, our apologist begs the question. Let us return to the real world.

THE WELFARE STATE OBJECTION

Have we not skewed our analysis too, by refusing to acknowledge that politicians can, sometimes, do good? Take the Welfare State, for example. (For those who have forgotten, this was a system of free benefits, paid for out of taxation, providing education, health care etc which applied in Britain between 1948 and 1984 or so.) The Welfare Slate is put forwards as an example of a good policy. How do we determine that such a policy was indeed ethical? Through reference to ethical criteria.

I readily concede that some of the politicians putting forwards the NHS, Butler Education Act and so on did so for ethical treasons. Others will have done it for reasons of political expediency. Some politicians will have been indifferent to it, and some will have opposed it. The government, however was not forced to introduce the Welfare State. It could have followed other policies; intensified the Cold War or adopted other policies with regard to the Commonwealth. The choice of policy was politically guided. Later, much of the Welfare State was abolished. Were we to try to apply the same ethical criteria to the abolition as well as the setting up, we might say that the start was right (ethically correct), and the ending of it was wrong (ethically flawed). One thing this shows is that the political is not guided by the ethical, and so we are . trying to examine the political with the wrong sort of tools.

An example like the Welfare Slate shows the political still cancels the ethical. At one point there is an apparent link between them, and at other times this docs not exist To apply the ethical to the political is to try to measure the process using the wrong equipment (like measuring a straight line with a protractor).The correspondence between the ethical and the political is arbitrary, the ‘link’ selected or disregarded according to expediency or whim or other (non-ethical) criterion. The overriding factor is not ethical but dictated by expediency and the imperative to get, retain and to cling to power. The political, if it uses the ethical at all, uses it as a fig leaf - something to camouflage its proper motives.

One more point with regard to the Welfare State objection. Above, I asked “Wherever have we seen such a politics practiced on earth?” Think about the example of Aneurin Bevin, the Minister of Health, who resigned in 1950 when the basic principle of free health care was watered down by the introduction of dental charges. Now, at last, we see an example of the ethical politician - but it is noteworthy that the only way he could exercise his state of being moral was to resign his office and so cease being that official. A parable of the void between politics and the ethical.

THE REMOVAL OF CHOICE

In the hundred interlocking questions, why do we have to give up asking ethical questions of the political? Partly because of the sheer futility of asking them. We realize that the political has never acknowledged the ethical, not for one second. Politics assets something else - its own power to deny choice. It is true that politicians sometimes use the rhetoric of the ethical as an electioneering ploy or as an argument to encourage obedience; “If you don’t pay your poll tax, how will the hospitals keep going and the bins keep being emptied?” One of the reasons why politics docs not acknowledge the ethical is that it cannot do so, because if it did the political would be abolished as a category.

THE BUSINESS OF POLITICS

The business of politics is to govern — io make more mechanisms of control, to systematically block the paths to freedom, to stop them up. With politics the capacity for choice is already taken away and so we cannot value what happens. It is not appropriate to offer praise or blame where there is no choice.

Politics is about the way we organise and administer society as a collective entity. The business of politics is to govern, that is to say to make more and more mechanisms of control, to systematically block the paths to ferecdom, to syop them up. The ethical is about how we value actions and choices as individuals. With politics, the choice is already taken away and so we cannot value what happens. We cannot offer praise or blame where there is no choice, it is just not appropriate to do so.

To accept the political is to subordinate yourself to the process, to acknowledge the Divine Right of Parliament to rule. The political arrogates that power to itself and the power of the individual to choose is annihilated. Suppose, for just one second, that we declared the ethical to be superior (or to have power over) that divine right. The distinctive character of the political would thereby be abolished. Something other than the political would be given the power to decide. What is ethical is equally clear, or equally obscure, to all. The privileged position of the politicians, judges and bureaucrats to arbitrate what is correct would vanish. The ethical is public property in a way the political is not. You do not need a voting card or the membership of a political party or elite to determine what is cancer.

POLITICS ASSUMES A MODE OF AUTHORITY WHICH CANCELS THE ETHICAL

Were we to declare the political as subordinate to the ethical, politics would be abolished as separate wentity. The divine right of the political to govern would be abolished. The call to obedience overturned, politics would be subsumed as a sub-branch of applied ethics.

Were we to declare the political subordinate to the ethical, the distinctive nature of the political would be swept away. To make this declaration is to classify the political as a sub-branch of applied ethics, the part of it relating to collective decisions and choices, a kind of ‘ethics in aggregate’. This leads to another objection.

THE WHOLESOME APPLE THESIS

Not all politicians are bad, the apologist asserts just as not all apples in the barrel have gone bad. Some apples arc wholesome, just as some politicians arc capable of good (ethically valued) actions and choices. If the aggregate of politicians behaved ethically then politics would be moral. In effect, this is an attempt to subsume the political underneath the ethical, as in the preceding paragraph. The difference between the open declaration of ethical priority over the political, and the wholesome apple thesis is that this time the declaration is mute, it works by sleight of hand.

In this hypothetical example, politics is never openly declared subservient to ethics, it is just that in some way the politicians subordinate their actions and choices to the ethical. The only way we could know they arc doing this is by observing their deeds. They still retain the myth of political infallibility, and still make the decisions for other people, but they secretly allow the ethical to determine their choices.

Under its own terms the wholesome apple objection only works so long as the controlling majority of politicians go along with the subterfuge. They walk a thin line between; on the one hand openly declaring the ethical superior to the political and thereby doing themselves out of a job; and on the other hand losing that moral majority and seeing the political once again regain the upper hand, thereby demonstrating the ethical void.

In so far as me politicians allow something outside the political (namely the ethical) to govern their choices, they cease to be politicians. To accept the ethical is superior to the political is to cancel the political.

Does the wholesome apple objection apply in the real world? Suppose we were to secretly persuade a controlling majority of politicians to make ethical choices, we would still have the political as something apart from the ethical, demanding our unconditional obedience. Once we start asserting the ethical over the political, whether as a stated ethical principle or in our deeds, the whole corrupt political web begins to unravel.

INTERCONNECTEDNESS

Part of the reason why we had to give up asking the specific ethical questions of the political was that they connected up. The ethical politician (if indeed it makes sense to talk of such a being) is apt to challenge all their corruption. Start to ask the ethical questions and it all goes. Ask enough of them and you end up asking just one, the ‘Who are these bastards?’ question which leads to open doubt about the divine right of Parliament to rule; or just a few specific questions. The answer comes back just the same from the politician: “I do these things because 1 want to do them, and you do not have the power to stop me”. This is the core of politics. The politicians sneering at the questioner is not an ethical position al all but something else — it is the declaration of disinterested independence from morality. You can try to go on applying the ethical to the political, but t is futile. The politicians refuse to acknowledge the power of the ethical. It has no leverage. Hence my description of the political as an ethical void.

ETHICS IS WITHOUT LEVERAGE

Are works of art to be valued ethically?
Are machines? Inanimate objects? Where are the people, the actors? If they are not materially part of the process, how can the process be valued?
How can the people be blamed?

The hundred questions interconnect. What is there to value, ethically speaking, with the political? They lead to the “Who are these bastards?” question, but to ask that is to step outside the political, to move towards retaking authority and responsibility over your own life and so to become ethical once more. What is there to value, ethically speaking, with the political?

The political is not about individuals, the individual is only seen as steamroller fodder, cannon fodder, a cross on a lottery ticket, as a taxpayer, customer, a unit on a balance sheet. The individual is precisely nothing. The wholesome apple thesis asserts that if the aggregate of politicians chose differently, the politics would become ethical. It would cease to be what it is. A what if...? argument By contrast, my concern is to describe politics as 1 find it, and not uncritically repeat the myth. With politics as we find it, even individual politicians count for nothing. The party machines rumble on, with or without them. This insignificance can be demonstrated by turning the questions asked at the start of this article:

The Torture Batons to Iraq Question: A (hypothetical) junior I minister discovered the government I was supplying torture batons to Saddam Hussain. He raised the mailer at a cabinet meeting. The I other ministers just laughed at him I and so he resigned in disgust.

“There’s plenty more yes men I where you came from” the Prime I Minister told him, pressing the bell I under the table for the cabinet minister’s replacement to be sent up. If he believed in the ethical, why was he sitting there in the first place?
The Ambulance Roulette Question: Due to the crisis in NHS funding, an Orpington man •was helicoptered 187 miles to Leeds (7th March 1995) and died in the intensive are unit 12,935 of his fellow Orpingtonians voted Tory in 1992. How much are this man’s neighbours to blame for his death?

If the gap is as wide as the Atlantic, it doesn’t matter how many boys slick their fingers in the dyke, the water still purs through the gap.

Attempts to value the political are hopeless because we either end up blaming the individuals (who arc only components) or we end up blaming everybody, and therefore nobody. So long as The Machine has enough components in place, it will continue to function and resignations by cabinet ministers or angry letters in the Orpington Advertiser will not change that. When they all resign at the same time, the political will no longer exist and the question will change. As it is. The Machine goes on “There are plenty more yes men where you came from”... We cannot value this system, we cannot value a network of abstractions. Such attempts at value become so diluted they are meaningless. It dioesn’l make sense to try to apply collective value judgements in this way.

THE POLITICAL AS MACHINE

The political is like a machine which has been built up over the centuries by people with different objectives. We cannot claim that they had a single, coherent overview of the political. If today the political has any practical, observed coherence this is a consequence of what it is and not a product of the will of the system-builders. What is this coherence? -- Mere survival of the Machine, the exercising and enhancement of its power. The fact these zombies can march in the same direction, and march in step says nothing about whether their corporate destination is any good. The destination is incidental, their marching the important fact. The system is likened to a colony of bacteria but we cannot apply ethical judgements to this, either. Here we must note that mee survival is not an ethical attribute.

A colony of bacteria, a virus, a corpse of marching men -- these are analogies of the system, but the best analogy of all is the idea of the system as something like a vast Artificial Intelligence computer programme designed to simulate the mind. People insist on applying what I call the Organic Metaphor’ to the political. These think that politics is alive, tghat it has a mind, or that it is a moral entity to which we can pin moral judgements. They speak about The Body Politic’ but all of this is delusional thinking. It doesn't work like that. The political is not a moral entity but a mechanism of control, it works through power — the annihilation of value.

THE MYTH OF OFFICE

The myth of office asserts that the politician or bureaucrat etc is not responsible. The Machine is the actor, the official merely the component They use uniforms, funny clothes, insignias, ritual and titles to distance themselves as individuals. There is a distinction being drawn between the person as official and person as private individual. Yet people insist on trying to apply the ethical to the political, and blame the person of the official for the part they have played in the running of The Machine.

When the apologists try to blame an official or component, they claim that the individual is responsible and should not have surrendered his / her will to that political regime. The apologist draws a distinction between a particular regime, and political systems in general, thereby avoiding the denial of the divine right of authority (properly constituted) to govern. In so far as people ever get round to punishing these miscreants, we hang them as individuals (something apart from the political system). The officials are stripped of their offices and ranks, their uniforms. The Nazi Slate beat the rap al Nuremberg. Only individuals were hung. The state itself goes on marching, still asserting its divine right to rule. Indeed, the idea of political trials itself reinforces that dominance and subservience mindset. Outside, the vast mass of people remain spectators, abdicating their responsibilities.

GOVERNMENT IS NOT A PERSON

When we make ethical judgements about government, there is no one there to praise or blame. When we try to judge individuals for the actions of states, we ignore the political and it escapes our grasp. The political is impervious to ethical criticism.

How can we apply an ethical judgement to the political? The individuals are blamed for thou- actions in supporting it but that is something apart from the system itself. Yet, I find something intuitively unsatisfactory in my view that the political and ethical are completely separate. One is left with the distinct feeling that the political ought to be ethical, and people do persist in trying to apply the ethical to it.

Ethical judgements about politics might lake the following form: ‘This political system is evil’ or That political party is ethically flawed’ or This policy decision is morally wrong’. Yet it is meaningless to try to apply an ethical judgement to an entire system. We end up scapegoating a few individuals while ignoring the mass of passive ‘wrongdoers’. They escape unpunished. The concentration camp commandant would be nothing without the industrial and technological systems of mass murder behind him. What are the workers in the English armaments factory doing about those electric torture batons they are making for Saddam?

THE ETHICAL VOID MERELY RECORDING A DETERMINATION TO USE WORDS IN A CERTAIN WAY

Perhaps one of the strongest objections to my argument is that all of this is simply a problem of terminology and classification. In declaring the ethical to be divorced from the political I am simply recording my determination to use these words in different ways. Other people may choose to use these words in different ways. Other people may choose to apply them differently and so to make ethical judgements about the political: e.g. “Sexual or racial discrimination is morally wrong”.

Against this objection that to describe politics as an ethical; void merely records a definitional wish to use words in a certain way, I say that for the people who choose otherwise, we still have this problem of applying he ethical to the political, and this is a real problem, not just one of words. The activist who wishes to reduce discrimination almost certainly will be ethically motivated, but so far as that person remains inside the ethical s/he will be unable to engage with the political. In stepping into the public arena and trying to act against prejudice, the activist will run into political problems, legal problems, problems of local authority funding, getting their case across to the media, the balance of parties in the local council chamber etc. All of these not only refuse to recognise the ethical but annihilate it. ‘‘This is not a court of justice, but of law”. I return to a restatement of my thesis: The political assumes a mode of authority which cancels the ethical.

ETHICS BY THE BACK DOOR -ALL THIS IS REALLY ONLY A DISGUISED ETHICAL CRITIQUE OF POLITICS

The last objection I wish to deal with here is the view that all of this -- my position that the political and the ethical are fundamentally divorced - is simply a disguised ethical critique of politics. Politicians ought to submit themselves to the ethical and the fact they do not is a powerful ethical criticism of politics. “Dear Mr Portillo, please be moral...” Political parties and countries ought to enshrine moral principles in their constitutions. Against this I say the objection fails to take account of what politics is. We need to avoid this type of wishful thinking. The ethics by the back door objection depends on politics as it ought be and not politics as it is.

If I am correct here, my view has consequences. No individual with any claim to participate in the ethical can have any part in the political. We need something different, something self-determined but which recognises the importance of the ethical. What then? you say. Are you an anarchist - But of course....

AN ASSERTION OF MORAL RESPONSIBILITY

To understand that politics is an ethical void is a call for us to take back control over our own lives. We cannot value The Machine but we can and must find value in our own lives.

POLITICS AND THE
ETHICAL VOID
STEVE BOOTH

"We cannot apply the ethical to the political To try to do so is to be like a small boy with his finger in the dyke, while a hundred yards away, the sea rushes through a gap as wide as the Atlantic Ocean"

Steve Booth shows the political and the ethical are totally incompatible, that politics is technique and that therefore anarchist revolution cannot be made using political means.

£1.50 from: GA Mail Order, PO Box 407, Camberley GU15 3FL

The Irrationalists

#51 Mar 1998

(click to expand)

Steve Booth on resistance in the new millennium

Eat Shit or Fight Back: The Choice is Yours

The irrationalists commit acts of intense violence against the system, with no obvious motives, no pattern. More important, there is no organization to claim responsibility, offer explanations, make apologies or demands. Then, with the Tokyo sarin gas attack, Florence Rey and Audry Maupin, the Unabomber, Oklahoma and many other such incidents, we entered the Age of the Irrationalists.

One Office Block, One Blue Truck

The Oklahoma bombers had the right idea. The pity was that they did not blast any more government offices. Even so, they did all they could and now there are at least 200 government automatons that are no longer capable of oppression.

Let a Thousand Aum Cults Sarinate…

The Tokyo sarin cult had the right idea. The pity was that in testing the gas a year prior to the attack, they gave themselves away. They were not secretive enough. They had the technology to produce the gas but the method of delivery was innefective. One day the groups will be totally secretive and their methods of fumigation will be completely effective…..

I Have a Dream

One day there will be blue trucks rolling off underground production lines. Missiles will be fired into government buildings and financial institutions. Politicians will be shot. Microlights will spray botulism over every millionaire’s ghetto. More beautiful than all this, there will be no organisations claiming ‘responsibility’, no explanations whatsoever. The whole thing will seem as mysterious as the menacing laughter heard in the Roman baths at Colchester must have been shortly before the Iceni sacked the city.

Cold War into Cola War

Back in the 1970s we used to think the East was oppressive, totalitarian. Their people were brainwashed, elections rigged, dissident groups suppressed. We used to think the West was free, democratic, tolerant. Things were so bad under communism people built balloons out of bed sheets in order to escape. Their repression was so total, military forces were quite prepared to blow up the entire world with nuclear weapons to keep ourselves free. Then with the 1980s people discovered that East and West were the same. Britain had the Economic Leauge to blacklist dissidents. Nixon was as corrupt and as nepotistic as Brhznev. Thatcher was the English Hitler. We had the 1984 Miners’ Strike. Waves and waves of helicopters, miles of razor wire and the full might of the military machine were deployed just to evict a few CND peaceniks at Molesworth. Hilda Murrell was murdered by the State.

New World Ordure

The 1991 Gulf War shows how things are now. World US hegemony, a sordid little was for the oil companies. How can the soldiers go along with it? If they don’t get hit with Saddam’s Scuds, they’ll get Gulf War Syndrome from the West’s own anti-nerve gas tablets. Who could fight for this? Who could fight for Major, Tory Blair and his spin doctors? Europe? With all the world like this, where do we fly our home-made balloon now?

The crowd are passive. In their flight from the truth, people submerge themselves in irrelevancy. Aromatherapy,

WELCOME TO THE WORLD TRADE CENTRE! YOU JUST WATCHED AND DID NOTHING SO HERE ARE YOUR SIDE-HANDLED BATON BLOWS AS YOU TRAVEL ON THE EBOLA SUBWAY, SUCKERS!

drugs, role-playing games, the lottery, selling Amway. They all have their negative equity mortgages, unemployment, job insecurity, MuckDonalds Happy Meals, the Sun, Gulf War Syndrome…. In 1992, even after the poll tax and all that, thirteen million brain-dead morons voted Conservative. How many will vote for Blair? People pay money for the Sun. Millions of them buy lottery tickets. As Mystic Meg once said (echoing Sir Gerard Ratner with his “culture of crap”) “The people want trash, so let’s give them trash…”. All this goes on. Do they act to stop it? Do they bollocks. So in the long run, they get exactly what they deserve, and by heck they are going to get it….

IT’S A LINE SO THIN YOU CANNOT STAND OVER IT – YOU HAVE TO CHOOSE WHICH SIDE TO STAND ON. YOU ARE EITHER FIGHTING IT. THE POINT IS TO CHOOSE…

The Importance of Ethics

As a fundamental, people are free and entitled to exercise that freedom and defend it. Freedom can never be granted grudgingly by authority (only to later be rescinded). Freedom has to be taken. Where we are faced with the systematic annihilation and negation posed against ourselves by The Machine, we are required to find ways to give value to our lives.

We have ethical criteria to judge actions it is wrong to lie, it is wrong to coerce people, it is wrong to stand back and do nothing to prevent injustice. Yet the whole Machine is founded on lies, run by coercion and lubricated with complicity. This requires a response.

The Ethical Void

Several years ago, an article was published in *Freedom (Politics and the Ethical Void, 7^th March 1992, p.7) showing how the ethical has no point of contact with the political. To call on politicians to recognize the ethical is as futile as writing a letter “Dear Mr Himmler, please be moral!” To try to bring the ethical to bear on the political is to be like the boy with his finger in the dyke, while 100 yards away, water pours through a gap as wide as the Atlantic. Politics is without ethics but that does not absolve us of our own responsibilities towards the ethical.

IF JUST ONE PERSON CAN BE FREE, THE REST ARE WITHOUT EXCUSE

The Ethical Imperative To Act

If I can do just one thing to fracture that Iron Grip I will have done something. Then again, if everybody did just one thing. The Machine would be abolished. But we are not in that situation yet, nowhere near it. The numbers of activists are few, very low indeed. Even so, the Sunday Express (14^th January 1996, p.14) expo of Green extremists admitted the Stasi had identified as many as 1,700 road protesters in London and the Home Counties. 1,700 committed road protesters would easily stop the road provided they did not waste their energy in futile fluffy NVDA gesture politics but always go for the jugular.

Numbers are Not Important

It doesn’t matter how many of us there are, one, a hundred, or a thousand. All that matters is that I myself act. The duty to act against the tyrant system is always present and cannot be evaded. In the book Auschwitz by Dr Miklos Nyiszli (Mayflower Books, St Albans 1962), an account is given of the Twelfth Sonderkommando, a group of prisoners who were due for execution and who rose against the concentration camp guards. Another example, taken from the same period, is that of General Stauffenberg, who tried to blow up Hitler with a bomb. No matter how hopeless the situation may seem, the imperative to act against the tyrant state is ever present.

How much do I want to be free?

True knowledge of what the system really is comes with the realisation that the Somme, Auschwitz, Tianamen or Trafalgar Square, etc etc are not exceptions but the norm. We are all in the Twelfth Sonderkommando now, the situation really is that desperate. We are all part of the Warsaw Uprising, we are all Oklahoma bombers or like the character Auger, the suicide bomber in the Green Anarchist novel City-Death. We must use ethical criteria to judge revolutionary actions and so choose our own. Three years ago, an article in Freedom considered pacifism as a response to the situation and found it wanting (Letter To A Pacifist, 15^th May 1993, p.3)

Keep it Pikey!

The State was likened to a madman with an axe. The choice is to do nothing or to fight. An ethical principle, the Categorical Imperative of the Enlightenment philosopher, Immanuel Kant, was mooted as a criterion to judge our response:

I ought never to act except in such a way that I can also will that my maxim should become a universal law.

The suggested maxim was ‘when attacked by a madman with an axe, shoot the madman’. This rejection of pacifism angered the Derrick Pike anarcho-acifist brigade but nothing they could say against the article demonstrated that this maxim was unsound.

The cost of freedom

How much do I want to be free? Am I prepared to kill the madman? Because that is what it will take. What are we doing to destroy the State? Are we driving the truck to Oklahoma? Apire always to be perpetrators, never victims. It’s not what the State has done to me, what I am doing to the State is what really counts.

Of course, under this Irrationalists revolutionary model, the whole radical enterprise becomes very dangerous. Much too dangerous for your average fluffy. It involves sacrifice, hardship, danger, the threat to my present (un)comfortable existence. But do you know, since I discovered the fact, I also discussed that my life has taken on a meaning and a purpose like it never had before. Now what about all the do-nothings, the pseudo-radicals? Too much for them, the treat of something real happening to rid us of the car stickers and standing orders, their aromatherapy classes, hoping against all reason that the charging madman is going to back off in his attack and put that axe down. Tough luck, suckers. He isn’t ....

...

Irrationalism: Steve Booth Against “The Machine”

Source: Black Flag #215 Nov(?) 1998.
<web.archive.org/web/20170302011822/http://flag.blackened.net/blackflag/215/215irrat.htm>

In Green Anarchist issue 51, Steve Booth, one of Green Anarchist’s editors, published “The Irrationalists”, his views on “resistance in the new millennium.” According to Booth, we are entering “the Age of the Irrationalists”, who “commit acts of intense violence against the system with no obvious motives, no pattern.” We are told by Booth that “The Oklahoma bombers had the right idea. The pity was that they did not blast any more government offices.”... The Tokyo sarin cult had the right idea. The pity was that in testing the gas a year prior to the attack they gave themselves away.”

In issue 52, both GA and Booth himself, attempt a retreat from the position initially expressed. In a letter to the Scottish Anarchist Federation, who pulled a speaking tour by the London Gandalf Support Campaign in protest at the content of the article, GA accuse the SAF of “intolerance, credulity and conformism”, presumably for treating Booth’s rantings with the contempt they deserve. Apparently, Booth only wrote the article to “express his anger” at the Operation Washington raids, and GA concede that “maybe Steve goes too far affirming certain desperate acts, rather than just acknowledging them as inevitable reactions to an ever-more organised and repressive society”. Booth also tries to escape the logic of the positions he’d earlier put forward, by arguing that “irrationalism” is a product of despair, and that we need to develop “the capacity of revolutionary action to enlarge our hope.”

This won’t do. Booth’s original article blatantly endorses the actions of the Aum and the Oklahoma bombers. We are told “they had the right idea.” To this we can only echo the comments of Larry O’Hara, Dave Black and Michel Prigent that the Oklahoma bombing was “fascist mass murder” and that “we have as little sympathy (zero) for those carrying out a sarin attack on the Tokyo underground as we would anybody carrying out a similar attack on the Newcastle Metro or London Underground.” In his initial article, Booth contends that “The question is asked “What about the innocent people?” How can anyone inside the Fuhrerbunker be innocent?... Why should Joe and Edna Couch Potato derive any benefit from what the Irrationalists do? They can either join in somewhere, or fuck off and die, it’s up to them, it’s up to you.” For Booth, the enemy is not any longer capitalism, technology, or (whatever the fuck it means) “The Machine” — it is anyone who doesn’t embrace his particular view of the world, or his particular Utopia as an alternative. Some alarm bells should now be ringing for those familiar with the history of “Green Anarchist”. GA’s original editor, Richard Hunt, now edits a fascist, misanthropic rag called “Alternative Green”. Booth appears to be following a similar trajectory.

So, is it that everyone who gets involved in the GA collective develops a personality disorder or is there something at the heart of the “anarcho-primitivist” project that engenders the rot?

Whenever the “primitivists” are pushed to define their agenda in comprehensible terms, we are told that “there’s no blue print, no proscriptive pattern.” The closest we get to a point is the US journal Anarchy’s statement that they aim for a future that is “radically co-operative and communitarian, ecological and feminist, spontaneous and wild.” Fifth Estate churn out mystical babble about “an emerging synthesis of post-modern anarchy and the primitive (in the sense of original) Earth based ecstatic vision”. In his “Primitivist Primer”, GA’s John Moore endorses this definition. Primitivism, so far as anything about it is clear, looks back to the primitive communism of hunter-gatherer societies as an alternative to the “multiplicity of power relations” of “civilisation.” All of which is fine, as far as it goes. Even the US science writer Carl Sagan, in his book “Billions and Billions” states that hunter gatherer existence was more democratic and egalitarian than contemporary society, and writers as diverse as Engels, Levi-Strauss and Maurice Godelier have articulated an anthropology of primitive communism. The problem for contemporary primitivists is not whether such societies were “better” than our own, but how their legacy can be incorporated in a politics of the here and now.

We live in a society that edges ever closer to the brink of ecological destruction. Capitalism sees Nature as one more commodity. As the US writer Michael Parenti puts it, the “capital accumulation process wreaks havoc upon the global ecological system... An ever expanding capitalism and a fragile, finite ecology are on a calamitous collision course. It is not true that the ruling politico-economic interests are in a state of denial about this. Far worse than denial, they are in a state of utter antagonism towards those who think the planet is more important than corporate profits.” The problem for the primitivists is that their politics leave them unable to effectively resist.

Primitivism abandons any notion of a class-based analysis of the structures of “control, coercion, domination and exploitation” and replaces them with a rejection of “civilisation” and an idealisation of a period of history superseded by the development of agriculture, and the relations and means of production which have led us to our present state. The problem is — you can’t wish such developments away, or wind the historical clock back. The primitivist project fails on two counts. The first is the question of agency. Every social transformation — from feudalism, to the bourgeois revolutions, has been based upon the material interests of a particular class, who act as conscious agents of transformation. The primitivists have not been able to identify any positive agent for the “destruction of civilisation” and so their politics becomes a counsel of despair. As GA concede, it is this despair which is at the root of Booth’s “Irrationalist” tantrums. What they fail to concede is that such despair is fundamental to the hopelessness engendered by their politics in and of itself. With no rational agent for primitivist change, GA are left with the Utopian babble of “One day soon, very soon, the whole system will perish in flames, and where will your designer clothes and Mercedes 450SLs be then?” and the Aum and the Oklahoma fascists as vehicles for “the absolute physical destruction of the machine”.

Moreover, even if a positive vehicle for the primitivist project could be found, should we then embrace it as a viable alternative to the immiseration of millions under the rule of capital? In his book, “Beyond Bookchin”, David Watson, of Fifth Estate, argues that aboriginal society represents a viable Utopia. He quotes favourably the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins; “We are inclined to think of hunters and gatherers as poor because they don’t have anything, perhaps better to think of them for that reason as free.” (Perhaps, then, Watson, in the relative comfort of the middle class anarchist scene in Detroit, envies the “freedom” enjoyed by the 1.5 million currently starving to death in the Sudan?) He tells us that aboriginal societies are in reality “affluent” because “everyone starves or no-one does.” What a miserable vision the primitivists — even at their most reasoned — are trying to hawk — at a time when the wealth produced under capitalism is sufficient to eliminate want, at a time when radical ecologists are engaged in a battle for planned, environmentally sustainable production in the interests of and under the control of those currently at the bottom of the production process, all the primitivists have on offer is the communism of want!

It is our contention that the nature of the primitivist project is such that the “irrationalisms” of Steve Booth are, within the context of GA’s project, perfectly rational; that the GA project results in, faced with the age old choice of socialism or barbarism, the election of barbarism as the chosen alternative.

Booth contends that “Only the ability of a given group to create facts really counts. 11 million people not paying poll tax. That was something. The Oklahoma bombing. Unless you can create facts, you are nothing.” Booth is fond of sending out “propositions” to his opponents. We have a few for him (and it would be nice to get a straight answer, instead of the usual thought disordered rant). If the Oklahoma bombing “creates facts”, does also the election of the FN in France or their equivalents in Austria and Germany? If the Aum got it right — if Joe and Edna Couch Potato don’t count — if “the only question could then be — so where was your bomb and why did it not go off first” would Booth endorse, say, the fascist bombing of Bologna railway station, or a far right militia using poison gas on a black community in the US? If not, following your own logic, why not? Go on surprise us; give us a considered reply.

The Return of The Irrationalists

#54–55 Mar 1999

John Connor on reaction and Civilised values

...

Our Obvious Critics

...

But It’s More Than This

...

False Flag

#54–55 Mar 1999

An expose of the Black Flag racket

Black Flag # 215 spent six times more space slagging off Steve Booth’s Irrationalists than on their story on the Gandolf case, which they were so noncommittal in reporting that they didn’t even bother to end it with the defence campaign’s address. This and repeated trashy references to GA throughout this issue suggests Black Flag might have a problem with us.

The article, coincidently titled Irrationalism — Steve Booth against “the Machine” implied Steve is “a fascist, misanthrope”, although they hadn’t got the bottle to say this plainly and don’t believe it anyway as ...

Dancing with the devil: On the politics of Green Anarchist, again!

Black Flag #217. 1999. Pages 33–35

Black Flag defends class struggle anarchism against the nihilist-terrorism of Green Anarchist

In issue 215 of Black Flag we ran a critique of the politics of Green Anarchist, “Irrationalism — Steve Booth Against the Machine”, which attacked propositions by Steve Booth (in Green Anarchist 51) in favour of “acts of intense violence against the system with no obvious motives, no pattern”. Booth stated that:

“The Oklahoma bombers had the right idea. The pity was that they did not blast any more government offices...The Tokyo sarin cult had the right idea. The pity was that in testing the gas a year prior to the attack they gave themselves away.”

Our polemic argued that Booth’s Irrationalism is the logical end-point for the “primitivist” project; that “the primitivists have not been able to identify any positive agent for the ‘destruction of civilisation’ and so their politics becomes a counsel of despair...With no rational agent for primitivist change, GA are left with...making Aum and the Oklahoma fascists vehicles for ‘the absolute physical destruction of the machine.’”

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 the Black Flag critique. Or rather, they don’t. Black Flag is denounced as “opportunistic and power hungry” (the misrepresentations about the history and politics of the Black Flag Collective are dealt with elsewhere). GA also get excited about our question “would Booth endorse, say, the fascist bombing of Bologna railway station” (although their excitement is a bit misplaced, as they have a go at point scoring about how we appear to believe there were several 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 a concept 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 two questions. 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 ‘s non-ideological examples of “resistance” were the Aum and the militias, not the IRA, ETA, the Angry Brigade, the Black Liberation Army, and so on? As we’ll illustrate, this isn’t just coincidence. The primitivist project rejects all notions of positive agency, of a human subject attempting to change the world, as “reifying” — alienative. Hence, any act of resistance which has a positive, “socialistic” goal (however poorly defined) has to be rejected, while groups which have purely negative or destructive goals are seen as “decivilising” and hence embraced. The logic of primitivism leads its proponents ultimately into the camp of those who would advocate “Long Live Death”.

We are not suggesting that GA are fascists; what we do suggest is that the method of primitivism, and the notion of the “non-ideological” lead precisely to a situation where questions of means and ends are buried beneath the desire for “the destruction of civilisation.” That they can dismiss the question of whether or not they would, as we raised, “endorse, say, the fascist bombings of Bologna railway station, or a far-right militia using poison gas on a black community in the US” as “ideological” suggests our concern, and anger, is justified. To argue that, as Booth’s article “rejects all ideology, it necessarily rejects fascist ideology” is bullshit. Booth says the Aum had the right idea and that “Joe and Edna Couch Potato...can either 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 organisation is irrelevant, so long as it is engaged in acts of “intense violence against the 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 London also had “the right idea.”

Class an irrelevance?

We are told that Black Flag’s contention that any effective resistance has to be grounded in an understanding of class is an “irrelevant 80s dogma”, a “crude workerism”. GA, apparently, call “for our actions to be unmediated through the working class.” Class-struggle anarchism is a “secular ‘religion of slaves.’”

Class, contra GA, whether fashionable in the 80s or irrelevant in the 90s, is the fundamental issue of our time — the relationship between those who own the means of production and those forced to sell their labour to the property-owning class underpins every aspect of our society. The New Labour government has taken office committed to the utilisation of the welfare state as a weapon of coercion to drive the unemployed off the dole and into the workplace, to drag down wages, in the interests of capital. New Labour’s attacks on working class living standards affect the majority of people in the UK. Irrelevant, though, according to GA. Environmental crisis has as its cause the industrial/technological practices of capitalism — either in the form of production techniques used or pollutants sold to the consumer in the pursuit of profit. Still, who cares, eh?

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

It is undeniably true that trade unionism and social democratic reformism have, as GA assert, “emasculated authentically revolutionary currents.” It is therefore, as Rudolf Rocker incited, the objective of “anarcho-syndicalism to prepare the toiling masses in the city and country for this great goal[social revolution] and to bind them together as a militant force.” The class war has, too often, been mediated through reformism. It is part of Black Flag’s objective to explore ways and means of making the working class, for capitalism, “the modern Satan, the great rebel” (to use Bakunin’s phrase) again. In doing so, we do not intend to distance ourselves from questions of revolutionary violence, and our movement’s embrace at times of the propaganda of the deed. However, to equate such acts as the assassination of the Empress of Austria by Lucheni, President Carnot of France by Santo Caserio, or the assassination of Alexander II by the Russian nihilists with the Aum’s desire to murder a train full of Japanese commuters as GA does, is to reduce the propaganda 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 Couch Potato, Steve Booth’s cynical dismissal of any ordinary person who’s not part of GA’s sorry little grouping.

Which helps explain why GA does not identify any agent for social change and instead relies on “irrationalist” acts. It is probable that the return to a “Hunter-Gatherer” style society would result in mass starvation in almost all countries as the social infrastructure collapses. Indeed, it is tempting to insist that the primitivists have ceded the right to be taken seriously until they come up with a consistent response to the key question asked by Brian Morris 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 sustains almost six billion people (for evidence suggests that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is only able to support 1 or 2 people per sq. mile)... Zerzan does not 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 most people (“Joe and Edna Couch Potato,” in other words), it could never come about by libertarian means (i.e. by the free choice of individuals who create it by their own acts). Which partly explains their rejection of an agent for change as very few people would actually voluntarily embrace such a situation. This, we suggest, leads to GA developing a form of eco-vanguardism in order, to use Rousseau’s evil expression, to “force people to be free” (as can be seen from the articles published celebrating terrorist acts). As subjective choice is ruled out, there can only be objective pressures which force people, against their will, into “anarchy” (namely “irrationalist” acts which 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 moralistic anarcho-vanguard” (anyone who presumes to question the authority of GA!!) is an article by John Moore “Maximalist Anarchism, Anarchist Maximalism”, a celebration by the author of “those forms of anarchism which aim at the exponential exposure, challenging and abolition of power.” Moore is also author of “The Primitivist Primer”. His “Maximalist Anarchism” is helpful, because it locates for us the theoretical bankruptcy of the primitivist project, the philosophical crisis which underpins the disordered musings of Booth and co. It has always been part of the anarchist project to oppose the dominion of man over man. That dominion, though, has always been understood as historically grounded in the development of the State as the guarantor of man’s exploitation by man; the guarantor of property. Moore’s conception of power, though, is a-historical, and anti-materialist: “Power is not seen as located in any single institution such as patriarchy or the state, but as pervasive in everyday life.”

Remember the film “The Usual Suspects”? At one point in the film there’s a voice over from Kevin Spacey along the lines of “The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” Moore’s view of power as “pervasive in everyday life” is “The Usual Suspects” as political theory. The greatest trick that capitalism could play is convincing those oppressed under it that their oppression is natural, inevitable. Power is everywhere and all-corrupting.

What does Moore mean? If Person A robs Person B and Person C intervenes to physically prevent him, is Person C’s action as oppressive as Person A’s? Is the state in seeking to murder Mumia Abu-Jamal no more or less oppressive than those who would seek to organise collectively to exercise the power to stop them? Moore conflates power, and hence agency, with oppression. Not all power is oppressive. The power to resist cannot be equated with the power to oppress.

In 1793 the French revolutionary Jacques Roux petitioned that “Liberty is but a phantom when one class of men can starve another with impunity.” Moore would add that liberty is but a phantom when one class of men has the power to resist the fate delegated to it by the whim of another. Power, for Moore, becomes as one with our subjectivity, our power to act. What we are left with is bourgeois individualism dressed up as freedom. “Central to the emancipation of life from governance and control remains the exploration of desire and the free, joyful pursuit of individual lines of interest.”

Bakunin argued that “man only becomes man and achieves consciousness only to the extent that he realises his humanity within society and then only through the collective endeavours of society as a whole.” Moore’s “struggle against micro-fascism”, the reduction of social struggle to the “anti-politics of everyday life”, is a retreat from the collective struggle for a free society of Bakunin to the deconstructive agenda of post-modernism. As he concedes

“The arts, due to their capacity to bypass inhibitions and connect with or even liberate unconscious concerns and desires, thus remain far more appropriate than political discourse as a means of promoting and expressing the development of autonomy and anti-authoritarian rebellion.”

This is not, then, a politics of resistance in the sense one might understand a politics of everyday life as embodying strategies of resistance to the encroachments of capital upon everyday life; resistance is substituted by play, artistic self-expression (why not shopping?). As Moore himself concedes; real issues of strategy and tactics in the battle to regain control of our lives are abandoned to “the very science fictional 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 primitivist thinkers, in an article “Reification: That Thing We Do” (Anarchy #45) starts with an examination of the use of the term “reification” as employed by the Marxist Georg Lukacs

“namely, a form of alienation issuing from the commodity fetishism of modern market relations. Social conditions and the plight of the individual have become mysterious and impenetrable as a function of what we now commonly refer to as consumerist capitalism. We are crushed and blinded by the reifying force of the stage of capital that began in the 20^th century.”

Lukac’s observations are based on Marx’s contention in Grundrisse that “Money...directly and simultaneously becomes the real community...Money dissolve(s) the community” His use of the term “reification” is historically specific. Zerzan argues

“however, that it may be useful to re-cast reification so as to establish a much deeper meaning and dynamic. The merely and directly human is in fact being drained away as surely as nature itself has been tamed into an object.”

It would be reasonable here to anticipate an attack upon Enlightenment views of the human subject, the Descartean notion that we can “render ourselves the masters and possessors of nature.” Zerzan goes much further. He argues that we are “exiled from immediacy” by our capacity for abstract thought, that “the reification aspect of thought is a further cognitive ‘fall from grace’”. It is the human subject acting as subject that leads to our alienation from ourselves. “objectification is the take off point for culture, in that it makes domestication possible. It reaches its full potential with the onset of division of labour; the exchange principle itself moves on the level of objectification.”

Raymond Williams once argued that “communication is community”, that man as social being is defined by interaction through language. Zerzan has it that “the reification act of language impoverishes existence by creating a universe 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 viewed negatively by Zerzan — in a monolithic sense.”

Zerzan is a committed activist and capable of writings of both insight and beauty. His writings against our “ever more standardised, massified lost world” stand as powerful indictments of modern life. Yet a contradiction stands at the centre of his thought. If the “dreadfulness of our post-modernity” is constituted by the “denial of human choice and effective agency” how can we go forward, how can we change the world, except by our own hands and how can it be possible to so change the world if by acting we “render ourselves as objects”?

If what Cassirer called the process of creative destruction, of “man” as subject, “doubting and seeking, tearing down and building up” has led us to “these dark 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 and Dasmann put it. But living-in-place seems much like knowing your place, and not much of a recipe for change, and even Arne Naess acknowledges that “only look at” nature is extremely peculiar behaviour. Experiencing of an environment happens by doing something in it, by living in it, meditating and acting” (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 it stands. His best writings are full of celebrations of worker resistance to work life, luddism, the 1977 New York blackout lootings and riots. For Green Anarchism though, it is not so simple. The contradictions of primitivism — Zerzan’s theoretical abandonment of the revolutionary subject, Moore’s bourgeois individualism — lead practical, direct action politics down a blind alley. We can’t stand where we are — we can’t go forward because power is everywhere and human agency is ultimately reifying. The dead end of primitivism lies precisely in the fact that there can be no positive agency for the primitivist transformation. All that’s left then is what Booth and Colike to pretend is the “non-ideological”.

When Zerzan talks about the un-mediated/un-ideologized he means, as Paul Simons put it in Anarchy #44

“the participants 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 you puke party and power outrage of 1977, the MLK assassination riots, May 68 in France and so forth.”

In this, he stands as part of the best of our movement’s tradition, anarchism as the voice of the “swinish multitude.”

Booth’s idea of “non-ideological”, contra Zerzan, is not non-ideological at all. Both the Aum and the Oklahoma bombers had clear ideological ends. Booth wants to pretend their ends don’t count (so why not, then, the FN or the BNP?) As GA concede, (and in doing so concede their own irrelevance) “all Steve did was write.” And it’s all he’s ever likely to do. There is an element of “The Irrationalists” which reeks of middle class posturing and vicarious rebellion (the comprehensive I went to school in had a few middle class twats who liked to pretend they were in the NF to wind up “the rougher elements”, until they realised that there was a price to pay for posturing as fascists!).

Nevertheless, their politics have some resonance within the direct action environmental movement and they have to be taken seriously to that extent. Booth’s “Irrationalism” is the dead end of primitivism — the abandonment of any notion of positive human agency. Whether they like it or not, all that’s then left is the passive surrender of “living in place” or looking to the forces of reaction to bring about the death of civilisation; the barbarism Rosa Luxemburg warned against.

False Flag Again

#57_58 Autumn 1999

We expose the disinformers

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Mouthpiece Micah

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Fuckwit, His Guru

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False Flag

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The Irrationalists 7[22]

#57_58 Autumn 1999

Steve Booth restates his controversial ‘Irrationalists’ article, which has so upset the anarcho-establishment

Introduction

What a fuss and a bleating of sheep there was over my Irrationalists article in GA51 ...

In what way is irrationalism an outworking of anarchist theory

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The state we’re in and where it’s all heading

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Liberalism becomes totalitarian

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What do we want? What do we really, really want?

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An end to gesture politics

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The future — more of the same, only worse

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Types of protest groups

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The uselessness of terrorism

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An end to negotiation

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Steve Booth on the Irrationalists

Source: Added to Insurgent Desire on 14 Nov, 2000.

It seems to me that much of the argument against my Irrationalists article concentrated on the examples of the Oklahoma bombing and Tokyo gas attack. In all this knee jerk reaction, the whole point of the article itself was lost. It is important to stress that I am not a Primitivist, therefore it is wrong to use the ‘Irrationalists’ article to criticise anarcho-primitivism. Nor is the ‘Irrationalists’ article the opinion of everybody who edits, or writes for Green Anarchist.

To deal with the Oklahoma and Tokyo objections:

(1) Guilt by Associated Methods

There are ideas and motives behind an action, and there are methods. These two things are separate. Do we blame tools for the use to which they are put?

The main objections followed the path that because the Oklahoma bomb was thought to be fascist, then the Irrationalists will also be fascists. Using the same form of argument they might as well argue Communists have used guns, therefore those who use guns are also Communists. Or how about if M16 assassinated Princess Diana therefore all those who commit political assassinations are MI6 ? If protesters ever throw tear gas at the police at some hypothetical future demonstration, heaven help them, for that will prove they are members of the FBI, because of what happened at Waco.

I say only a fool refuses to learn lessons about effectiveness from their worst enemies.

(2) The Dogma of Pacifism

Another type of objection is openly pacifist. These people claim that all violence in every case is wrong. It is a moral standpoint. While I have a great deal of respect for the people who hold this view, I disagree with it.

Many revolutionary people disagree with pacifism, for example the Black Bloc or the Unabomber. Historically, anarchists fought in the Spanish Civil War. Makhno, the ‘Propaganda by Deed’ bomb thrower anarchists of the 1890’s, and there are many other examples. I say revolutionaries have used violence in the past, and are using it in the present. Their use of violence does not prove they are not revolutionaries.

(3) Not Now .... Not Never —

At least the objectors under (2) are open about it. The crypto-pacifists people here argue against every act of violence, every case (eg at the November 30^th 1999 Seattle protests) on tactical grounds. ‘Violence is not in itself wrong, in principle ...’ they claim, ‘but in this particular case it was wrong, because ...’ (usually that it will alienate public support). This position is dishonest, because the objectors really believe (2) but lack the guts to say it.

People like Ed Stamm fall under this category. Sometimes this point of view combines with the argument at (1) that to use contaminated physical means necessarily entails that the purposes too, or your ideologies, are osmotically contaminated via guilt by association. The violent people at Seattle, eg are ‘really’ fascists because they were abusive to leftist trade unionists and peace-police who wanted them to take their CS gas and police beatings like good little masochists..

The public support objection fails because the public vote for totalitarianism. The public buys the Big Mac, the public sit passive in the face of their annihilation, the public swallow all the media lies, the public does not know and thinks nothing of the totalitarian reich. With passive ‘support’ like this, who needs enemies?

(4) We Don’t Like It Because It Isn’t Nice....

If all the totalitarian, global state / system continues to grow on its present curve, that will not be very nice, either. The onus is on the objector to suggest a more effective way of working.

What did it take for the people of the world to stop fascism? A world war. A lot of violence, and many people killed. What did it take for totalitarian communism to die? The Cold War, a lower level of intensity conflict, but drawn out over 40 years. The gulag, proxy wars like Vietnam and Afghanistan. With the struggle against global totalitarianism, the terms of the conflict are different, the way it will have to be fought are different. One aspect is that it will have to be fought on an ideological level. Yet it is also a physical conflict, and anybody who doubts that is a fool. Global capitalism, when it goes, is going to try to take as many of its dupes as possible with it, and will leave a catastrophic mess behind.

So much for the objections. Now on to more general points:

‘Irrationalism’ and Revolution

The important question is how is it possible for revolutionaries to become and remain effective, or even just to exist in the face of this totalitarian, global system? When every street has a CCTV camera on it, when every telephone call is tapped, when the state has computer files on everybody? I do not think the people who complained about the Irrationalists have an objective view of the situation. The system now has capacities for surveillance and control far in excess of things in East Germany or Soviet Russia. When are people going to wake up and act against them? How can they act against them? Do they care, even in the slightest, about human freedom? Like I said, they took down the Iron Curtain, only to put up the barbed wire inside their own heads.

Will the System Collapse of Itself?

One possibility I reject is that the state / totalitarian system will collapse completely by itself in all its own rottenness. I think this is wishful thinking. Under this understanding of it, we (i.e. revolutionaries) don’t have to do anything. Some even think the protest milieu is counter-productive, because it acts as a safety valve, prolonging the system, allowing its pressure to vent off. What we really need to do is weld that safety valve down so that the pressure inside the Reich increases until it destroys itself.

Do We Deserve to Go on?

Another understanding is misanthropism — that the human race is so bad that it does not deserve to continue. Eventually, in a similar way to the inhabitants of Easter Island, we will cut down the last tree or we will poison the sky and the seas so much that we will all die. I profoundly disagree with this opinion too.

To Build the Strong and Active Protest Movement

As I said in my more recent GA58 Irrationalists article, I shall be quite happy if events prove me wrong. Aside from doing nothing, the long term alternative to the Irrationalists is a strong and active protest movement. The recent Mayday events in London have some good points and some bad points and indicate the general trend. Formal organised protest groups have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Some of them are intent on careerist concerns, media spectacularization, or are governments in waiting. They are innately hierarchical and manipulative. Events like ‘Mayday’ operate on a curve of diminishing returns. If we continue to follow that line, of hierarchical structures, and replaying past successes, then the ‘Irrationalists’ thing will certainly happen.

That ‘Leftism’ is an Escape Mechanism

Orthodox do-nothing and dying Leftism is a displacement activity, a mechanism for evading the present situation, and our ethical imperative to act against its injustice. This fact drives many of the objections. For were a new revolutionary paradigm like the ‘Irrationalists’ to come into being and to work, it would show up the total and absolute bankruptcy of all their previous meanderings. In my planned but unwritten novel about the Irrationalists the first action the Irrationalists committed was to physically destroy the power-centre of all the pseudo-revolutionary hierarchies. The ‘it will alienate public support’ objection above is part of that same process of displacement, for it may well be linked to the dogma that the revolutionary working class will one day arise and overturn their oppressors. Illegitimately, the locus of responsibility is shifted away from the individual on to the abstract, non-existent theoretical entity. Dying Leftism wishes at all costs to preserve their particular group’s hegemony as the only true keeper of the flame of real revolutionary working class consciousness. Such a flame, for pragmatic reasons, must never really burn anybody.

As I say above, all truly revolutionary situations are an implicit threat to the status quo, and so will be opposed by the pseudo-revolutionary hierarchies.

Non Hierarchical, Flexible, Hydra Headed Movement

If the protest movement hierarchies are by and large a bad thing, and the leftoid hierarchies definitely a bad thing, the broad and diffuse spread of protesters themselves offer the greatest hope. Some of the things going on just now are bloody brilliant; like the animal rights protesters closing down Hillgrove Farm, Shamrock and Regal Rabbits. The anti GMO thing is also brilliant. The example of the direct action based protest movement inspires others to take up their own struggles, eg housing estate residents against developers. We desperately need to self-coordinate, co-operate, widen out and deepen all these protests; act against exploitation, environmental degradation, injustice and state repression. Be like a many-headed hydra, flexible, changing tack and tactics all the time. It is very late, and the state / system / Reich is powerful, but the people against it are getting better at opposing it too. Wherever something positive happens, this weakens the system, and so is to be welcomed. In my opinion, so long as the broad protest movement keeps on building up and gaining momentum, we have to keep working at that.

Technophilia, An Infantile Disorder by Bob Black

[A rejoinder to a polemic by “Walter Alter” published in Fringe Ware Review]

If patriotism is, as Samuel Johnson said, the last refuge of a scoundrel, scientism is by now the first. It’s the only ideology which, restated in cyberbabble, projects the look-and-feel of futurity even as it conserves attitudes and values essential to keeping things just as they are. Keep on zapping!

The abstract affirmation of “change” is conservative, not progressive. It privileges all change, apparent or real, stylistic or substantive, reactionary or revolutionary. The more things change — the more things that change — the more they stay the same. Faster, faster, Speed Racer! — (but keep going in circles).

For much the same reason the privileging of progress is also conservative. Progress is the notion that change tends toward improvement and improvement tends to be irreversible. Local setbacks occur as change is stalled or misdirected (“the ether,” “phlogiston”) but the secular tendency is forward (and secular). Nothing goes very wrong for very long, so there is never any compelling reason not to just keep doing what you’re doing. It’s gonna be all right. As some jurist once put it in another (but startlingly similar) context, the wheels of justice turn slowly, but they grind fine.

As his pseudonym suggests, Walter Alter is a self-sanctified high priest of progress (but does he know that in German, alter means “older”?). He disdains the past the better to perpetuate it. His writing only in small letters — how modernist! — was quite the rage when e.e. cummings pioneered it 80 years ago. Perhaps Alter’s next advance will be to abandon punctuation only a few decades after James Joyce did. And well under 3000 years since the Romans did both. The pace of progress can be dizzying.

For Alter, the future is a program that Karl Marx and Jules Verne mapped out in a previous century. Evolution is unilinear, technologically driven and, for some strange reason, morally imperative. These notions were already old when Herbert Spencer and Karl Marx cobbled them together. Alter’s positivism is no improvement on that of Comte, who gave the game away by founding a Positivist Church. And his mechanical materialism is actually a regression from Marxism to Stalinism. Like bad science fiction, but not as entertaining, Alterism is 19^th century ideology declaimed in 21^st century jargon. (One of the few facts about the future at once certain and reassuring is that it will not talk like Walter Alter any more than the present talks like Hugo Gernsback.) Alter hasn’t written one word with which Newt Gingrich or Walt Disney, defrosted, would disagree. The “think tank social engineers” are on his side; or rather, he’s on theirs. They don’t think the way he does — that barely qualifies as thinking at all — but they want us to think the way he does. The only reason he isn’t on their payroll is why pay him if he’s willing to do it for nothing?

“Info overload is relative to your skill level,” intones Alter. It’s certainly relative to his. He bounces from technology to anthropology to history and back again like the atoms of the Newtonian billiard-bill universe that scientists, unlike Alter, no longer believe in. The breadth of his ignorance amazes, a wondering world can only, with Groucho Marx, ask: “Is there anything else you know absolutely nothing about?” If syndicalism is (as one wag put it) fascism minus the excitement, Alterism is empiricism minus the evidence. He sports the toga of reason without stating any reason for doing so. He expects us to take his rejection of faith on faith. He fiercely affirms that facts are facts without mentioning any.

Alter is much too upset to be articulate, but at least he’s provided an enemies list — although, like Senator McCarthy, he would rather issue vague categorical denunciations than name names. High on the list are “primitivo-nostalgic” “anthro-romanticists” who are either also, or are giving aid and comfort to, “anti-authoritarians” of the “anarcho-left.” To the lay reader all these mysterious hyphenations are calculated to inspire a vague dread without communicating any information whom they refer to except dupes of the think tank social engineers and enemies of civilization. But why should the think tank social engineers want to destroy the civilization in which they flourish at the expense of most of the rest of us?

If by religion is meant reverence for something not understood, Alter is fervently religious. He mistakes science for codified knowledge (that was natural history, long since as defunct as phrenology). Science is a social practice with distinctive methods, not an accumulation of officially certified “facts.” There are no naked, extracontextual facts. Facts are always relative to a context. Scientific facts are relative to a theory or a paradigm (i.e., to a formalized context). Are electrons particles or waves? Neither and both, according to Niels Bohr — it depends on where you are looking from and why. Are the postulates and theorems of Euclidean geometry “true”? They correspond very well to much of the physical universe, but Einstein found that Riemann’s non-Euclidean geometry better described such crucial phenomena as gravitation and the deflection of light rays. Each geometry is internally consistent; each is inconsistent with the other. No conceivable fact or facts would resolve their discrepancy. As much as they would like to transcend the inconsistency, physicists have learned to live with the incommensurable theories of relativity and quantum physics because they both work (almost). Newtonian physics is still very serviceable inside the solar system, where there are still a few “facts” (like the precession of Mercury) not amenable to Einsteinian relativity, but the latter is definitely the theory of choice for application to the rest of the universe. To call the one true and the other false is like calling a Toyota true and a Model-T false.

Theories create facts — and theories destroy them. Science is simultaneously, and necessarily, progressive and regressive. Unlike Walter Alter, science privileges neither direction. There is no passive, preexisting, “organised, patterned, predicted and graspable” universe out there awaiting our Promethean touch. Insofar as the Universe is orderly — which, for all we know, may not be all that far — we make it so. Not only in the obvious sense that we form families and build cities, ordering our own life-ways, but merely by the patterning power of perception, by which we resolve a welter of sense-data into a “table” where there are “really” only a multitude of tiny particles and mostly empty space.

Alter rages against obnosis, his ill-formed neologism for ignoring the obvious. But ignoring the obvious is “obviously” the precondition for science. As S.F.C. Milsom put it, “things that are obvious cannot be slightly wrong: like the movement of the sun, they can only be fundamentally wrong.” Obviously the sun circles the earth. Obviously the earth is flat. Obviously the table before me is solid, not, as atomic-science mystics claim, almost entirely empty space. Obviously particles cannot also be waves. Obviously human society is impossible without a state. Obviously hunter-gatherers work harder than contemporary wage-laborers. Obviously the death penalty deters crime. But nothing is more obvious, if anything is, than that all these propositions are false. Which is to say, they cannot qualify as “facts” within any framework which even their own proponents acknowledge as their own. Indeed, all the advocates (of such of these opinions as still have any) stridently affirm, like Alter, a positivist-empiricist framework in which their falsity is conspicuous.

So then — to get down to details — forward into the past. Alter rants against what he calls the “romanticist attachment to a ‘simpler,’ ‘purer’ existence in past times or among contemporary primitive or ‘Eastern’ societies.” Hold it right there. Nobody that I know of is conflating past or present primitive societies with “Eastern” societies (presumably the civilizations of China and India and their offshoots in Japan, Korea, Burma, Southeast Asia, Indonesia, etc.). These “Eastern” societies much more closely resemble the society — ours — which “anarcho-leftists” want to overthrow than they do any primitive society. Both feature the state, the market, class stratification and sacerdotally controlled religion, which are absent from all band (forager) societies and many tribal societies. If primitive and Eastern societies have common features of any importance to his argument (had he troubled to formulate one) Alter does not identify them.

For Alter it is a “crushing reality that the innate direction that any sentient culture will take to amplify its well-being will be to increase the application of tool-extensions.” Cultures are not “sentient”; that is to reify and mystify their nature. Nor do cultures necessarily have any “innate direction.” As an ex- (or crypto-) Marxist — he is a former (?) follower of Lyndon LaRouche in his Stalinist, “National Caucus of Labor Committees” phase — Alter has no excuse for not knowing this. Although Marx was most interested in a mode of production — capitalism — which, he argued, did have an innate direction, he also identified an “Asiatic mode of production” which did not; Karl Wittfogel elaborated on the insight in his Oriental Despotism. Our seer prognosticates that “if that increase stops, the culture will die.” This we know to be false.

If Alter is correct, for a society to regress to a simpler technology is inevitably suicidal. Anthropologists know better. For Alter it’s an article of faith that agriculture is technologically superior to foraging. But the ancestors of the Plains Indians were sedentary or semisedentary agriculturists who abandoned that life-way because the arrival of the horse made possible (not necessary) the choice of a simpler hunting existence which they must have adjudged qualitatively superior. The Kpelle of Liberia refuse to switch from dry- to wet-cultivation of rice, their staple food, as economic development “experts” urge them to. The Kpelle are well aware that wet (irrigated) rice farming is much more productive than dry farming. But dry farming is conducted communally, with singing and feasting and drinking, in a way which wet farming cannot be — and it’s much easier work at a healthier, more comfortable “work station.” If their culture should “die” as a result of this eminently reasonable choice it will be murder, not suicide. If by progress Alter means exterminating people because we can and because they’re different, he can take his progress and shove it. He defames science by defending it.

Even the history of Western civilization (the only one our ethnocentric futurist takes seriously) contradicts Alter’s theory of technological will-to-power. For well over a thousand years, classical civilization flourished without any significant “application of tool extension.” Even when Hellenistic or Roman science advanced, its technology usually did not. It created the steam engine, then forgot about the toy, as China (another counter-example to Alterism) invented gunpowder and used it to scare away demons — arguably its best use. Of course, ancient societies came to an end, but they all do: as Keynes put it, in the long run, we will all be dead.

And I have my suspicions about the phrase “tool extension.” Isn’t something to do with that advertised in the back of porn magazines?

Alter must be lying, not merely mistaken, when he reiterates the Hobbesian myth that “primitive life is short and brutal.” He cannot possibly even be aware of the existence of those he tags as anthro-romanticists without knowing that they have demonstrated otherwise to the satisfaction of their fellow scientists. The word “primitive” is for many purposes — including this one — too vague and overinclusive to be useful. It might refer to anything from the few surviving hunter-gathering societies to the ethnic minority peasantry of modernizing Third World states (like the Indians of Mexico or Peru). Life expectancy is a case in point. Alter wants his readers to suppose that longevity is a function of techno-social complexity. It isn’t, and it isn’t the opposite either. As Richard Borshay Lee ascertained, the Kung San (“Bushmen”) of Botswana have a population structure closer to that of the United States than to that of the typical Third World country with its peasant majority. Foragers’ lives are not all that short. Only recently have the average lifespans in the privileged metropolis nations surpassed prehistoric rates.

As for whether the lives of primitives are “brutal,” as compared to those of, say, Detroiters, that is obviously a moralistic, not a scientific, judgment. If brutality refers to the quality of life, foragers, as Marshall Sahlins demonstrated in “The Original Affluent Society,” work much less and socialize and party much more than we moderns do. None of them take orders from an asshole boss or get up before noon or work a five-day week or — well, you get the idea.

Alter smugly observes that “damn few aboriginal societies are being created and lived in fully by those doing the praising [of them].” No shit. So what? These societies never were created; they evolved. The same industrial and capitalist forces which are extinguishing existing aboriginal societies place powerful obstacles to forming new ones. What we deplore is precisely what we have lost, including the skills to recreate it. Alter is just cheerleading for the pigs. Like I said, they’d pay him (but probably not very well) if he weren’t doing it for free.

Admittedly an occasional anthropologist and an occasional “anarcho-leftist” has in some respects romanticized primitive life at one time or another, but on nothing like the scale on which Alter falsifies the ethnographic record. Richard Borshay Lee and Marshall Sahlins today represent the conventional wisdom as regards hunter-gatherer societies. They don’t romanticize anything. They don’t have to. A romanticist would claim that the primitive society he or she studies is virtually free of conflict and violence, as did Elizabeth Marshall Thomas in her book on the San/Bushmen, The Harmless People. Lee’s later, more painstaking observations established per capita homicide rates for the San not much lower than from those of the contemporary United States. Sahlins made clear that the tradeoff for the leisurely, well-fed hunting-gathering life was not accumulating any property which could not be conveniently carried away. Whether this is any great sacrifice is a value judgment, not a scientific finding — a distinction to which Alter is as oblivious as any medieval monk.

About the only specific reference Alter makes is to Margaret Mead, “a semi-literate sectarian specializing in ‘doping the samples’ when they didn’t fit into her pre-existent doctrine” (never specified). Mead was poorly trained prior to her first fieldwork in Samoa, but to call the author of a number of well-written best-sellers “semi-literate” falls well short of even semi-literate, it’s just plain stupid. I’d say Alter was a semi-literate sectarian doping the facts except that he’s really a semi-literate sectarian ignoring the facts.

Mead’s major conclusions were that the Samoans were sexually liberal and that they were, relative to interwar Americans, more cooperative than competitive. Mead — the bisexual protege of the lesbian Ruth Benedict — may well have projected her own sexual liberalism onto the natives. But modern ethnographies (such as Robert Suggs’ Mangaia) as well as historical sources from Captain Cook forwards confirm that most Pacific island societies really were closer to the easygoing hedonistic idyll Mead thought she saw in Samoa than to some Hobbesian horrorshow. Alter rails against romanticism, subjectivity, mysticism — the usual suspects — but won’t look the real, regularly replicated facts about primitive society in the face. He’s in denial.

If Mead’s findings as to sexuality and maturation have been revised by subsequent fieldwork, her characterization of competition and cooperation in the societies she studied has not. By any standard, our modern (state-) capitalist society is what statisticians call an outlier — a sport, a freak, a monster — at an extraordinary distance from most observations, the sort that pushes variance and variation far apart. There is no “double standard employing an extreme criticism against all bourgeoise [sic], capitalist, spectacular, commodity factors” — the departure is only as extreme as the departure from community as it’s been experienced by most hominid societies for the last several million years. It’s as if Alter denounced a yardstick as prejudiced because it establishes that objects of three feet or more are longer than all those that are not. If this is science, give me mysticism or give me death.

Alter insinuates, without demonstrating, that Mead faked evidence. Even if she did, we know that many illustrious scientists, among them Galileo and Gregor Mendel, faked or fudged reports of their experiments to substantiate conclusions now universally accepted. Mendel, to make matters worse, was a Catholic monk, a “mystic” according to Alter’s demonology, and yet he founded the science of genetics. Alter, far from founding any science, gives no indication of even beginning to understand any of them.

The merits and demerits of Margaret Mead’s ethnography are less than peripheral to Alter’s polemic. It wasn’t Mead who discovered and reported that hunter-gatherers work a lot less than we do. There is something very off about a control freak who insists that ideas he cannot accept or understand are Fascist. I cannot denounce this kind of jerkoff opportunism too strongly. “Fascist” is not, as Alter supposes, an all-purpose epithet synonomous with “me no like.” I once wrote an essay, “Feminism as Fascism,” which occasioned a great deal of indignation, although it has held up only too well. But I didn’t mind that because I’d been careful and specific about identifying the precise parallels between Fascism and so-called (radical) feminism — about half a dozen. That’s half a dozen more analogies between feminism and Fascism than Alter identifies between Fascism and anarcho-leftism or primito-nostagia. The only anarcho-leftists with any demonstrable affinities to Fascism (to which, in Italy, they provided many recruits) are the Syndicalists, a dwindling sect, the last anarchists to share Alter’s retrograde scientism. It’s Alter, not his enemies, who calls for “a guiding, cohesive body of knowledge and experience as a frame of reference” — just one frame of reference, mind you — for “diagrams and manuals,” for marching orders. There happen to be real-life Fascists in this imperfect world of ours. By trivializing the word, Alter (who is far from alone in this), purporting to oppose Fascists, in fact equips them with a cloaking device.

Artists, wails Walter, “don’t believe that technology is a good thing, intrinsically.” I don’t much care what artists believe, especially if Alter is typical of them, but their reported opinion does them credit. I’d have thought it obnosis, ignoring the obvious, to believe in technology “intrinsically,” not as the means to an end or ends it’s marketed as, but as some sort of be-all and end-all of no use to anybody. Art-for-art’s-sake is a debatable credo but at least it furnishes art which for some pleases by its beauty. Technology for its own sake makes no sense at all, no more than Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. If tech-for-tech’s sake isn’t the antithesis of reason, I don’t know reason from squat and I’d rather not.

The communist-anarchist hunter-gatherers (for that is what, to be precise, they are), past and present, are important. Not (necessarily) for their successful habitat-specific adaptations since these are, by definition, not generalizable. But because they demonstrate that life once was, that life can be, radically different. The point is not to recreate that way of life (although there may be some occasions to do that) but to appreciate that, if a life-way so utterly contradictory to ours is feasible, which indeed has a million-year track record, then maybe other life-ways contradictory to ours are feasible.

For a 21^st century schizoid man of wealth and taste, Alter has an awfully retarded vocabulary. He assumes that babytalk babblewords like “good” and “evil” mean something more than “me like” and “me no like,” but if they do mean anything more to him he hasn’t distributed the surplus to the rest of us. He accuses his chosen enemies of “infantilism and anti-parental vengeance,” echoing the authoritarianism of Lenin (”Left-Wing” Communism, An Infantile Disorder) and Freud, respectively. A typical futurist — and the original Futurists did embrace Fascism — he’s about a century behind Heisenberg and Nietzsche and the rest of us. Moralism is retrograde. You want something? Don’t tell me you’re “right” and I’m “wrong,” I don’t care what God or Santa Claus likes, never mind if I’ve been naughty or nice. Just tell me what you want that I have and why I should give it to you. I can’t guarantee we’ll come to terms, but articulation succeeded by negotiation is the only possible way to settle a dispute without coercion. As Proudhon put it, “I want no laws, but I am ready to bargain.”

Alter clings to objective “physical reality” — matter in motion — with the same faith a child clutches his mother’s hand. And faith, for Alter and children of all ages, is always shadowed by fear. Alter is (to quote Clifford Geertz) “afraid reality is going to go away unless we believe very hard in it.” He’ll never experience an Oedipal crisis because he’ll never grow up that much. A wind-up world is the only kind he can understand. He thinks the solar system actually is an orrery. He has no tolerance for ambiguity, relativity, indeterminacy — no tolerance, in fact, for tolerance.

Alter seems to have learned nothing of science except some badly bumbled-up jargon. In denouncing “bad scientific method” and “intuition” in almost the same bad breath, he advertises his ignorance of the pluralism of scientific method. Even so resolute a positivist as Karl Popper distinguished the “context of justification,” which he thought entailed compliance with a rather rigid demonstrative orthodoxy, from the “context of discovery” where, as Paul Feyerabend gleefully observed, “anything goes.” Alter reveals how utterly out of it he is by a casual reference to “true methods of discovery.” There are no true methods of discovery, only useful ones. In principle, reading the Bible or dropping acid is as legitimate a practice in the context of discovery as is keeping up with the technical journals. Whether Archimedes actually gleaned inspiration from hopping in the tub or Newton from watching an apple fall is not important. What’s important is that these — any — triggers to creativity are possible and, if effective, desirable.

Intuition is important, not as an occult authoritative faculty, but as a source of hypotheses in all fields. And also of insights not yet, if ever, formalizable, but nonetheless meaningful and heuristic in the hermeneutic disciplines which rightfully refuse to concede that if they are not susceptible to quantification they are mystical. Many disciplines since admitted to the pantheon of science (such as biology, geology and economics) would have been aborted by this anachronistic dogma. “Consider the source” is what Alter calls “bad scientific method.” We hear much (too much) of the conflict between evolutionism and creationism. It takes only a nodding acquaintance with Western intellectual history to recognize that the theory of evolution is a secularization of the eschatology which distinguishes Christianity from other religious traditions. But having Christianity as its context of discovery is a very unscientific reason to reject evolution. Or, for that matter, to accept it.

Alter is not what he pretends to be, a paladin of reason assailing the irrationalist hordes. The only thing those on his enemies list have in common is that they’re on it. Ayn Rand, whose hysterical espousal of “reason” was Alterism without the pop science jargon, had a list of irrationalists including homosexuals, liberals, Christians, anti-Zionists, Marxists, abstract expressionists, hippies, technophobes, racists, and smokers of pot (but not tobacco). Alter’s list (surely incomplete) includes sado-masochists, New Agers, anthropologists, schizophrenics, anti-authoritarians, Christian Fundamentalists, think tank social engineers, Fascists, proto-Cubists ... Round up the unusual suspects. Alter’s just playing a naming-and-blaming game because he doesn’t get enough tool extensions.

“How many times a day do you really strike forward on important matters intuitively?” Well said — and as good a point as any to give this guy the hook. Riddle me this, Mr. or Ms. Reader: How many times a day do you really strike forward on important matters AT ALL? How many times a day do you “strike forward on important matters” — intuitively, ironically, intellectually, impulsively, impassively, or any damn way? Or do you find as day follows day that day follows day, and that’s about it? That the only “important matters” that affect you, if there even are any, are decided, if they even are, by somebody else? Have you noticed your lack of power to chart your own destiny? That your access to “virtual” reality increases in proportion as you distance yourself (a prudent move) from the real thing? That aside from working and paying, you are of absolutely no use to this society and can’t expect to be kept around after you can’t do either? And finally, does Walter Alter’s technophiliac techno-capitalist caterwauling in any way help you to interpret the future, much less — and much more important — to change it?

Letters against Primitivism by Iain McKay

Green Anarchists celebration of terrorism against the general public

Dear Anarchy,

Reading your interview with John Conner (Anarchy no. 47) I saw that he states that Micah “succeed[ed] in getting a May 1998 LGSC speaking tour through Scotland cancelled.” In the interest of truth, I feel that I should point out that nothing of the kind actually happened. What did happen was that the meeting tour, which was being organised by the Scottish Anarchist Network (SAN), was postponed after Micah brought to our attention certain articles in Green Anarchist (namely the infamous “Irrationalists” article). I must stress this point as Green Anarchist has continually stated that we cancelled it at the order of Micah. Indeed, Green Anarchist went so far as to state that we Anarchists in Glasgow were “sheep,” following Micah’s decrees without question (anyone who knows the Scottish movement will know how far from reality such an assertion actually is). Ironically, the only people who did follow Micah was Green Anarchist themselves who took Micah’s wish as a SAN decision!

So why did we decide to postpone the meeting tour? Simply so we could discuss the issues Micah raised. Micah desired to have the tour cancelled, other comrades were not so sure. Unfortunately, the issue became mote as the tour was effectively cancelled by Green Anarchists assumption we were all sheep following Micah’s orders. One thing which we all did agree on was that the article in question, with its celebration of terrorism against the general public, had nothing to do with anarchism (and, indeed, humanity). Stating that murdering innocent people was the “right idea” suggests a deeply authoritarian position and one in direct opposition of the goals of anarchism — namely individual and working class self-liberation. Such a position, I would also argue, reflects the politics of Unabomber and, therefore, not anarchist. I quote from the manifesto Industrial Society and Its Future:

194. Probably the revolutionaries should even avoid assuming political power, whether by legal or illegal means, until the industrial system is stressed to the danger point and has proved itself to be a failure in the eyes of most people... the revolutionaries should not try to acquire political power until the system has gotten itself into such a mess that any hardships will be seen as resulting from the failures of the industrial system itself and not from the policies of the revolutionaries. The revolution against technology will probably have to be a revolution by outsiders, a revolution from below and not from above.

In other words, the aims of “revolutionaries” is to “acquire political power.” This is may be revolutionary, but it is not anarchism. Anarchism, by definition, is against the acquiring of political power — it is for its destruction. Clearly this places the Unabomber outside the anarchist tradition and the anarchist movement, unless of course anarchism now includes those who seek political power (which makes the Trotskyites anarchists as they seek a “revolution from below” in which they assume political power). Perhaps this explains the earlier comment that:

193. The kind of revolution we have in mind will not necessarily involve an armed uprising against any government. It may or may not involve physical violence, but it will not be a political revolution. Its focus will be on technology and economics, not politics.

After all, if the Unabomber does seek “political power” then a revolution which had involved an uprising against “any” government could put the new government in a dangerous position. Having done it against the old bosses, they may just do it against the new ones. So it looks like Freedom (who insisted that Unabomber was not an anarchist) were right and Conner’s attempts to dismiss their claims misguided

Like all vanguardists, Unabomber downplays the importance of working class self-liberation. He states that:

189. Prior to that final struggle, the revolutionaries should not expect to have a majority of people on their side. History is made by active, determined minorities, not by the majority, which seldom has a clear and consistent idea of what it really wants. Until the time comes for the final push toward revolution, the task of revolutionaries will be less to win the shallow support of the majority than to build a small core of deeply committed people. As for the majority, it will be enough to make them aware of the existence of the new ideology and remind them of it frequently; though of course it will be desirable to get majority support to the extent that this can be done without weakening the core of seriously committed people.

Yes, the minorities with a “new ideology” who will lead the majority (after gaining their “support”, perhaps) to the new land... Well, I have heard that before and not from the mouths of anarchists. Yes, anarchists are (or at least should be) an “active, determined minority” but we are such in order to increase the influence of anarchist ideas and so produce a social movement which aims to transform society into something better. Rather than get the “support” of others, we desire them to act for themselves, think for themselves and create their own future, for that is the only way an anarchist society can be created. We do not have a “new ideology” seeking to “acquire political power.” These comments by Unabomber indicate how far from anarchism he actually is. Rather than a popular movement against the state, his vision is of a vanguard seizing power even if they do not have the “support” of the majority of people. Democratic government at best, dictatorship at worse.

Given this dismissal of working class self-activity, it is not surprising that Unabomber argues that “revolutionaries” should “promote social stress and instability in industrial society.” After all, with the majority ignored until the “final push” (when they can help the new bosses “acquire political power” perhaps?) there is no real way to revolution. This, in turn, explains Green Anarchist’s support for terrorism — such acts do promote “social stress and instability” and so the revolution is promoted against the wishes the majority, who, let us not forget, “unthinking.” Rather than an act of social revolt, the “revolution” will be the act of minorities who force the rest of society to be free (whether they subscribe to Unabomber’s ideas of a free society or not). The parallels to Leninism are clear, with the “instability in industrial society” replacing the inevitable collapse of capitalism as the catalyst to the new society. Rather than being a subjective revolt for a free society, the Unabomber revolution is a reaction to objective events which force people to his utopia whether they want to go or not. And, therefore, Green Anarchist’s support for terrorist acts — they may claim to be anarchists, but their politics drive them towards authoritarianism and vanguardism. After all, someone who claims that they would prefer “mass starvation” to “mass government” (i.e. existing society) hardly counts as a libertarian, if by libertarian we think of someone who supports liberty rather than an ideology (these words were said by a member of Green Anarchist at a London Anarchist Forum meeting last year). That someone who claims to be an anarchist could say should a thing is a disgrace — if liberty means millions starving to death, then is it surprising most people prefer government?

One last point. To state that “political anarchy has never existed outside of primitive societies” (as the interviewer of John Conner states) raises an interesting point. If primitive societies are the only viable form of anarchy (something that anarcho-primitives assert) then why are we living in a state-ridden, industrial capitalist system? If primitive societies are inherently anarchic, then how did archy develop in the first place? And what is there to stop the future primitive societies aimed at by anarcho-primitives going the same way?

Hopefully this letter will not be answered by the usual Green Anarchist tirade of insults they direct against people who disagree with them. Indeed, like Lenin they take a positive delight in insulting those who dare to question their politics. Perhaps by so doing they ensure that their politics are not looked into critically? After all, any one who does must be a “workerist” or “anarcho-leftist” or “anarcho-liberal” — and if not celebrating the murder of children by bombs as the “right idea” makes you an “anarcho-leftist”, then I would sooner be an “anarcho-leftist” than a cheer-leader for terrorists.

Keep up the good work with Anarchy. I always enjoy reading it.

yours in solidarity

Iain

Bob Black and the primitivists

Dear Anarchy

I must admit to being perplexed where to start as both John Connor and Bob Black make so many points and claims. I will start with Black. Rest assured, Mr. Connor, I’ll be back for you!

Black states that “an event which is ‘postponed’ and not rescheduled is cancelled.” As I said, the only people who thought it was cancelled was GA and so the point became moot. It is hard to organise a tour when one half thinks it has been cancelled and the other is horrified by the first’s celebration of terrorism. The wave of insults and smears from GA made communication pointless. Black argues that “The Irrationalists” article “didn’t celebrate the terrorism of despair.” It stated that the Aum cult and the Oklahoma bombers had “the right idea” — in other words, it explicitly agreed with that terrorism. Perhaps the “intellectual infirmity” Black insults “anarcho-leftists” with is actually a case of the pot calling the kettle black?

Black calls me a “censorist leftist” and that I cannot “understand a text may be significant to anarchists” even if it is not written by an anarchist. “That’s where critique comes in” he enlightens us. Obviously Black has a different dictionary than myself, otherwise he would be aware that I presented a critique of the claim that the Unabomber is an anarchist plus a critique of his politics and theory of “revolution.” And how, exactly, am I “censorist leftist”? I am not a “leftist” but an anarchist. Moreover, did I state that the text should be banned? Or that anarchists should not read it? No, I did not. Indeed, I read it myself, found its politics somewhat authoritarian and saw their relevance to the politics of GA (which are not anarchist, if you ask me). Indeed, I quoted relevant parts of the text to justify my claims! Hardly a case of “censorship.” Black’s passion for insults gets the better of his intellect.

He asserts that stating someone had the “right idea” is actually a “dramatic metaphor.” Bollocks. It is nothing of the kind. Here is the quote in question:

“The Oklahoma bombers had the right idea. The pity was that they did not blast any more government offices. Even so, they did all they could and now there are at least 200 government automatons that are no longer capable of oppression.

“The Tokyo sarin cult had the right idea. The pity was that in testing the gas a year prior to the attack, they gave themselves away. They were not secretive enough. They had the technology to produce the gas but the method of delivery was ineffective. One day the groups will be totally secretive and their methods of fumigation will be completely effective.”

It is clearly stating that the Oklahoma bombing and the attempted massacre of Japanese commuters were correct. This is not “metaphor,” it is agreement. To argue otherwise is complete and utter nonsense.

Black seems to state that he thinks that the article is “idiotic.” Why? If it is simply a “dramatic metaphor” then why is it “idiotic”? Perhaps because it was clearly nothing of the kind? What is idiotic is to print such an honest account of your politics and expect no one to comment on them and express the obvious conclusion that they are not anarchist. In that sense Black is correct. Hence the difference between Fifth Estate’s printing of a silly article and GA’s printing of the “Irrationalists.” One was idiotic, the other stated that it was the “right idea” to try and gas commuters and actually blow up people. If Black cannot see the difference, he is truly lost to humanity. If he truly thinks my (and others) repulsion towards “The Irrationalists” article is simply because it “offends” people then I feel sorry for him.

Ironically, he (correctly) lambastes Chomsky and Bookchin for affirming “political power” and yet states that the Unabomber is “inconsistent” as regards anarchism. This is in spite of his manifesto clearly stating that “the revolutionaries” will “acquire political power” That is not “inconsistent,” it is a clear support for political power and for “revolutionaries” to take hold of it. Black’s hypocrisy is clear. He seems to have a problem understanding English (when it suits him). Support for terrorism becomes a “metaphor,” support for acquiring “political power” becomes “inconsistent” anarchism. He states that GA are “obviously” anarchist. When it comes to certain tendencies we can see that Black’s justly famous critical faculties are switched off and so there is cause to question what Black considers “obvious.”

Black states that my “parting shot” hits me right in the foot. Actually, it was serious question that I wanted answered. Black obviously judges me by his own standards. Of his replies, I would agree with number three — there is no guarantee that any form of anarchism will not degenerate into statism. We cannot predict the future and while I think anarchism will work I may be disappointed. Point One, however, begs the question. Why did the original primitive societies not see and counteract the degeneration into statism? They were surely as intelligent as the “future primitivists” will be. If they did not see the rise of statism, why should we expect the future primitivists to see it? Could not the very nature of primitive society contain the seeds of its own destruction?

Black ends by comparing me to a cloned sheep. How amusing. Do I wish to keep anarchism “respectable”? No, I wish to keep it revolutionary and anarchist in nature. Hence my critique of the Unabomber and GA. Shame that Black prefers to slander than to think. I do wish to “learn of” and “think through the anarchist implications of primitivism.” Hence my reading of the Unabomber’s manifesto, Watson’s Beyond Bookchin, and other works. It also informed my question which Black so clearly fails to answer. Why am I a sheep in Black’s eyes? Perhaps because I do not agree with him or GA and instead ask some questions about their ideas and politics? Surely not!

Now I turn to John Connor’s letter. As pseudonyms go, I cannot help thinking that Tom O’Connor would be better as O’Connor’s jokes were as bad as Connor’s politics. I will ignore the usual silly claims that anarchists in Scotland are sheep, following our (GA appointed) shepherd. It seems clear that if you unquestioningly agree with GA then you are a freethinking, non-ideological bound revolutionary. If you question their politics or activities you are a sheep. Instead, I will concentrate on the new silly claims Connor voices.

He starts by stating I think GA are “Leninists.” Nope, read the original letter. I stated there were “parallels” between GA’s politics and Leninism. He states I think GA are FC’s “active, determined minority.” Nope, read the original letter. I made no such claim. I stated that FC’s ideas explains GA’s support for terrorist acts and that anarchists (a grouping I would exclude GA from) should be an “active, determined minority” but, obviously, not FC’s one. Unfortunately, the rest of Connor’s letter gets no better than its beginning. Nothing like starting a letter with obvious falsehoods to set the tone.

GA claim that “leafleting claimants about welfare reform” is “ritualistic political practice” and “is far more patronising, manipulative and futile” than GA’s work. Yes, informing people of what the state plans to inflict on them and urging them to resist and act for themselves must be “patronising, manipulative and futile” as GA disagrees with it. Fortunately, everyone else will see that it is, in fact, the opposite. It is treating people as intelligent individuals who can be convinced of certain things by presenting them with facts and arguments.

Connor states that I am “terrified, saying the resistance has to be approved by the ‘majority’” and adds the slander that by “the majority” it is meant myself and “other SAN types.” How false, banal and stupid. Firstly, where in my letter do I state that? Perhaps the little fact I made no such claim indicates why no supporting quotes are forthcoming? But, then again, Connor obviously knows I am an “anarcho-leftist” and so no evidence is required. Secondly, the twisted politics of GA are exposed by Connor’s lies. I was arguing against the mass terrorism of the kind celebrated in “The Irrationalists” article (such as associated with the Oklahoma bombers and the Aum cult, both of which, let us not forget, had “the right idea” according to GA). Connor considers such actions as examples of “unmediated resistance” conducted “under conditions of extreme repression.” He states that “The Irrationalists” article was a “discussion about dismantling” “Leviathanic structures.” Two points. Firstly, it is clear that for GA you can only take part in this “discussion” if you agree with GA and think the Aum cult and Oklahoma Bombers had the “right idea.” Otherwise you are slandered as a “leftist”, “workerist” or whatever. Secondly, it is perfectly clear that Connor considers that these examples of “unmediated resistance” as relevant to the process of creating a new society. He states that I “libel” these acts as “terrorism against the general public” rather than seeing them, as Connor does, as the “activity” of “particular oppressed people in their own immediate situations.” Let us not forget what the “activity” in question was, namely the blowing up of a government office and the attempted gassing of commuters. The insanity of Connor’s comments (and politics) is clear. It is obvious from his comments that nothing has changed in the last two years. GA is still celebrating such acts. I await GA’s defence of pogroms against Jews and an “un-terrified” account of the importance of the fascist nail-bomb attacks in London last year.

Apparently I have a “concern” for “legitimacy and representation” and that, therefore, I support “concentrating/transferring power rather than destroying it” and so I “fall” into the “typically Leftist role as ‘revolutionary policeman’ and retardant”! Where in my letter are such concerns voiced? Indeed, I explicitly called for the destruction of political power (“Anarchism, by definition, is against the acquiring of political power — it is for its destruction”) and indicate that it is the Unabomber who aims to acquire political power. Conner obviously has total contempt for the intelligence of Anarchy’s readership to misrepresent my letter so.

Apparently I repeat Black Flag’s “libel that GA ‘prefer “mass starvation” to “mass society”’ (what I actually wrote was “they would prefer ‘mass starvation’ to ‘mass government’ (i.e. existing society)”). Indeed, they present a lovely paranoid tale of how this “libel” came about. To set the matter straight, I did not “repeat” the Black Flag claim. I, in fact, stated what I heard, with my own ears, at the meeting in question. I can only offer as “proof” the room full of people who also heard this statement. Just to aid the memory of the GA member, I was the one with the Scottish accent. Perhaps a few more details will jog the memory? He will recall, I am sure, his mobile phone going off halfway through the meeting. And remember, perhaps, Donald Rooum’s question concerning the dangers of epidemics in a primitivist society? Or the wonderful answer in which the GA member informed us we need not worry about such occurrences as the groups would be so small and so widespread that disease would just wipe-out one group and not spread wide enough to be classed as an epidemic? Needless to say, our GA member did not bother to indicate how we go from our current population of six billion to these Hunter and Gatherer levels. Perhaps the excess population just “disappears” in a puff of (suitably enhanced) smoke? Or, perhaps, this is where the mass starvation comes in? I hope Connor answers these questions clearly, as it is his chance to set the record straight. Can six billion people survive in a primitivist world? If not, how is the appropriate population level reached?

So we discover GA yet again rewriting history. And they have the cheek to state I“play fast and loose with the truth”! Incredible!

As far as Connor’s assertion that “mass society” causes “mass starvation,” well, what can I say? Research suggests otherwise. The work of economist Amartya Sen indicates that class society and its property distributions and entitlements that create mass starvation. According to his work, famine occurs in spite of food being available. Indeed, food is usually exported out of the famine zone in order to make profits. Rather than “mass society” causing it, it is rather specific forms of society, class societies, with specific property relations, distributions and entitlements. If, for example, workers owned and controlled the land and the means of production they used, then famines would not occur. Without private property, people would be able to produce to meet their needs. Which, by the way, indicates well how GA’s ever-so-radical “primitivist” politics obscures the real causes of starvation in modern society. It has nothing to do with “mass society” and a lot more to do with capitalists, the distribution of land and power and the economic system we live under. But such an analysis of the real causes of starvation is obscured by vague comments about “mass societies” having to be hierarchical. The capitalist class can rest easy — famines are not their fault, they are simply the inevitable result of “mass society.”

Connor fails to answer any of my points and questions. Indeed, in answer to my question on the inherent anarchist nature of primitive society he mutters that its is a “boring” question, and “answered many times.” He could at least point me to the relevant articles or books or, indeed, provide me with a summary of the answer, and so on. No, that would get in the way of the main purpose of his article, to insult and slander those who dare to disagree with his politics and point out their authoritarian core. So much for wanting to “clarify issues.”

Connor ends his letter with some truly amazing paranoid speculation. He wonders if I am “really” Ian Heavens (indeed, he seems convinced of it). This has caused my friends and comrades no end of amusement. Well, I am myself and none other. How can I prove it? As well as comrades in Scotland, you could ask Freddie Baer, Chuck Munson (who should be familiar to Anarchy readers) and the numerous comrades on the anarchy and organise e-mail lists. Or, then again, ask Jason McQuinn who met me in Glasgow about 5 years ago when he was staying with a member of the Here and Now and Counter Information collectives. He will hopefully remember me (I remember asking about the “anarcho”-capitalists who I had recently come across on-line). If he does remember, he will confirm that I am from Glasgow and not, in fact, from England as Ian Heavens is. I hope he states so in Anarchy as it would be nice to stamp this particular paranoid delusion out before it fully joins the others in Connor’s mind. Or, then again, ask the GA member who attended the London Anarchist Forum meeting on Murray Bookchin (but, given how hazy his memory is of that event, he may not remember who was there any more than what he said).

It is interesting that GA use the Sunday Times article about Ian Heavens. This article was slander, pure and simple. A piece of hack-work by a journalist Larry O’Hara stated had links with MI5 in his book Turning up the Heat: MI5 after that cold war. From this article they state Spunk Press “happily advertised bomb manuals.” In reality, that claim was a clever piece of misinformation presented by the journalists. The article in fact pointed to a specific Spunk Press file. This file contained links anarchists would find of interest. These links included news-groups such as alt.society.anarchy and so on. These groups are totally open and anyone can post to them. The “bomb manuals” and other information the journalists were referring to appeared on these mailing groups, not Spunk Press. The way the journalists had written their smear article was extremely clever. It did not, in fact, tell a lie but it was so “economical with the truth” that anyone without a basic understanding of the internet would be led to believe that Spunk Press stored “bomb manuals.” As intended. A half-truth became a total lie and one Connor swallowed.

This hack-work, intended to present an anarchist terror at the heart of the Internet, almost cost Ian Heavens his job (yes, like most of us, he is a wage slave). As it was, he had to drop out of Spunk Press and anarchist activism on the Internet to keep it (which was a great loss). If Connor knew anything about what actually happened with Ian Heavens rather than repeating the smears of the Sunday Times article, then they would know that Spunk Press does not “urge” terrorism of any form. I’m quite glad Connor has brought up the Sunday Times article. It shows how firm his grasp of the facts really is and how low he will swoop to slander those “sheep” who dare to question GA’s politics and activities. It also shows that he quite happily repeats the smears of spook-friendly journalists when it suits him. I thank him.

So, as requested by Connor, I have indicated why ACE and SAN “don’t disassociate themselves” from Spunk Press and those Connor thinks are its members. The answer is clear from my comments above — there is nothing to “disassociate” from. We, unlike Connor, do not take Sunday Times hack (and spook friendly) journalism at face value. We do not have to disassociate ourselves because the Sunday Times article (and Connar’s sheep-like repeating of it) is not true.

Perhaps Connor will come back and argue he knew all along the truth of that article and decided to lie in his letter to present an analogy with the treatment of GA. This is possible, if highly unlikely and highly dishonest. Sadly, the analogy falls as GA did publish “The Irrationalists” article while Ian Heavens and Spunk Press were set-up and smeared by the Sunday Times.

Apparently I “presumably” mean that by “Leninist” “an elitist ideologue ‘gang’ in the Camattian sense.” Strangely enough, I meant by “Leninism” (I do not even use the word “Leninist” in my letter) the ideas of Lenin and Bolshevism. Funny that, but then again Connor consistently asserts I mean something totally different from what I actually wrote. I also have no idea what “Camattian” means and so cannot mean it in that sense, assuming I did use the word, which I did not. However, this is all irrelevant as I did not say that GA were “Leninist.” I stated that the Unabombers politics had parallels with Leninism (“The parallels to Leninism are clear, with the “instability in industrial society” replacing the inevitable collapse of capitalism as the catalyst to the new society”). It is this parallel, looking to an objective rather than a subjective catalyst for revolution, that helps explain GA’s support for terrorist acts. As is clear from my letter, which Connor clearly misrepresents.

According to Connor I am a “hysterical” “Neoist-tainted workerist.” Also nice to know. It is also nice to see that Connor (and Black) dashed the hopes I expressed in my first letter. I had hoped that my letter would “not be answered by the usual Green Anarchist tirade of insults they direct against people who disagree with them. Indeed, like Lenin they take a positive delight in insulting those who dare to question their politics. Perhaps by so doing they ensure that their politics are not looked into critically?” My hopes proved to be utopian. The level of Connor’s response is no improvement. Indeed, he has included Black Flag into the diatribes and insults — perhaps the better to hide the politics of the debate beneath another layer of smears. Given that the Black Flag collective is claimed to be “Neoist-tainted workerists,” I have to assume that GA think everyone who disagrees with them are “Neoist” or “tainted” with it. Nice to know. Useful, though, to group all criticism under one banner, regardless of the facts. It muddies the water even more, as intended I am sure.

At least Connor’s letter proves that GA’s basic politics have remained unchanged since “The Irrationalists” article. Black’s comment that GA are not “celebrat[ing] the terrorism of despair” is refuted by Connor. They obviously do. Indeed, they consider such acts as praise-worthy, “the right idea,” part of the revolutionary process like strikes, occupations, and so on, indeed they are part of the same revolution in Connor’s eyes. He states they are to be included with other acts of “liberation” which will “give the rest of us the opportunity to live autonomous, authentic lives too” (“the rest”, presumably, still alive after such “unmediated” actions). How can dead commuters, office workers and children “live autonomous, authentic lives”? Indeed, to call these acts what they actually are (acts of mass murder and terrorism) is to “libel” them. In Connor’s eyes they are part of the “resistance.” He confirms the critique in my last letter. I thank him again.

He states that SAN acted to “anathematise and stifle the free speech of anti-fascists and anti-Statists.” How did we “stifle” and “anathematise” their free speech? Did at any stage we ban or censor their words? No, GA, then and now, still publish their paper, write their letters and so on. So how could SAN “stifle” them? Only by not organising the speaking tour. In that case SAN also “anathematise and stifle,” the IWW, the IWA, Anarchy, Freedom, Black Flag, and so on as we have not organised speaking tours for them either. Connor’s definition of stifle seems strange. You apparently “stifle” free speech if you do not actively help someone spread their message! And do not forget that is why SAN postponed the speaking tour. We were not “manipulated by fascists and spooks.” We rather read an article they published which celebrated mass murder as “the right idea.” Connor’s paranoid rants try to hide this fact under a deep layer of smears and insults but that remains the truth. Read that article, read how mass murder is “the right idea” (opps, being “hysterical” again!) and then wonder if our reaction was, rather, a human and libertarian response to it.

I have to say, in ending, that I am glad I wrote my letter. Connor’s reply just exposes the nature of GA’s politics as well as their abusive and lying “debating” techniques. Rather than distancing himself from “The Irrationalists” article, Connor embraces it and still claims the terrorist acts of the likes of the Japanese Cultists and US fascists are examples of “unmediated resistance.” Looks like they still have the “right idea.” Nice to know. Rather than an “idiotic” article, as Black implies, it in fact represents the core of their politics. And that core is not anarchist, as I argued in my original letter.

I wish Anarchy all the best for the future!

yours in solidarity,

Iain

Bob Black, the Aum Cult and the Oklahoma Bomber

(letter to Anarchy)

Dear Anarchy

While I have much more important things to do, I will take the time to answer Bob Black’s and Steve Booth’s letters in Anarchy no. 51. I’m sure that no matter what I write, I will never convince either that their invented assumptions of myself or my politics are wrong. Still, the readers of Anarchy may find my comments of interest.

Bob Black claims that mass murder is “a tactic, not an idea.” Interesting. So people who have tactics do not think about them? A tactic is an idea until such time as they do it, then it becomes an action. Clearly, Black is talking nonsense. He states he is “unable to imagine any ideas they [the Aum Cult and the Oklahoma bombers] might hold in common,” which suggests a lack of imagination which is amazing. Perhaps the “idea” would be the tactics they were using? The ones praised in the “Irrationalists” article? No, surely not? Black is abusing the English language and the intelligence of the reader.

Bob argues that it would have been the “anarchist way of dealing with problems” to go ahead with the speaking tour and discuss face to face with GA the issues. Strange, then, that it was GA, not us, who decided to take our decision to postpone the tour as a cancellation and then attack us in their paper as “sheep,” following our (GA appointed) leaders. And Black talks about “the shabby way [I] and my ilk treated the would be Green Anarchist visitors”! Yes, indeed, poor GA, having other anarchists hold them accountable for their politics! I wasn’t aware that the anarchist way of dealing with problems was to simply switch off ones brain and not question the validity of decisions previously reached when new information appears.

I remember the meeting when the issue was first raised on whether to cancel the meeting or not and the decision to postpone it until such time as we could fully discuss the “Irrationalists” articles, the issues it raised and decide whether or not to continue with the tour. Next thing I see is GA writing in their paper that we had cancelled the meeting and that the Scottish Anarchists are all sheep (is that the anarchist way of dealing with problems?). Funny how a desire to think about GA’s politics and our response to them rather than mindlessly do what GA wanted equates with being sheep. But as I said in my previous letter, any independence of mind by other anarchists quickly results in them being labelled as “sheep” by GA and their supporters like Black.

It also seems strange that Black thinks that my letter was just a “painfully long defence” of what happened in Scotland so many years ago. Rather, as the reader would soon see, the bulk of the letter was made up of a discussion of GA’s politics and a reply to the distortions of “John Connor” on my politics and who I was, distortions which I notice Black considers as not worthy of comment. Does he have so little respect for his readers that he feels he can rewrite history so? Sad, really, but I do get the impression that discussing their politics is the last thing Black or GA desire. Rather, we must take their word as to the “consistent” and “committed” nature of GA’s politics. Sorry, I gave up religion decades ago and I analyse what people say rather than accept it on faith.

It is interesting how Black portrays GA always as victims. Not only that, even when they advocate mass murder as the right idea, they are “more consistent and committed British anarchists” than people whose activities and politics Black probably knows nothing about. Sad, really, that Black has decided to show his ignorance of the Scottish anarchist movement.

Black’s comment that mass murder was a “tactic” used by revolutionary anarchism during the Spanish Revolution suggests a desire to confuse the issue being discussed. Like GA defences of the “Irrationalists” article which equated the Aum cult and the Oklahoma Bombers with “Propaganda by Deed” anarchists, Black’s pathetic analogy does damage not only to argument but also to the intelligence of the reader. If Emile Henry argued that “there are no innocent bourgeoisie”, then Black and GA are arguing that there are no innocent people and so exploiter and exploited, oppressor and oppressed, are of equal worth as regards acts of “resistance.” Apparently, there is no difference between the killing of fascists and pro-fascists by the militia columns immediately after a military coup and the planned gassing of commuters and the blowing up of office workers and children. Sad, really, that one of the best minds in the US anarchist movement comes up with such rubbish. Obviously the Durruti column would have had the “right idea” if they had just shot everyone who crossed their path.

I find it funny that Black thinks we have “ex-communicated” GA from the anarchist movement. Sorry, no, GA managed to do that very successfully by themselves. And, of course, GA never, ever “excommunicate” anyone (and neither does Black, he just calls them “anarcho-leftists” regardless of the facts). All this talk of “leftism” is definitely not an attempt to use guilt by association to marginalise other anarchists. No, of course not. But then again, it is easier to call someone a name than actually address their arguments — as authoritarians and authorities throughout history have known.

Black argues that “they had the right idea” was “a very poor choice of words on Steve’s part.” Looking at Steve’s letter, published in the same issue of Anarchy, its clear that they were no such thing. It must annoy Black that he claims one thing, and then a GA member blows his argument out the water in the very same letters page. First it was “Tom O’Connor,” now it is Booth.

Booth states that I express “knee-jerk pacifist disagreement.” How he knows this, I’m not sure. I discussed whether mass murder of workers was “the right idea” or not and, of course, whether it is consistent with libertarian politics. No mention of the merits of non-violence as the only means of social change, but why let facts get in the way of a good rant?

He claims that the “Irrationalists” article was about “the possibility of armed struggle and armed resistance to totalitarianism.” He states that the article aimed at discussing the “shape of possible anarchist armed struggle in the future, and how such actions resemble” violent events “in the present.” Clearly, then, as the Aum Cult and the Oklahoma Bomber had the “right idea” then “anarchist” struggle “in the future” could follow this model. His attempts afterwards to distance himself from his original article fail as Booth, like Tom O’Connor before him, clearly thinks gassing commuters as a valid form of “resistance” (“resistance” to what, exactly? Working people? Are they the enemy?) and can be applied for libertarian ends (which makes you wonder how “libertarian” those ends could be, given the means).

He says that he wishes to provide an effective alternative for the “protest movements” which will make the “Irrationalists” irrelevant. Sorry, no, that does not work either as it still implies that actions like those of the Aum Cult and the Oklahoma Bomber can be considered part of the “resistance” movement. They are not — they are part of the problem and they share the same authoritarian basis as any state’s bombing campaign against civilians.

We can get an insight to Booth’s ideas from another of his articles (as posted on the internet at: www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/irrationalists.htm). There he argues that “there are ideas and motives behind an action, and there are methods. These two things are separate. Do we blame tools for the use to which they are put?” He stresses: “I say only a fool refuses to learn lessons about effectiveness from their worst enemies.” Needless to say, certain methods imply certain ideas and ends. The Bolshevik creation of a political police force (the Cheka) was very effective in ensuring the “success” of the Russian Revolution. It reflected Bolshevik ideas on the need for centralised power and party rule. It was very effective in ensuring the defence of Bolshevik power. Shame that it helped kill the revolution. Now, could there be an anarchist Cheka? Can this “tool” be effective for anything other than what it was designed for? Of course not.

Similarly for those whom Booth thought had the “right idea.” The ideas (“tactics,” “methods,” “tools”) in question were selected because they reflected the politics of the people who used it. They are not tools of liberation. That the actions were carried out by right wing authoritarians should come as no surprise as they reflected the anti-revolutionary nature of their creators. Moreover, they would remain so no matter the professed politics of the perpetrators (just as one-man management did not change its nature when it was inflicted on the Russian workers by the Bolsheviks rather than by the capitalists). But that should be obvious. Sadly, it is not for GA, which confirms my analysis of GA’s politics as fundamentally authoritarian. Such actions cannot in any way be part of any possible revolutionary strategy. To argue that they could be shows not only a lack of revolutionary and libertarian politics, but also a lack of common humanity.

Ironically, if we accept Booth’s analysis at face value, we would have to admit that the tools used by the “Irrationalists,” unlike every other, were simply neutral and could be used for liberation rather than oppression! Will GA start arguing that techniques, like tactics, are socially neutral? That tools do not reflect the ideas and interests of those who create and apply them nor shape those subject to them? That would be amusing...

Booth states that I “think anarchists who use armed struggle are not anarchists” and I am a “dogmatic pacifist.” Strange, but considering that I did not discuss the question of violence nor armed struggle by anarchists, I would say that Booth’s comments that I am “merely calling on AJODA readers to share [my] dogma” is really a case of the pot calling the kettle black! How can I all upon AJODA readers to share a “dogma” (namely “pacifism”) which I do not, in fact, hold? Like Tom O’Connor’s sad remarks in his letter as regards my politics, Booth’s comments indicate how little GA are interested in little things like facts and evidence when they discuss other people and their ideas.

Also of interest is Booth’s assertions that I use a “common technique” of “Neoists and Neoists fellow travellers” and am grouped together with “Micah/Tompsett etc.” As I said in my last letter, the lumping together of all critics into one camp is a useful way of muddying the waters and so obscuring the real issues of the debate. And has Booth “answered” the concerns raised by his original article? Clearly not, as he can still think of these actions as being compatible with libertarian “resistance.”

I also love the “this Iain character” comment, very funny! How dare other anarchists question him! Sorry, I had better name myself after a fictional character from a movie before I can discuss politics with (sorry, get labelled by) GA...

All in all, I’m not surprised by any of this. The ability of GA members to avoid the issues and instead invent the politics (and associations) of those who dare question their politics was proven by Tom O’Connor’s rants two issues ago. Can I expect another diatribe about what I do not think next issue? Perhaps rather than make up the ideas I hold, they could actually address the issues concerning their politics I raise? But that would be too much like hard work, far better to smear than think.

yours in solidarity

Iain McKay
Glasgow

Support for Ted K

The Unabombings: Communique #1

#39 Autumn 1995

This is a message from the terrorist group FC.

We blew up Thomas Mosser last December because he was a Burston-Marsteller executive. Among other misdeeds, Burston-Marsteller [sic.] helped Exxon clean up its public image after the Exxon Valdes incident. But we attacked Burston-Marsteller less for its specific misdeed than on general principles. Burston-Marsteller is about the biggest organization in the public relations field. This means that its business is the development of techniques for manipulating people’s attitudes. It was for this more than for its actions in specific cases that we sent a bomb to an executive of this company.

Some news reports have made the misleading statement that we have been attacking universities or scholars. We have nothing against universities or scholars as such. All the university people whom we have attacked have been specialists in technical fields. (We consider certain areas of applied psychology, such as behavior modification, to be technical fields.) We would not want anyone to think that we have any desire to hurt professors who study archaeology, history, literature or harmless stuff like that. The people we are out to get are the scientists and engineers, especially in critical fields like computers and genetics. As for the bomb planted in the [crossed out] Business School at the U. of Utah, that was a botched operation. We won’t say how or why it was botched because we don’t want to give the FBI any clues. No one was hurt by that bomb.

In our previous letter to you we called ourselves anarchists. Since “anarchist” is a vague word that has been applied to a variety of attitudes, further explanation is needed. We call ourselves anarchists because we would like, ideally, to break down all society into very small, completely autonomous units. Regrettably, we don’t see any clear road to this goal, so we leave it to the indefinite future. Our more immediate goal, which we think may be attainable at some time during the next several decades, is the destruction of the worldwide industrial system. Through our bombings we hope to promote social instability in industrial society, propagate anti-industrial ideas and give encouragement to those who hate the industrial system.

The FBI has tried to portray these bombings as the work of an isolated nut. We won’t waste our time arguing about whether we are nuts, but we certainly are not isolated. For security reasons we won’t reveal the number of members of our group, but anyone who will read the anarchist and radical environmentalist journals will see that opposition to the industrial-technological system is widespread and growing.

Why do we announce our [crossed out] goals only now, through we made our first bomb some seventeen years ago? Our early bombs were too ineffectual to attract much public attention or give encouragement to those who hate the system. We found by experience that gunpowder bombs, if small enough to be carried inconspicuously, were too feeble to do much damage, so we took a couple of years off to do some experimenting. We learned how to make pipe bombs that were powerful enough, and we used these in a couple of successful bombings as well as in some unsuccessful ones. Unfortunately we discovered that these bombs would not detonate consistently when made with three-quarter inch steel water pipe. They did seem to detonate consistently when made with massively reinforced one inch steel water pipe, but a bomb of this type made a long, heavy package, too conspicuous and suspicious looking for our liking.

So we went back to work, and after a long period of experimentation we developed a type of bomb that does not require a pipe, but is set off by a detonating cap that consists of chlorate explosive packed into a piece of small diameter copper tubing. (The detonating cap is a miniature pipe bomb.) We used bombs of this type to blow up the genetic engineer Charles Epstein and the computer specialist David Gelernter. We did use a chlorate pipe bomb to blow up Thomas Mosser because we happened to have a piece of light-weight aluminum pipe that was just right for the job. The Gelernter and Epstein bombings were not fatal, but the Mosser bombing was fatal even though a smaller amount of explosive was used. We think this was because the type of fragmentation material that we used in the Mosser bombing is more effective [crossed out] than what we’ve used previously.

Since we no longer have to confine the explosive in a pipe, we are now free of limitations on the size and shape of our bombs. We are pretty sure we know how to increase the power of our explosives and reduce the number of batteries needed to set them off. And, as we’ve just indicated, we think we now have more effective fragmentation material. So we expect to be able to pack deadly bombs into ever smaller, lighter and more harmless looking packages. On the other hand, we believe we will be able to make bombs much bigger than any we’ve made before. With a briefcase-full or a suitcase-full of explosives we should be able to blow out the walls of substantial buildings.

Clearly we are in a position to do a great deal of damage. And it doesn’t appear that the FBI is going to catch us any time soon. The FBI is a joke.

The people who are pushing all this growth and progress garbage deserve to be severely punished. But our goal is less to punish them than to propagate ideas. Anyhow we are getting tired of making bombs. It’s no fun having to spend all your evenings and weekends preparing dangerous mixtures, filing trigger mechanisms out of scraps of metal or searching the sierras for a place isolated enough to test a bomb. So we offer a bargain.

We have a long article, between 29,000 and 37,000 words, that we want to have published. If you can get it published according to our requirements we will permanently desist from terrorist activities. It must be published in the New York Times, Time or Newsweek, or in some other widely read, nationally distributed periodical. Because of its length we suppose it will have to be serialized. Alternatively, it can be published as a small book, but the book must be well publicized and made available at a moderate price in bookstores nationwide and in at least some places abroad. Whoever agrees to publish the material will have exclusive rights to reproduce it for a period of six months and will be welcome to any profits they may make from it. After six months from the first appearance of the article or book it must become public property, so that anyone can reproduce or publish it. (If material is serialized, first instalment becomes public property six months after appearance of first instalment, second instalment, etc.) We must have the right to publish in the New York Times, Time or Newsweek, each year for three years after the appearance of our article or book, three thousand words expanding or clarifying our material or rebutting criticisms of it.

The article will [crossed out] not explicitly advocate violence. There will be an unavoidable implication that we favor violence to the extent that it may be necessary, since we advocate eliminating industrial society and we ourselves have been using violence to that end. But the article will not advocate violence explicitly, nor will it propose the overthrow of the United States Government, nor will it contain obscenity or anything else that you would be likely to regard as unacceptable for publication.

How do you know that we will keep our promise to desist from terrorism if our conditions are met? It will be to our [crossed out] advantage to keep our promise. We want to win acceptance for certain ideas. If we break our promise people will lose respect for us and so will be less likely to accept the ideas.

Our offer to desist from terrorism is subject to three qualifications. First: Our promise to desist will not take effect until all parts of our article or book have appeared in print. Second: If the authorities should succeed in tracking us down and an attempt is made to arrest any of us, or even to question us in connection with the bombings, we reserve the right to use violence. Third: We distinguish between terrorism and sabotage. By terrorism we mean actions motivated by a desire to influence the development of a society and intended to cause injury or death to human beings. By sabotage we mean similarly motivated actions intended to destroy property without injuring human beings. The promise we offer is to desist from terrorism. We reserve the right to engage in sabotage.

It may be just as well that failure of our early bombs discouraged us from making any public statements at that time. We were very young then and our thinking was crude. Over the years we have given as much attention to the development of our ideas as to the development of bombs, and we now have something serious to say. And we feel that just now the time is ripe for the presentation of anti-industrial ideas.

Please see to it that the answer to our offer is well publicized in the media so that we won’t miss it. Be sure to tell us where and how our material will be published and how long it will take to appear in print once we have sent in the manuscript. If the answer is satisfactory, we will finish typing the manuscript and send it to you. If the answer is unsatisfactory, we will start building our next bomb.

Free Ted!

#42 Summer 1996

Stop the FBI frame-up of Ted Kaczynski

After 18 year [sic] of humiliating failure hunting the Unabomber, the FBI were relieved to announce to the worldwide media that they’d arrested Ted Kaczynski last Thursday, 5^th April 1996.

Ted is a hermit whose lived alone in a mountain shack outside Lincoln, Montana, since 1971. He was so shy he found it difficult to talk to Lincoln residents when he got his weekly provisions from town, though he did manage to play pinocle with 84 year old Irene Preston. Townspeople can’t believe he’s the Unabomber.

...

Industrial-Technological Society Cannot Be Reformed

#42 Summer 1996

Mass organisation and the division of labour destroy freedom: extracts from the Unabomber’s Industrial Society & Its Future

Restriction of Freedom is Unavoidable in Industrial Society

114.... modern man is strapped down by a network of rules and regulations, and his fate depends on the actions of persons remote from him whose decisions he cannot influence. This is not accidental or a result of the arbitrariness of arrogant bureaucrats. It is necessary and inevitable in any technologically advanced society. The system HAS TO regulate human behavior closely in order to function. At work, people have to do what they are told to do, when they are told to do it and in the way they are told to do it, otherwise production would be thrown into chaos. Bureaucracies HAVE TO be run according to rigid rules. To allow any substantial personal discretion to lower-level bureaucrats would disrupt the system and lead to charges of unfairness due to differences in the way individual bureaucrats exercised their discretion. It is true that some restrictions on our freedom could be eliminated. but GENERALLY SPEAKING the regulation of our lives by large organizations is necessary for the functioning of industrial-technological society. The result is a sense of powerlessness on the part of the average person. It may be. however. that formal regulations will tend increasingly to be replaced by psychological tools that make us want to do what the system requires of us. (Propaganda, educational techniques, “mental health” programs, etc.)

115. The system HAS TO force people to behave in ways that are increasingly remote from the natural pattern of human behavior. For example, the system needs scientists. mathematicians and engineers. It can’t function without them. So heavy pressure is put on children to excel in these fields. It isn’t natural for an adolescent human being to spend the bulk of his time sitting at a desk absorbed in study. A normal adolescent wants to spend his time in active contact with the real world. Among primitive peoples the things that children are trained to do tend to be in reasonable harmony with natural human impulses. Among the American Indians, for example, boys were trained in active outdoor pursuits—just the sort of things that boys like. But in our society children are pushed into studying technical subjects, which most do grudgingly.

116. Because of the constant pressure that the system exerts to modify human behavior, there is a gradual increase in the number of people who cannot or will not adjust to society’s requirements: welfare leeches, youth-gang members, cultists, anti-government rebels, radical environmentalist saboteurs, dropouts and resisters of various kinds.

117. In any technologically advanced society the individual’s fate MUST depend on decisions that he personally cannot influence to any great extent. A technological society cannot be broken down into small, autonomous communities, because production depends on the cooperation of very large numbers of people and machines. Such a society MUST be highly organized and decisions HAVE TO be made that affect very large numbers of people. When a decision affects, say, a million people, then each of the affected individuals has, on the average, only a one-millionth share in making the decision. What usually happens in practice is that decisions are made by public officials or corporation executives, or by technical specialists, but even when the public votes on a decision the number of voters ordinarily is too large for the vote of anyone individual to be significant. Thus most individuals are unable to influence measurably the major decisions that affect their lives. There is no conceivable way to remedy this in a technologically advanced society. The system tries to “solve” this problem by using propaganda to make people WANT the decisions that have been made for them, but even if this “solution” were completely successful in making people feel better, it would be demeaning.

118. Conservatives and some others advocate more “local autonomy.” Local communities once did have autonomy, but such autonomy becomes less and less possible as local communities become more enmeshed with and dependent on large-scale systems like public utilities, computer networks, highway systems, the mass communications media and the modern health-care system. Also operating against autonomy is the fact that technology applied in one location often affects people at other locations far away. Thus pesticide or chemical use near a creek may contaminate the water supply hundreds of miles downstream, and the greenhouse effect affects the whole world.

119. The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is not the fault of capitalism and it is not the fault of socialism. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity. Of course the system does satisfy many human needs, but generally speaking it does this only to the extent that it is to the advantage of the system to do it. It is the needs of the system that are paramount, not those of the human being. For example, the system provides people with food because the system couldn’t function if everyone starved; it attends to people’s psychological needs whenever it can CONVENIENTLY do so, because it couldn’t function if too many people became depressed or rebellious. But the system, for good, solid, practical reasons, must exert constant pressure on people to mold their behavior to the needs of the system. Too much waste accumulating? The government, the media, the educational system, environmentalists, everyone inundates us with a mass of propaganda about recycling. Need more technical personnel? A chorus of voices exhorts kids to study science. No one stops to ask whether it is inhumane to force adolescents to spend the bulk of their time studying subjects that most of them hate. When skilled workers are put out of a job by technical advances and have to undergo “retraining,” no one asks whether it is humiliating for them to be pushed around in this way. It is simply taken for granted that everyone must bow to technical necessity. And for good reason: If human needs were put before technical necessity there would be economic problems, unemployment, shortages or worse. The concept of “mental health” in our society is defined largely by the extent to which an individual behaves in accord with the needs of the system and does so without showing signs of stress.

120. Efforts to make room for a sense of purpose and for autonomy within the system are no better than a joke. For example, one company, instead of having each of its employees assemble only one section of a catalogue, had each assemble a whole catalogue, and this was supposed to give them a sense of purpose and achievement. Some companies have tried to give their employees more autonomy in their work, but for practical reasons this usually can be done only to a very limited extent, and in any case employees are never given autonomy as to ultimate goals—their “autonomous” efforts can never be directed toward goals that they select personally, but only toward their employer’s goals, such as the survival and growth of the company. Any company would soon go out of business if it permitted its employees to act otherwise. Similarly, in any enterprise within a socialist system, workers must direct their efforts toward the goals of the enterprise, otherwise the enterprise will not serve its purpose as part of the system. Once again, for purely technical reasons it is not possible for most individuals or small groups to have much autonomy in industrial society. Even the small-business owner commonly has only limited autonomy. Apart from the necessity of government regulation, he is restricted by the fact that he must fit into the economic system and conform to its requirements. For instance, when someone develops a new technology, the small-business person often has to use that technology whether he wants to or not, in order to remain competitive.

The “Bad” Parts of Technology Cannot Be Separated from the “Good” Parts

121. A further reason why industrial society cannot be reformed in favor of freedom is that modern technology is a unified system in which all parts are dependent on one another. You can’t get rid of the “bad” parts of technology and retain only the “good” parts. Take modern medicine, for example. Progress in medical science depends on progress in chemistry, physics, biology, computer science and other fields. Advanced medical treatments require expensive, high-tech equipment that can be made available only by a technologically progressive, economically rich society. Clearly you can’t have much progress in medicine without the whole technological system and everything that goes with it.

122. Even if medical progress could be maintained without the rest of the technological system, it would by itself bring certain evils. Suppose for example that a cure for diabetes is discovered. People with a genetic tendency to diabetes will then be able to survive and reproduce as well as anyone else. Natural selection against genes for diabetes will cease and such genes will spread throughout the population. (This may be occurring to some extent already, since diabetes, while not curable, can be controlled through the use of insulin.) The same thing will happen with many other diseases susceptibility to which is affected by genetic factors (e.g., childhood cancer), resulting in massive genetic degradation of the population. The only solution will be some sort of eugenics program or extensive genetic engineering of human beings, so that man in the future will no longer be a creation of nature, or of chance, or of God (depending on your religious or philosophical opinions), but a manufactured product.

123. If you think that big government interferes in your life too much NOW, just wait till the government starts regulating the genetic constitution of your children. Such regulation will inevitably follow the introduction of genetic engineering of human beings, because the consequences of unregulated genetic engineering would be disastrous.

124. The usual response to such concerns is to talk about “medical ethics.” But a code of ethics would not serve to protect freedom in the face of medical progress; it would only make matters worse. A code of ethics applicable to genetic engineering would be in effect a means of regulating the genetic constitution of human beings. Somebody (probably the upper middle class, mostly) would decide that such and such applications of genetic engineering were “ethical” and others were not, so that in effect they would be imposing their own values on the genetic constitution of the population at large. Even if a code of ethics were chosen on a completely democratic basis, the majority would be imposing their own values on any minorities who might have a different idea of what constituted an “ethical” use of genetic engineering. The only code of ethics that would truly protect freedom would be one that prohibited ANY genetic engineering of human beings, and you can be sure that no such code will ever be applied in a technological society. No code that reduced genetic engineering to a minor role could stand up for long, because the temptation presented by the immense power of biotechnology would be irresistible, especially since to the majority of people many of its applications will seem obviously and unequivocally good (eliminating physical and mental diseases, giving people the abilities they need to get along in today’s world). Inevitably, genetic engineering will be used extensively, but only in ways consistent with the needs of the industrial-technological system.

Technology is a More Powerful Social Force than the Aspiration for Freedom

125. It is not possible to make a LASTING compromise between technology and freedom, because technology is by far the more powerful social force and continually encroaches on freedom through REPEATED compromises. Imagine the case of two neighbors, each of whom at the outset owns the same amount of land, but one of whom is more powerful than the other. The powerful one demands a piece of the other’s land. The weak one refuses. The powerful one says, “Okay, let’s compromise. Give me half of what I asked.” The weak one has little choice but to give in. Some time later the powerful neighbor demands another piece of land, again there is a compromise, and so forth. By forcing a long series of compromises on the weaker man, the powerful one eventually gets all of his land. So it goes in the conflict between technology and freedom.

126. Let us explain why technology is a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom.

127. A technological advance that appears not to threaten freedom often turns out to threaten it very seriously later on. For example, consider motorized transport. A walking man formerly could go where he pleased, go at his own pace without observing any traffic regulations, and was independent of technological support systems. When motor vehicles were introduced they appeared to increase man’s freedom. They took no freedom away from the walking man, no one had to have an automobile if he didn’t want one, and anyone who did choose to buy an automobile could travel much faster and farther than a walking man. But the introduction of motorized transport soon changed society in such a way as to restrict greatly man’s freedom of locomotion. When automobiles became numerous, it became necessary to regulate their use extensively. In a car, especially in densely populated areas, one cannot just go where one likes at one’s own pace; one’s movement is governed by the flow of traffic and by various traffic laws. One is tied down by various obligations: license requirements, driver test, renewing registration, insurance, maintenance required for safety, monthly payments on purchase price. Moreover, the use of motorized transport is no longer optional. Since the introduction of motorized transport the arrangement of our cities has changed in such a way that the majority of people no longer live within walking distance of their place of employment, shopping areas and recreational opportunities, so that they HAVE TO depend on the automobile for transportation. Or else they must use public transportation, in which case they have even less control over their own movement than when driving a car. Even the walker’s freedom is now greatly restricted. In the city he continually has to stop to wait for traffic lights that are designed mainly to serve auto traffic. In the country, motor traffic makes it dangerous and unpleasant to walk along the highway. (Note this important point that we have just illustrated with the case of motorized transport: When a new item of technology is introduced as an option that an individual can accept or not as he chooses, it does not necessarily REMAIN optional. In many cases the new technology changes society in such a way that people eventually find themselves FORCED to use it.)

128. While technological progress AS A WHOLE continually narrows our sphere of freedom, each new technical advance CONSIDERED BY ITSELF appears to be desirable. Electricity, indoor plumbing, rapid long- distance communications…how could one argue against any of these things, or against any other of the innumerable technical advances that have made modern society? It would have been absurd to resist the introduction of the telephone, for example. It offered many advantages and no disadvantages. Yet, as we explained in paragraphs 59–76, all these technical advances taken together have created a world in which the average man’s fate is no longer in his own hands or in the hands of his neighbors and friends, but in those of politicians, corporation executives and remote, anonymous technicians and bureaucrats whom he as an individual has no power to influence. The same process will continue in the future. Take genetic engineering, for example. Few people will resist the introduction of a genetic technique that eliminates a hereditary disease. It does no apparent harm and prevents much suffering. Yet a large number of genetic improvements taken together will make the human being into an engineered product rather than a free creation of chance (or of God, or whatever, depending on your religious beliefs).

129. Another reason why technology is such a powerful social force is that, within the context of a given society, technological progress marches in only one direction; it can never be reversed. Once a technical innovation has been introduced, people usually become dependent on it, so that they can never again do without it, unless it is replaced by some still more advanced innovation. Not only do people become dependent as individuals on a new item of technology, but, even more, the system as a whole becomes dependent on it. (Imagine what would happen to the system today if computers, for example, were eliminated.) Thus the system can move in only one direction, toward greater technologization. Technology repeatedly forces freedom to take a step back but technology can never take a step back—short of the overthrow of the whole technological system.

130. Technology advances with great rapidity and threatens freedom at many different points at the same time (crowding, rules and regulations, increasing dependence of individuals on large organizations, propaganda and other psychological techniques, genetic engineering, invasion of privacy through surveillance devices and computers, etc.). To hold back any ONE of the threats to freedom would require a long and difficult social struggle. Those who want to protect freedom are overwhelmed by the sheer number of new attacks and the rapidity with which they develop, hence they become apathetic and no longer resist. To fight each of the threats separately would be futile. Success can be hoped for only by fighting the technological system as a whole; but that is revolution, not reform.

131. Technicians (we use this term in its broad sense to describe all those who perform a specialized task that requires training) tend to be so involved in their work (their surrogate activity) that when a conflict arises between their technical work and freedom, they almost always decide in favor of their technical work. This is obvious in the case of scientists, but it also appears elsewhere: Educators, humanitarian groups, conservation organizations do not hesitate to use propaganda{3) or other psychological techniques to help them achieve their laudable ends. Corporations and government agencies, when they find it useful, do not hesitate to collect information about individuals without regard to their privacy. Law enforcement agencies are frequently inconvenienced by the constitutional rights of suspects and often of completely innocent persons, and they do whatever they can do legally (or sometimes illegally) to restrict or circumvent those rights. Most of these educators, government officials and law officers believe in freedom, privacy and constitutional rights, but when these conflict with their work, they usually feel that their work is more important.

132. It is well known that people generally work better and more persistently when striving for a reward than when attempting to avoid a punishment or negative outcome. Scientists and other technicians are motivated mainly by the rewards they get through their work. But those who oppose technological invasions of freedom are working to avoid a negative outcome, consequently there are few who work persistently and well at this discouraging task. If reformers ever achieved a signal victory that seemed to set up a solid barrier against further erosion of freedom through technical progress, most would tend to relax and turn their attention to more agreeable pursuits. But the scientists would remain busy in their laboratories, and technology as it progressed would find ways, in spite of any barriers, to exert more and more control over individuals and make them always more dependent on the system.

133. No social arrangements, whether laws, institutions, customs or ethical codes, can provide permanent protection against technology. History shows that all social arrangements are transitory; they all change or break down eventually. But technological advances are permanent within the context of a given civilization. Suppose for example that it were possible to arrive at some social arrangement that would prevent genetic engineering from being applied to human beings, or prevent it from being applied in such a way as to threaten freedom and dignity. Still, the technology would remain, waiting. Sooner or later the social arrangement would break down. Probably sooner, given the pace of change in our society. Then genetic engineering would begin to invade our sphere of freedom, and this invasion would be irreversible (short of a breakdown of technological civilization itself). Any illusions about achieving anything permanent through social arrangements should be dispelled by what is currently happening with environmental legislation. A few years ago it seemed that there were secure legal barriers preventing at least SOME of the worst forms of environmental degradation. A change in the political wind, and those barriers begin to crumble.

134. For all of the foregoing reasons, technology is a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom. But this statement requires an important qualification. It appears that during the next several decades the industrial-technological system will be undergoing severe stresses due to economic and environmental problems, and especially due to problems of human behavior (alienation, rebellion, hostility, a variety of social and psychological difficulties). We hope that the stresses through which the system is likely to pass will cause it to break down, or at least will weaken it sufficiently so that a revolution against it becomes possible. If such a revolution occurs and is successful, then at that particular moment the aspiration for freedom will have proved more powerful than technology.

135. In paragraph 125 we used an analogy of a weak neighbor who is left destitute by a strong neighbor who takes all his land by forcing on him a series of compromises. But suppose now that the strong neighbor gets sick, so that he is unable to defend himself. The weak neighbor can force the strong one to give him his land back, or he can kill him. If he lets the strong man survive and only forces him to give the land back, he is a fool, because when the strong man gets well he will again take all the land for himself. The only sensible alternative for the weaker man is to kill the strong one while he has the chance. In the same way, while the industrial system is sick we must destroy it. If we compromise with it and let it recover from its sickness, it will eventually wipe out all of our freedom.

Simpler Social Problems Have Proved Intractable

136. If anyone still imagines that it would be possible to reform the system in such a way as to protect freedom from technology, let him consider how clumsily and for the most part unsuccessfully our society has dealt with other social problems that are far more simple and straightforward. Among other things, the system has failed to stop environmental degradation, political corruption, drug trafficking or domestic abuse.

137. Take our environmental problems, for example. Here the conflict of values is straightforward: economic expedience now versus saving some of our natural resources for our grandchildren. But on this subject we get only a lot of blather and obfuscation from the people who have power, and nothing like a clear, consistent line of action, and we keep on piling up environmental problems that our grandchildren will have to live with. Attempts to resolve the environmental issue consist of struggles and compromises between different factions, some of which are ascendant at one moment, others at another moment. The line of struggle changes with the shifting currents of public opinion. This is not a rational process, nor is it one that is likely to lead to a timely and successful solution to the problem. Major social problems, if they get “solved” at all, are rarely or never solved through any rational, comprehensive plan. They just work themselves out through a process in which various competing groups pursuing their own (usually short-term) self-interest arrive (mainly by luck) at some more or less stable modus vivendi. In fact, the principles we formulated in paragraphs 100–106 make it seem doubtful that rational, long-term social planning can EVER be successful.

138. Thus it is clear that the human race has at best a very limited capacity for solving even relatively straightforward social problems. How then is it going to solve the far more difficult and subtle problem of reconciling freedom with technology? Technology presents clear-cut material advantages, whereas freedom is an abstraction that means different things to different people, and its loss is easily obscured by propaganda and fancy talk.

139. And note this important difference: It is conceivable that our environmental problems (for example) may some day be settled through a rational, comprehensive plan, but if this happens it will be only because it is in the long-term interest of the system to solve these problems. But it is NOT in the interest of the system to preserve freedom or small-group autonomy. On the contrary, it is in the interest of the system to bring human behavior under control to the greatest possible extent. Thus, while practical considerations may eventually force the system to take a rational, prudent approach to environmental problems, equally practical considerations will force the system to regulate human behavior ever more closely (preferably by indirect means that will disguise the encroachment on freedom). This isn’t just our opinion. Eminent social scientists (e.g., James Q. Wilson) have stressed the importance of “socializing” people more effectively.

Revolution is Easier than Reform

140. We hope we have convinced the reader that the system cannot be reformed in such a way as to reconcile freedom with technology. The only way out is to dispense with the industrial-technological system altogether. This implies revolution, not necessarily an armed uprising, but certainly a radical and fundamental change in the nature of society.

141. People tend to assume that because a revolution involves a much greater change than reform does, it is more difficult to bring about than reform is. Actually, under certain circumstances revolution is much easier than reform. The reason is that a revolutionary movement can inspire an intensity of commitment that a reform movement cannot inspire. A reform movement merely offers to solve a particular social problem. A revolutionary movement offers to solve all problems at one stroke and create a whole new world; it provides the kind of ideal for which people will take great risks and make great sacrifices. For this reason it would be much easier to overthrow the whole technological system than to put effective, permanent restraints on the development or application of anyone segment of technology, such as genetic engineering, for example. Not many people will devote themselves with single-minded passion to imposing and maintaining restraints on genetic engineering, but under suitable conditions large numbers of people may devote themselves passionately to a revolution against the industrial-technological system. As we noted in paragraph 132, reformers seeking to limit certain aspects of technology would be working to avoid a negative outcome. But revolutionaries work to gain a powerful reward-fulfillment of their revolutionary vision-and therefore work harder and more persistently than reformers do.

Top Ten Reasons to Vote Unabomber

#42 Summer 1996

Lydia Eccles on your presidential write-in choice for ’96

THE BOYS. Clinton, Gingrich, Powell, Perot, Forbes, Dole, Gramm, Lugar, Alexander, Dornan, Keyes, etc.

HE’S HOT! His favorability ratings may be low, but his name recognition is close to 100% ...

Free Ted!

#43_44 Autumn 1996

Unabomber suspect Ted Kaczynski was extradited to Sacramento, California. On 18^th June 1996, he was charged with mail-bombing deforestation lobbyist Gilbert Murray, computer pusher Hugh Scrutton, ...

Fixed Ideas and Letter Bombs

#45_46 Spring 1997

Unfortunately, the response of american anarchists to the ‘unabomber’ (hereafter, FC¹) has mostly been one of knee-jerk disavowal verging on reactionary hysteria. It seems these anarchists fear for their good reputation by which they plan to convert the masses to anarchism. So there has not yet been an actual critical response from an anarchist perspective to FC’s tract Industrial Society & Its Future. Since FC claim to be anarchists (defining this in terms of favouring self-determination for individuals and small groups over the domination of large-scale systems over our lives) and have involved themselves in doing something (whatever problems we have with their tactics), this non-response is absurd. Industrial Society & Its Future is an attempt to deal with some significant questions often ignored or dealt with by sloganeering in the anarchist press. FC’s statement has many faults, often is shallow and inadequate to the challenge it is attempting to meet. This stems from a lack of thorough social analysis, reliance on concepts which seem to come from pop psychology and adherence to fixed ideas (a fixed idea is a thought or idea that dominates the thinker, causing her to channel all thinking and analysis through that one idea, e.g. for the religious, god is a fixed idea, for the patriot, the country). FC correctly sees that the industrial technological system is a system of domination, but misses the fact that it is a complex social system which needs to be attacked in its totality. But let’s examine FC’s theses.

Leftism: a Neurotic Response to a Psychotic Society (Fc’s Theses 1–32)

FC’s tract strangely begins with several pages critical of leftism. Stranger still this criticism relies completely on psychology (and that of a rather crude ‘pop’ form). FC uses this as a basis, later on, for a more general description of the psychology of people under the industrials system.

FC sees leftism as having a psychological basis in “feelings of inferiority” and “oversocialisation”. Modern american leftism is certainly based in what Max Stirner called ragamuffinism and Nietzsche called “ressentiment”. Some recent anarchist writings have referred to it as the “ideology of victimism’ This ideology does seem to reflect and promote feelings of inferiority, but FC seems to be, unfamiliar with these ideas and adopt instead a methodology reminiscent of pop psychology in their critique Fortunately for FC, leftists are apparently so afraid of any sort of criticism, that they could only respond to FC’s inadequate criticism with hysterical yammering.

FC are correct in saying that most American leftists come from middle or upper-class backgrounds. But FC miss what may be the most significant aspects of this in terms of the psychology of leftism namely, that many leftists believe Ural they are privileged, that they have an excess of social power, and they lied guilty about this. In a very Christum, messianic manner, they “give themselves” to those who — according to their ideology — have received the short shift from society. This guilt and secular chnstianist activism explain the leftist masochism, self-sacrifice and dogmatism quite well Recognising the religiosity of leftism, we can see that it can be compassionate, morally based and hostile all at once just like Christianity which compassionately and morally instituted pogroms, technological system is a system or it is an integral part of a more to be attacked in its totality But inquisitions. wars and genocide against heretics and non-believers.

FC’s attempts to interpret every aspect of the leftist’s life in terms of a pop psychology inferiority complex severely weakens the argument leftists, like nearly every one else in this society, lead very compartmentalised lives. I have known leftists who seem to like the blues or world beast music because they imagine such music is a way to get in touch with the feelings of black or thud world people Thus to the extent that leftism affects the art preferences of the leftist*it does not seem Io be in the direction of embracing defeat or irrationalism, but of trying to get in touch with’ other cultures this is absurd and merely reinforces the commodification of these cultures but it does not. in itself, indicate inferiority feelings.

Certainly, leftists spend far too much time trying to prove the equality of oppressed groups and demanding that it be granted by the state, but this does not so much prove the inferiority need to develop analyses of society and the left’s role therein that go far deeper feelings of leftists as their adherence to relying on authority It is the leftist belief m a democratic social order — which is to say, a structure of democratic authority - which causes them to embrace victimistic ideology, an ideology which begs those in power to grant equality’, ’rights’, ‘justice’, etc. This practise of constantly begging for what one wants (particularly when those wants have been transformed into abstractions which one can never sue accomplished) inevitably makes one feel weak and incapable — and so inferior. Leftist activists promote this form of radicalism because it guarantees their role within the present social structures When women, gays, blacks, etc., start taking their lives as their own as individuals, it brings them into conflict equally with leftist ideologues and with society, precisely because they are no longer begging and so no longer need lire leftists Io beg for them.

FC’s concept of “oversocialization” also proves to be inadequate because it depends on psychology rather than an analysis of the social role of the leftist. Leftism is a form of liberal democratic / humanist politics — that is, it is part of the political system to which the rise of capitalism and the industrial system gave birth So it is no surprise that leftists subscribe to the “liberty, equality, fraternity’’ which are the shibboleths of such politics But the totality of the social system is far more complex and irrational than FC dunk. The real values of (his system, the ones for which it sacrifices all others, can be summed up rather simplistically as follows (I) the expansion of capital; (2) efficiency in production. (3) increasing social control in the daily lives of individuals to guarantee the first two Beyond these fundamentals, die social system is quite irrational and full of contradictions Thus, the social structure is both anti-racist and racist us each of this tendencies max under different circumstances better serve the above-mentioned values (and. of course, aspects of earlier social structures do not disappear overnight) The same can be said about sexism / anti-sexism, violence / non-violence, war / peace, etc. Leftists arc no more or less “ oversocialization” than conservatives, moderates or most radicals Leftists believe that the social system can be rationalised, that Us contradictions can lie removed without destroying the system as a whole So they try to convince the authorities to abolish sexism, racism, violence, war — without realising that, within this social system, these arc a necessary pan of the same mechanism of control of which anti-sexism, anti-racism, non-violence and peace arc a pan — the one side needs the other, just as the right needs the left and vice versa.

I do not deny the neuroses of leftism as evidenced in its guilt, masochism and moral stridency But if we want to make an intelligent attack on the social system — as FC apparently does – we than FCs pop psychology.

Fixed Idea #1: The Power Process (FC’s Theses 33- 98)

The first major fixed idea that dominates FC’s thoughts is ‘the power process” This idea seems to form the basis of most of FC’s analysis, and that’s too bad because it’s a (flawed idea — |>op psychology reminiscent of 70 s management strategies and self- help books FC describes the power process ‘Everyone needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort. and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of these goals But do I need goals? No, I need or want specific dungs Some effort is inherently involved in getting these things and, of course, 1 will be happier if 1 do get diem and if I determine how I get them But to transform tins need for actual dungs into an abstract need for goals, effort and attainment which are simply words dial can be used to describe how one gels what one needs, and then to base an analysis of the present social system on this abstraction is absurd I have goals simply because I need or want specific things, but I do not need goals — so I not need a ‘power process”

The ‘power process ‘ is a psychological model and. like all such models, springs from and is only useful within u specific social context The ‘Oedipus complex’ was a model developed in Victorian Europe which worked well for explaining much of the sexual psychology of victorian Europe over time il has pruned less and less useful and is now used only by die-hard Freudians It has no applicability to ancient Romans, Hopi Indians. Mbute pygmies, medieval English peasants, etc. The “power process’ assuming it has any application outside of pop psychology would also have to be understood in terms of a specific social context FC’s attempt to universalize it leads to a sloppy understanding of history and anthropology.

FC’s anthropology is about 30 years behind the times. FC seem to assume that primitive people needed to spend most of their time and energy satisfying biological needs It has been pretty well established that even in harsh environments. the amount of time primitive people spent m activities which provided their basic needs is about one quarter of the amount of time spent by the average person in industrial society at work In other words, primitive people got the things they wanted with less effort than most of us expend to get what we want In fact since there was no lime schedule which they had to follow to perform these activities, so they could be done whenever one pleased (except in emergencies), it can be argued that primitive societies were societies of total ‘leisure’. With the rise of agriculture and cities about 10,000 years ago, the new technological system doubled the amount of time that those who used it had to spend m meeting their basic needs and placed this activity on a *tnct seasonal time schedule — this could be considered the origin of work Industrial technology drasticallv increased both the amount of work time and the ngidits of scheduling necessan f<» work So most people in our society find themselves so exhausted by activities not of their own making that in what little leisure time they have they often choose to vegetate through passive entertainment This problem is ahenatum FC are not completely unaware of thu in otu society people do rau satisfi their biological needs AUTONOMOUSLY, but by functioning as parts of an immense social machine.

Alienation is not merely a psychological problem. Often the most alienated people arc the most adjusted to their alienation. Alienation is the realm of a social system m which our Ines, our activities and our interactions arc not our own to create as we choose, but have been made for us in such a way that we become the property of society the wav s oJ fulfilling our needs and.wants become ven convoluted and indirect, like a Rube Goldberg machine — but it isn i comical I want ftxxL shelter, a few things in give me pleasure So I travel — In car or public transit iwhich have bcawne another necessity I — to a place where I spend eight hours — not masking niv own food »w shelter or phivihtngs — Inil maybe ‘hullling papers ar welding paru to parts or serving food tn ■trangas .v sitting tn front of a computer processing information that means nothing to me 1 do not do these things because they give me am pleasure — usually they arc miserably tedious tasks In themselves, these tasks serve no purpose for me, they serve the purpose of the boss or corporation for which I do these tasks and they serve the purposes of the social system – in other words, they serve purposes alien to me. What I get for giving up so much of my life to serve an alien cause is money. So after work. I have to go out to the shops with the money I got from working to get food, clothing and pleasure items I want — vince n is as compulsory as a job. thi> chopping time should also be c» Hinted as work tunc — and J must pay rent to a land-lord or mortgage to a hank fdor shelter In fact, with the cxceptnwi of a few who refuse, most people sacrifice most of their lives to huv survival and a few plastic trinkets Here there is a goal, an effort of (he most horrendous sort and the attainment of basic necessities — but there is no life, not one that is mv own. The technological system is an essential part of this ahenasuon but not the totality A complex social system incorporating work. technology, capital, authmtv. ideology (including religion) and w on. all of which are integrally mien ui this is what turns our Ines into mere resources for society And it must be attacked in its totality by those of us who want to take hack our lives.

FC’s “power process” seems to me to have a meagre, political view of the world as a constant struggle for -•unival This may well indicate the meagre, sdngv social context from which it springs — for the present era certamh is that But such meagreness will never get us out of tins mess That will take something strong and lively, something so certain of its abundance Oiat it has no fear of squarxiering Stimer speaks of such a thing calling it one s “own might the might of which one makes «me s life one s own. and so cornm u» have an excess of lie — and it is this, rnv lite as mv own, and n«A “the freedom to go through the power process’ . that I want

FCs reliance on their fixed idea, the power process’ makes for very (xior — and. in my opinion dangerous — social unahsiA I have already punted out the fallacies this has caused in FC’s understanding of primitive societies and the acquisition of necessities in industrial society. But I C take these lallacics further Wc II leave aside such minor absurdities as FC s a tin but ion of a lack of interest in having children to a durupb«) of the power process Ihe danger of FC’s use of the power pr<xxss as a basis for social analysis become- evident when it is applied to science I or FC science is essentially a tunogaie activity Scientists get involved in order to “go through the power pruccvs . <m*J xkikz is eniphaMis added

obedient only to thepiytluiloyical needs of the scientists and of Ilir govurrunent official* and corporation executives who provide the funds lor research.

If only it were that simple, but science is rn»i just a surrogate activity to help a few people meet their psychological needs Science i> an integral part of the social svstem under which we live, an ideological and practical tool for the maintenance and expansion of that social svstem It is this goal to which science is Hindis obedient, and for the oiciul s\ stem, science is not a surrogate acinny. but u necessary component for its survival Whatever psychological lultillmcnt science mass provide to its ITHClitioiKTs is simply, like the paxcheck part of the bribe necc’san to make people willing to serve the needs of socieh m this wav.

FC are obviously aware of the systemic nature at least of industrial technology (even though they don’t make the tuai to the social system as a whole), yet they are so fixated on their pop psychology concept of the power pnxccss that they develop tunnel vision and interpret everything through this faulty idea So then end up lacking a clear analysis of society This fixation <m the power process causes FC to describe ihmgs as universal problems which are only problems within this prcseni social context because of the necessary contradictions of this society Ihus. transexuahty among American the tribes m which it occured accepted it without censure If FC were to study sexual anthrojxjlogy thev would discover that many sexual practise which are considered perverted by our society are pcascticed by masny frumtivc people without the stigma of jiervcTxion and so were no problem Such aclivities l>ecome prHilcmauc in this society because sexuality is most useful to it when repressed and promoted at the same lime — transforming n into a hard-to-get commodity and into an identity Thus, the problematic nature of sexuality stems not from a disruption of thr power process’ as FC would have it, but from its commodificatHMi Such separahon of sexuality from life is rarely a problem in primitive cultures

FC define freedom^ as The opportunity t<» go through the power jxocexs ‘ The only freedom I consider lo be worth pursuing is that my life he mv own to determine fruit nn interactions be my own to create, that rm iiclfienjuvmcnl be central to liow I Ine my life FC may try to claim that (hi* is uh/it tlsc ‘power pfoyeM” is. but (heir own use of the (erm proves otherwise It is a fixed idea through which to interpret the world and w hich one should sacrifice oneself The desire for self-determination and scif-cnjoymcni will move me to fight for inysclf and possibly even to sacrifice vane ihtnys. but J will sacrifice them lo mysrlf and will never sacrifice myself Itoi adherence to a fixed idea (such as the power process ) moves one to tight for the CAUSE, to sacrifice oneself to the CAUSE As I will show, EC call tor just such self-sacrifice, showing that the |x»wcr process’ lias nothing to do with making one’s life one’s own. but is a fixed idea to be served

FC’s Description of Industrial-Technological Society (FC’s Thesis 99–160)

having laid the groundwork with tie fixed idea of the “power process” FC now present their “analysis” (more a description) of industrial-technological society FC introduce this part of their essay with five principles of history. As with most radicals for whom “history “ is a central concept, they refrain from defining it. I find the five principles to be useless abstractions. Thev arc concerned with vast social trends and express only the most banal generalities about these trends. The only positive thing I have to say on it is that they would lead anyone who desires individual self-detcmunation to conclusion that they must destroy society itself. But FC use these principles as dogmas by which thev interpret industrial society. Nonetheless, this is the best section of FC’s essay Their descriptions of this society are often accurate, though their interpretations are fcrquentlv shallow and poorly thopught out because of Ihor dqjendence on fixed ideas and dogma

FC rightly recognise that the industnal-technological system w .tot compatible with self-determination, dial it must, out of inhcreo! necessity, rcgulaste people s lives and thasi tlie level of regulation must increa.se as the system expands, but FC do not recognise that this is true exif the system as an integrated whole — including its political, cultural and ideological institutions. The whole is beyond reform and revolt against the totality is necessary — which means thast attacks against any part of the social sy stem can be worthwhile as long us they are aimed at taking back one’s life In the same light just as g<xxl and ‘bud’ ports of leduxjlogy cannot bv sejjcraicd. neither can good’ and ‘had’ parts of civilisation as a whole.

Throughout this section. FC describe many horrbic aspects potentiuh of industrial technology, but provides no social analysis, no recognition that there is an entire social context which creates this technology One is left to wonder of FC think social context has any significance Several times, ihcy bring up their bchefin the genetic basis of human behaviour as if it were proven fact Stphcn Jay Gould has effectively argued that this is an unproven hvp»<ficMs which does nol explain human bchavuxir very well In any case I wonder if FC’s reliance on psyetiological models might mot stem from their aiiltcrcncc to geneticism It certainly impoverishes FC’s argument by causing them to ignore the social syy stern of which technology is an integral part making their argument inadequate and unconvincing in many wavs And it leads FC to propose a revolutionary strategy that is self- sacrificial and. furthermore, absurd.

FC’s Fixed Idea #2: The Revolution Against the Industrial-Technological System (FC’s Theses 161–232)

I oppose not the industrial technology, but technology and civilisation tn their totality. So why do I call FC’s revolution against industrial technology a fixed idea? Because my opposition to civilisation is based on a recognition that civilisation as a system of social relationships makes mv life and mv uxctivities alien to me, so that they are not my own, but arc molds into which I am to try u to fit I would never willingly sacrifice mvself lor the destruction of civilisation Rather I try to destroy this system for myself as a way of taking back my life. For FC,

the destruction of [the industrial) svstem must be the revolutionaries ONLY goal no other goal can be allowed to compete with that one

So I am to be second to the goal of destroying industnasl technology Haviong a goasl for which one is w illing to sacrifice oneself changes the nature of the battle against the sociasl system FC’s strategics, aside from being frequently absurd, are also strategics on an immense scale One almost gels the impression that FC expect to convert u large number of people to their cause who will then be willing to participate in a unified revolution Since FC make comparisons to the French and Russian revolutions, it seems that this is then model for evolution. sufficiently modified for use against industrial (cclinology But both of these revolutions actual moved in the opposite direction to that which FC calls for Each created modem states which made transition to an industrial system easier 1 would argue that a unified revolution of the sort for which FC call can most likely only lead to the creation of a unified system, nol to the destruction of one If the goal is individual self-determination, then the struggle must start from the individual who united only us one chooses with whom one fights.

Those who have a cause with which to fight rather than fighting for themselves want converts So FC recommend a method of propagandising which involves inventing an ideology of “Wild Nature vs Industrial technology Ihn manipulative strategy hardly seems conducive to promoting individual (or small group) autonomy FC’s strategy seems to promote a large group dynamic whec a few would lead and most would follow If this did not seem mostly like FC’s fantasy, 1 would find this part of FC’s ideas detestable Bui FC arc explicit rthc destruction of the industrial system must be the top priority For this, we should be willing to support dictatorships if that will destabilise the industrial system, support agreements like NAFTA and GATT if they can mask? the system top-heavy and so easier to push over, and have loads and loads of children because children of revolutionaries supposedly become revolutionaries (al least according to the genetic theories to which FC apparently subscribe), For FC. there is no social context in which these things arise and for which they occur — capitalism technology, the slate, the family — all arc nothing for FC. only industrial technology and its destruction matter.

FC make an important point when they tell us that primitive people ru individuals were actually much better able to take care of themselves than industnalused people who haw avowed themselves lo become dependent on an immense social system Hie significance of this for me is that it means (hat. to a much greater extent than we can know, their lives were their own But is it only industrial technology dial ends this ownness? I have already pointed out that hunter- gatherers apparently pursued the activities necessary for survival without compulsion, except in emergency situations >eg droughts, severe storms), doing them when tliey felt like it — more for the joy of it than out oi need Individuals ware constantly figuring ways of making these activities easier and more enjoyable but these wavs were not immense systems, but merely tools and methods thin individuals could make and use lor themselves The rise of agriculture (not to be mistaken for small-scale gardening) was the introduction of a technological system It created a compulsory seasonal schedule for the production of food But agriculture did not nsc in a vacuum Archaeological evidence indicates that agriculture developed in conjunction with the rise of early cities. Cities mav, in fact, have come first There can be no doubt that a concept of exclusive (private or communal) property must have coincided with the development of agriculture There is also evidence of a connection between religion and agriculture The early cities already give evidence of structured hierarchies and a specialised warrior class which can nghliy be called a slate and its armv In other words, the technological system of agriculture arose as pasrt of an integrated social system — whast we call civilisation Ihis system, in its totalirty and thnxigh all of us structures (technology, the state economy, religion the family, work exclusive property .). took the lives of individuals from (hem and made these lives the propertv of society John Zerzan has presented evidence in a number of his writings that this ahenastion began well before the rise of civilisation, but this system of social rchitionshijis called civilisation changed life qualitatively in ways fruit made alienation a central defining quality of life The fatalism and religiosity that arc so much u part of agricultural societies can be seen as an expression of this alienation Peasants feel more as though things happen to them than (hat they du things Industrial technology certainly made a further qualitative change in the nature uf alienation Though farmers are forced to comply with a time schedule rad kt than doing things in their own tunc, they still (in peasant cultures, ru>t in agribusiness) arc directly producibng their food In industrial society, the activities into which one is forced in order to cam survival are not even directly related to one’s survival needs in any way. They have become complexdy alien But once again, the Uxlinology is only part of an entire complex, integrated social system, all of which acts together to guarantee fruit we can only gain our survival by giving up our lives to the reproduction of the social system Those of us who want our lives back anno! limit ourselves to FC’s “only goal” We have much more to destroy than the industrial system — wc have the whole civilisation to bring down and will attack it on asll fronts, the state and its protectors (cops, the military, bureaucrats ), economy (capitalism, work, property rights asnd so on), technology, religion, education, the family, ideology... And we won t do this as a cause, but selfishly , because we want our lives back I want to determine my own life, create my own activities and interactions for my own enjyment So any “revolution” that demands that I sacrifice mvself for its cause is as much my enemy as the social system which demands the same of me < )nlv a revolution which attacks society in a way that allows indinduusls to take back their lives interests me, and such a resolution would grow out of the revolts of individuals against their own alienation, not from u mass programme

FC’s hatred of the technological system has my sympathy and agreement But 1 vehemently reject their adherence to fixed ideas, particularly their dependence on a psychological model, the “power process ”, as a means of analysing the technological system I wonccr if this psychological conception of the problem is why FC. who say that the destruction off the industrial system is “the ONLY goal”, has chosen to blow up technicians, researchers and other human servants of the machine rather than large-scale industrial facilities which are more essential parts of the industrial system Don’t get me wrong, everyone who has been attacked by FC has Ixxri working actively toward drastically increasing social control and destruction of wild places Ihe few deaths arc no loss to me — in fact, I smile, thinking ‘One less technician to control my life” But killing oil technicians one by one seems like an extremely slow way to destroy the industrial system.

I have many problems with FC s ideas Fhcir lack of a clear social analysis and their adherence to fixed ideas prevent them from making a coherent and convincing critique out of their often accurate descriptions of industrial society Furthermore, FC’s fixed ideas channel the whole into an authoritarian and ven self-sacrificial conception of revolution. Nonetheless, FC has been doing sonething to fight the present social system One may question their tactics, but those who do so from an anarchist armchair or from the position of typical, ineffective and unsatisfying radical activism had best direct equally probing questions at themselves.

Afterword: Some Thoughts on Violence

While there has been little response at all to FC’s essay, the reaction to their violence has come from nearly all sides. Even Tad Kepley’s mostly sympathetic article in Anarchy. A Journal of Desire Armed #42 was tainted with moralisms regarding violence, in spite of Tad’s claim to the contrary Tad says:

The anti-authoritarian who makes use of violence ... must be aware of the contradictions in destroying to create, in using violence in the hopes of creating a world without violence.

There are no contradictions in destroying to create — Every act of creation involves destruction When one makes a meal, one directly or indirectly kills or mutilates other living things making a shelter will involve destruction of one form of thing to make another But it is Tad’s second phrase that is more relevant to this question. There certainly would be contradictions in using violence if what one wanted was a world without violence, but FC never claims to want a world without violence FC want a world without a huge global system that destroys the autonomy of individuals and small groups I also do not want a world without violence I want a world in which individuals can create their own lives and interactions in accordance with their desires — and, in such a world, conflict and therefore, violence is inevitable It is the state’s monopoly on violence that 1 oppose, and when individuals use violence against the stale (or any other aspect of the system of social control) and its tools, they are breaking that monopoly.

Tad Keplev and the critics of violence are wrong; Taking a life is not the ultimate act of domination. Forcing someone — or hundreds, thousands, millions, billions — into dependency on a social system that bleeds their lives away to reproduce itself and in exchange for survival (in the worst cases, not even that) and possibly also a few trinkets and glass beads — that is the ultimate act of domination. The killer lays no claim to the life of the victim until they kill them, and even then they lay no claim to the life but only to the ending of that life. Domination consists of forcing people to give away their life energy while they are living. Certainly, dominators (or dominating institutions) sometimes kill to enforce their power, but as the cliché says “the living envy the dead”.

FC’s targets are precisely people who choose, by their research or other work activities, to uphold and increase domination The “absolute irrevocable removal” of such a person takes nothing away from me that I would want to keep Because I am selfish. I will never willingly sacrifice myself, but I will gladly sacrifice anything or anyone that interferes with my ability to create my own life and interactions as I choose ‘Human community’ is an abstraction. Real interactions and associations are those experienced by individuals — either as self-determined creations or as impositions — not the mystical connections which spring from such abstractions as humanity or species being. My interactions with cops, high-tech researchers in social control, stale bureaucrats, capitalists, religious leaders or any other authority figure, no matter how indirect the interaction is one in which I am imposed upon, one aimed at making my life alien from me. Such an interaction can only impoverish me. The death of any such a figure of authority therefore does not impoverish me and may well enrich me. Indeed, it can add a little brightness to my life, knowing that I have successfully managed to attack, in however small a way, the structures of authority — even if that involves killing someone who has willingly chosen to be a bully-boy for authority. Certainly, it makes more sense tactically to attack targets of more significance than any individual can ever be in maintaining authority — but such attacks on property also get condemned by those in power as “mindless terrorism”. And they are equally condemned by those who prefer to do nothing but continually beg the state to, please, abolish itself and, in the meantime, be nicer to poor, sweet, harmless little anarchists.

I am not meaning to be overly harsh to Tad. His article at least shows some sympathy for FC’s hatred of the technological system and avoids the reactionary hysteria found in Slingshot and numerous other anarchist periodicals. But in his assessment of violence, Tad seems to be kissing a bit too much pacifist ass. Destruction of a global social system will involve violence, and that violence would not be ironic or contradictory with its goal, it would be the unconstrained expression of the passion that those who are taking their lives back feel against the system that keeps them alienated.

Free Ted K

#49–50 Sep 1997

Former maths professor and Montana hermit Ted Kaczynski will be facing trial as the Unabomber in Sacremento, California, from 12^th November 1992. His trial — which could last three months, will se whether FBI claims that he killed two technocrats and injured two others as a result of a 17 year long letter bombing campaign are lies.

We know for a fact that Ted K has been framed. It’d have been impossible for him to have heard about the Oklahoma City bombing, travelled from Lincoln, Montana, to Oakland California three states away by Greyhound bus, and then posted out a parcel bomb and three communiques there all on the 13^th May 1995 as the FBI maintain. It’s just physically impossible! ...

Concerning The Case of Theodore Kaczynski

#51 Mar 1998

A post-trial letter from the ex-Maths professor and Montana hermit framed as the Unabomber

Last 22^nd January 1998, Ted Kaczynski was sentenced to life imprisonment ...

“For a matter of months preceding the beginning of my trial on Nov. 12, 1997, I had been aware that my attorneys wanted to use a defense that would be based on supposed evidence of mental impairment. However, my attorneys had led me to believe that I would have a considerable measure of control over the defense strategy, hence I was under the impression that I would be able to limit the presentation of mental evidence to some items that at that time I thought might have some validity.

The first weeks of the trial were devoted to selection of a jury, a process that told me little about the defense that my attorneys planned to use. But in late November I discovered that my attorneys had prepared a defense that would virtually portray me as insane, and that they were going to force this defense on me in spite of my bitter resistance to it.

For the present I will not review in detail what happened between late November 1997 and January 22, 1998. Suffice it to say that the judge in my case, Garland E. Burell, decided that my attorneys had the legal right to force their defense on me over my objections; that it was too late for me to replace my attorneys with a certain distinguished attorney who had offered to represent me and had stated his intention to use a defense not based on any supposed mental illness; and that it was too late for me to demand the right to act as my own attorney.

This put me in such a position that I had only one way left to prevent my attorneys from using false information to represent me to the world as insane: I agreed to plead guilty to the charges in exchange for withdrawal of the prrosecution’s request for the death penalty. I also had to give up al right to appeal, which leaves me with a virtual certain of spending my life in prison. I am not afraid of the death penalty, and I agreed to this bargain only to end the trial and thus prevent my attorneys from representing me as insane. It should be noted that the defense my attorneys had planned could not have led to my release; it was only intended to save me from the death penalty.

By concealing their intentions from me and discouraging me from finding anohther attorney before it was too late, my attorneys have done me very great harm: they have forced me to sacrifice my right to an appeal that might have led to my release; they have already made public the opinions of supposed experts who portray me as crazy; and they have caused me to lose my opportunity to be represented by a distinguished attorney who would have portrayed me in a very different light.

Perhaps I ought to hate my attorneys for what they have done to me, but I do not. Their motives were in no way malicious. They are essentially conventional people who are blind to some of the implications of this case, and they acted as they did because they subscribe to certain professional principles that they believe left them no alternative. These principles may seem rigid and even ruthless to a non-lawyer, but there is no doubt that my attorneys believe in them sincerely. Morever, on a personal level my attorneys have treated me with great generosity and have performed many kindnesses for me. (But these can never compensate for the harm they have done me through their handling of my case.)

Recent events constitute a major defeat for me. But the end is not yet. More will be heard from me in the future.

Theodore J. Kaczynski
January 26, 1998

P.s. Feel free to publish this message.”

The Framing of Ted Kaczynski

#51 Mar 1998

An hour-long video exposing how the Unabomber suspect was set up, only £5 from BCM 1715, London WC1N 3XX.

Write letters of support to:

Ted Kaczynski (X-Ref 316854), ...

Emporia State

#56 Jun 1999

John Moore on the Crystal Palace and its aftermath

The Crystal Palace is Dostoevsky’s crowning symbol for the barrenness of industrial civilization ... In the Crystal Palace everything will be provided, man’s every desire will be satisfied, he will be insulated from pain — but the more he becomes the automaton consumer the more he will also suffer from excruciating boredom ... The Crystal Palace is the supreme economic manifestation of the utilitarian, liberal-rationalist philosophy: and it is the bourgeois paradise.

— John Carroll

The Crystal Palace burned down, of course, in 1936. But like a phoenix, or dragon’s teeth sown in the earth, it sprang up everywhere as the shopping mall.

May 1998

Earth First! amnesiacs complain that council plans to build 18 multiplex cinemas plus 1000 rooftop car parking spaces on the vacant site of the Crystal Palace break the understanding that further building on the site would ‘reflect the style of the original Crystal Palace’.

Welcome to the Milton Keynes of the soul.

In the hothouse environment of the mall, designer label commodities hold their grand parade, showing off their trophies, their human conquests.

During previous centuries millions died due to a wasting disease called consumption; in the present century millions also die due to a wasting disease called consumption.

In the emporia state, production is concealed, energy congealed, eyes sealed and hearts annealed.

The UK shopping centre encourages inwardness. The elements and inclement weather conditions are banished, and the massed ranks of shops haughtily turn their backs on the hostile outside world. The chill wind gusting along the back alley should find no place here. And yet still the draught penetrates. For when shoppers look within they find a barren wasteland of commodities, and shiver as the wind howls through their empty souls.

Laughter is not permitted in the shopping mall, neither outbursts of joy nor corrisive mockery. Consumption is a serious business, and misery finds a ready counterfeit in solemnity.

Some women refer, only half-jokingly, to the idea of ‘retail therapy’: shopping as consolation for the fact that domesticated life is shit. If you can’t change yourself or your world, change your image, change your commodities.

Thirty years of built-in obsolescence was condemned as a capitalist con; now both capital and consumers benefit from it. Capital maximises profit; consumers gain a pretext for consuming again and again.

Designer labels

Identifying with capital, acquiring a corporate identity — even during leisure-time, labour’s twin. Paying to act as a mobile advertisement and to extend capital’s empire to all time and space. An acceleration of capitalist fashion: a desire to connect with the increasingly elusive moment by purchasing a brand new commodity. ‘Brand’ — a term used for the branding of cattle as property, or human flesh for penal purposes; also indicates a stigma, as in the phrase ‘the brand of Cain’. Ever murdered your kin? Ever feel you’ve been shopped?

The myth of postindustrialism

We inhabit the factory and the factory inhabits us. The clothes we wear, the food we eat, the buildings in which we live, work and die, the books we read, the media we ingest, the ideas we think — are all factory produced. And yet chaos is everywhere. Even as I walk through the barren waste of the shopping centre, I look up and see the sun boiling, the clouds scudding by, a flock of birds veering across the sky — and I feel the exquisite pulses, flows and currents that flow through my body.

The capitalist imperative: adapt or perish

A third alternative: rebel!

August 1998

Shopping centre travel agency poster: ‘Cut-price flights to the sun’.

Summer 1999

Total eclipse.

“I do not find it difficult to survive here”

#56 Jun 1999

A letter from Ted Kaczynski on his imprisonment

Thank you for your letter of September 8. I don’t know what press reports you may have said about the ADX, but you should bear in mind that press reports are wildly inaccurate — as I learned from press reports about my own case.

I think it is inhuman to keep people locked up under any conditions, but beyond the mere fact of imprisonment I don’t feel that the conditions here are bad as you seem to believe. I’ll describe them briefly, but it must be understood that this description applies only to the part of the prison where the high-profile (that is, the famous) prisoners are kept. I know nothing about the rest of the prison.

...

Ted K. Update

#56 Jun 1999

State-styled Unabomber Dr Kaczynski’s trial in December 1997 was a farce. His lawyers kept him virtually incommunicardo and ignored his instructions....

...

Ted K Update

#57–58 Autumn 1999

Ted Kaczynski, imprisoned as the Unabomber, had his first appeal turned down this June. He was not helped by his lawyer, Prof. Richard Bonney of Virginia Law School, fucking him off within three weeks of the appeal. Ted K was forced to hand-write a 120 page submission to court himself despite his lack of ...

...

Ted Speaks

#57–58 Autumn 1999

This June, Ted Kaczynski-the State-styled ‘Unabomber’-gave an unprecidented interview to an ex-EF! Journalista. Below is Ted’s story which we publish jointly with Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed.

Kaczynski’s story represents a parable:

Once upon a time there was a continent covered with beautiful pristine wilderness, where giant trees towered over lush mountainsides and rivers ran wild and free through deserts, where raptors soared and beavers labored at their pursuits and people lived in harmony with wild nature, accomplishing every task they needed to accomplish on a daily basis using only stones, bones and wood, walking gently on the Earth. Then came the explorers, conquerors, missionaries, soldiers, merchants and immigrants with their advanced technology, guns, and government. The wild life that had existed for millennia started dying, killed by a disease brought by alien versions of progress, arrogant visions of manifest destiny and a runaway utilitarian science.

In just 500 years, almost all the giant trees have been clear-cut and chemicals now poison the rivers; the eagle has faced extinction and the beaver’s work has been supplanted by the Army Corps of Engineers. And how have the people fared? What one concludes is most likely dependent on how well one is faring economically, emotionally and physically in this competitive technological world and the level of privilege one is afforded by the system. But for those who feel a deep connection to, a love and longing for, the wilderness and the wildness that once was, for the millions now crowded in cities, poor and oppressed, unable to find a clear target for their rage because the system is virtually omnipotent, these people are not faring well. All around us, as a result of human greed and a lack of respect for all life, wild nature and Mother Earth’s creatures are suffering. These beings are the victims of industrial society.

Cutting the bloody cord, that’s what we feel, the delirious exhilaration of independence, a rebirth backward in time and into primeval liberty, into freedom in the most simple, literal, primitive meaning of the word, the only meaning that really counts. The freedom, for example, to commit murder and get away with it scot-free, with no other burden than the jaunty halo of conscience.

My God! I’m thinking, what incredible shit we put up with most of our lives — the domestic routine, the stupid and useless and degrading jobs, the insufferable arrogance of elected officials, the crafty cheating and the slimy advertising of the businessmen, the tedious wars in which we kill our buddies instead of our real enemies back home in the capital, the foul, diseased and hideous cities and towns we live in, the constant petty tyranny of the automatic washers, the automobiles and TV machines and telephones-! ah Christ!,... what intolerable garbage and what utterly useless crap we bury ourselves in day by day, while patiently enduring at the same time the creeping strangulation of the clean white collar and the rich but modest four-in-hand garrote!

Such are my thoughts — you wouldn’t call them thoughts would you? — such are my feelings, a mixture of revulsion and delight, as we float away on the river, leaving behind for a while all that we most heartily and joyfully detest. That’s what the first taste of the wild does to a man, after having been penned up for too long in the city. No wonder the Authorities are so anxious to smother the wilderness under asphalt and reservoirs. They know what they are doing. Play safe. Ski only in a clockwise direction. Let’s all have fun together.

— Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire, 1968

“I read Edward Abbey in mid-eighties and that was one of the things that gave me the idea that, ‘yeah, there are other people out there that have the same attitudes that I do.’ I read The Monkeywrench Gang, I think it was. But what first motivated me wasn’t anything I read. I just got mad seeing the machines ripping up the woods and so forth...”

— Dr. Theodore Kaczynski, in an interview with the Earth First! Journal, Administrative Maximum Facility Prison, Florence, Colorado, USA, June 1999.

Theodore Kaczynski developed a negative attitude toward the techno-industrial system very early in his life. It was in 1962, during his last year at Harvard, he explained, when he began feeling a sense of disillusionment with the system. And he says he felt quite alone. “Back in the sixties there had been some critiques of technology, but as far as 1 knew there weren’t people who were against the technological system as-such... It wasn’t until 1971 or 72, shortly after I moved to Montana, that I read Jaques Ellul’s book, The Technological Society.” The book is a masterpiece. I was very enthusiastic when I read it. I thought, ‘look, this guy is saying things I have been wanting to say all along.’”

Why, I asked, did he personally come to be against technology? His immediate response was, “Why do you think? It reduces people to gears in a machine, it takes away our autonomy and our freedom.” But there was obviously more to it than that. Along with the rage he felt against the machine, his words revealed an obvious love for a very special place in the wilds of Montana. He became most animated, spoke most passionately, while relating stories about the mountain life he created there and then sought to defend against the encroachment of the system. “The honest truth is that I am not really politically oriented. I would have really rather just be living out in the woods. If nobody had started cutting roads through there and cutting the trees down and come buzzing around in helicopters and snowmobiles I would still just be living there and the rest of the world could just take care of itself. I got involved in political issues because I was driven to it, so to speak. I’m not really inclined in that direction.”

Kaczynski moved in a cabin that he built himself near Lincoln, Montana in 1971. His first decade there he concentrated on acquiring the primitive skills that would allow him to live autonomously in the wild. He explained that the urge to do this had been a part of his psyche since childhood. “Unquestionably there is no doubt that the reason I dropped out of the technological system is because I had read about other ways of life, in particular that of primitive peoples. When I was about eleven I remember going to the little local library in Evergreen Park, Illinois. They had a series of books published by the Smithsonian Institute that addressed various areas of science. Among other things, I read about anthropology in a book on human prehistory. I found it fascinating. After reading a few more books on the subject of Neanderthal man and so forth, I had this itch to read more. I started asking myself why and I came to the realization that what I really wanted was not to read another book, but that I just wanted to live that way.”

Kaczynski says he began an intensive study of how to identify wild edible plants, track animals and replicate primitive technologies, approaching the task like the scholar he was. “Many years ago I used to read books like, for example, Ernest Thompson Seton’s “Lives of Game Animals” to learn about animal behavior. But after a certain point, after living in the woods for a while, I developed an aversion to reading any scientific accounts. In some sense reading what the professional biologists said about wildlife ruined or contaminated it for me. What began to matter to me was the knowledge I acquired about wildlife through personal experience.

Kaczynski spoke at length about the life he led in his small cabin with no electricity and no running water. It was this lifestyle and the actual cabin that his attorneys would use to try to call his sanity into question during his trial. It was a defense strategy that Kaczynski said naturally greatly offended him. We spoke about the particulars of his daily routine. “I have quite a bit of experience identifying wild edible plants,” he said proudly, “it’s certainly one of the most fulfilling activities that I know of, going out in the woods and looking for things that are good to eat. But the trouble with a place like Montana, how it differs from the Eastern forests, is that starchy plant foods are much less available. There are edible roots but they are generally very small ones and the distribution is limited. The best ones usually grow down in the lower areas which are agricultural areas, actually ranches, and the ranchers presumably don’t want you digging up their meadows, so starchy foods were civilized foods. I bought flour, rice, corn meal, rolled oats, powdered milk and cooking oil.”

Kaczynski lamented never being able to accomplish three things to his satisfaction: building a crossbow that he could use for hunting, making a good pair of deerhide moccasins that would withstand the daily hikes he took on the rocky hillsides, and learning how to make fire consistently without using matches. He says he kept very busy and was happy with his solitary life. “One thing I found when living in the woods was that you get so that you don’t worry about the future, you don’t worry about dying, if things are good right now you think, ‘well, if I die next week, so that, things are good right now.’ I think it was Jane Austen who wrote in one of her novels that happiness is always something that you are anticipating in the future, not something that you have right now. This isn’t always true. Perhaps it is true in civilization, but when you get out of the system and become re-adapted to a different way of life, happiness is often something that you have right now.”

He readily admits he committed quite a few acts of monkeywrenching during the seventies, but there came a time when he decided to devote more energy into fighting against the system. He describes the catalyst:

“The best place, to me, was the largest remnant of this plateau that dates from the tertiary age. It’s kind of rolling country, not flat, and when you get to the edge of it you find these ravines that cut very steeply in to cliff-like drop-offs and there was even a waterfall there. It was about a two days hike from my cabin. That was the best spot until the summer of 1983. That summer there were too many people around my cabin so I decided I needed some peace. I went back to the plateau and when I got there I found they had put a road right through the middle of it” His voice trails off; he pauses, then continues, “You just can’t imagine how upset I was. It was from that point on I decided that, rather than trying to acquire further wilderness skills, I would work on getting back at the system. Revenge. That wasn’t the first time I ever did any monkeywrenching, but at that point, that sort of thing became a priority for me... I made a conscious effort to read things that were relevant to social issues, specifically the technological problem. For one thing, my concern was to understand how societies change, and for that purpose I read anthropology, history, a little bit of sociology and psychology, but mostly anthropology and history.”

Kaczynski soon came to the conclusion that reformist strategies that merely called for “fixing” the system were not enough, and he professed little confidence in the idea that a mass change in consciousness might someday be able to undermine the technological system. “I don’t think it can be done. In part because of the human tendency, for most people, there are exceptions, to take the path of least resistance. They’ll take the easy way out, and giving up your car, your television set, your electricity, is not the path of least resistance for most people. As I see it, I don’t think there is any controlled or planned way in which we can dismantle the industrial system. I think that the only way we will get rid of it is if it breaks down and collapses. That’s why I think the consequences will be something like the Russian Revolution, or circumstances like we see in other places in the world today like the Balkans, Afghanistan, Rwanda. This does, I think, pose a dilemma for radicals who take a non-violent point of view. When things break down, there is going to be violence and this does raise a question, I don’t know if I exactly want to call it a moral question, but the point is that for those who realize the need to do away with the techno-industrial system, if you work for its collapse, in effect you are killing a lot of people. If it collapses, there is going to be social disorder, there is going to be starvation, there aren’t going to be any more spare parts or fuel for farm equipment, there won’t be any more pesticide or fertilizer on which modern agriculture is dependent. So there isn’t going to be enough food to go around, so then what happens? This is something that, as far as I’ve read, I haven’t seen any radicals facing up to.

At this point he was asking me, as a radical, to face up to this issue. I responded I didn’t know the answer. He said neither did he, clasped his hands together and looked at me intently. His distinctly Midwestern accent, speech pattern, and the colloquialisms he used were so familiar and I thought about how much he reminded me of the professors I had as a student of anthropology, history and political philosophy in Ohio. I decided to relate to him the story of how one of my graduate advisors, Dr. Resnick, also a Harvard alumni, once posed the following question in a seminar on political legitimacy: Say a group of scientists asks for a meeting with the leading politicians in the country to discuss the introduction of a new invention. The scientists explain that the benefits of the technology are indisputable, that the invention will increase efficiency and make everyone’s life easier. The only down side, they caution, is that for it to work, forty-thousand innocent people will have to be killed each year. Would the politicians decide to adopt the new invention or not? The class was about to argue that such a proposal would be immediately rejected out of hand, then he casually remarked, “We already have it — the automobile.” He had forced us to ponder how much death and innocent suffering our society endures as a result of our commitment to maintaining the technological system — a system we all are born into now and have no choice but to try and adapt to. Everyone can see the existing technological society is violent, oppressive and destructive, but what can we do?

“The big problem is that people don’t believe a revolution is possible, and it is not possible precisely because they do not believe it is possible. To a large extent I think the eco-anarchist movement is accomplishing a great deal, but I think they could do it better... The real revolutionaries should separate themselves from the reformers... And I think that it would be good if a conscious effort was being made to get as many people as possible introduced to the wilderness. In a general way, I think what has to be done is not to try and convince or persuade the majority of people that we are right, as much as try to increase tensions in society to the point where things start to break down. To create a situation where people get uncomfortable enough that they’re going to rebel. So the question is how do you increase those tensions? I don’t know.”

Kaczynski wanted to talk about every aspect of the techno-industrial system in detail, and further, about why and how we should be working towards bringing about its demise. It was a subject we had both given a lot of thought to. We discussed direct action and the limits of political ideologies. But by far, the most interesting discussions revolved around our views about the superiority of wild life and wild nature. Towards the end of the interview, Kaczynski related a poignant story about the close relationship he had developed with snowshoe rabbit.

“This is kind of personal,” he begins by saying, and I ask if he wants me to turn off the tape. He says “no, I can tell you about it. While I was living in the woods I sort of invented some gods for myself” and he laughs. “Not that I believed in these things intellectually, but they were ideas that sort of corresponded with some of the feelings I had. I think the first one I invented was Grandfather Rabbit. You know the snowshoe rabbits were my main source of meat during the winters. I had spent a lot of time learning what they do and following their tracks all around before I could get close enough to shoot them. Sometimes you would track a rabbit around and around and then the tracks disappear. You can’t figure out where that rabbit went and lose the trail. I invented a myth for myself, that this was the Grandfather Rabbit, the grandfather who was responsible for the existence of all other rabbits. He was able to disappear, that is why you couldn’t catch him and why you would never see him... Every time I shot a snowshoe rabbit, I would always say ‘thank you Grandfather Rabbit.’ After a while I acquired an urge to draw snowshoe rabbits. I sort of got involved with them to the extent that they would occupy a great deal of my thought. I actually did have a wooden object that, among other things, I carved a snowshoe rabbit in. I planned to do a better one, just for the snowshoe rabbits, but I never did get it done. There was another one that I sometimes called the Will ‘o the Wisp, or the wings of the morning. That’s when you go out in to the hills in the morning and you just feel drawn to go on and on and on and on, then you are following the wisp. That was another god that I invented for myself.”

So Ted Kaczynski, living out in the wilderness, like generations of prehistoric peoples before him, had innocently rediscovered the forest’s gods. I wondered if he felt that those gods had forsaken him now as he sat facing life in prison with no more freedom, no more connection to the wild, nothing left of that life that was so important to him except for his sincere love of nature, his love of knowledge and his commitment to the revolutionary project of hastening the collapse of the techno-industrial system. I asked if he was afraid of losing his mind, if the circumstances he found himself in now would break his spirit? He answered, “No, what worries me is that I might in a sense adapt to this environment and come to be comfortable here and not resent it anymore. And I am afraid that as the years go by that I may forget, I may begin to lose my memories of the mountains and the woods and that’s what really worries me, that I might lose those memories, and lose that sense of contact with wild nature in general. But I am not afraid they are going to break my spirit.” And he offered the following advice to green anarchists who share his critique of the technological system and want to hasten the collapse of, as Edward Abbey put it, “the destroying juggernaut of industrial civilization”: “Never lose hope, be persistent and stubborn and never give up. There are many instances in history where apparent losers suddenly turn out to be winners unexpectedly, so you should never conclude all hope is lost.”

Statement from Ted Kaczynski

#59 Mar 2000

Dear GA,

Beau Freidlander is publishing my book, Truth versus Lies, and he has been generously helpful to me in various ways, for example, by providing me with money to coveer my mailing costs....

Friends of Ted Kaczynski

#59 Mar 2000

Ted’s expose of the lies told about him by his family and the mainstream media, Truth versus Lies, has been awaiting publication by Context Books for the last year. One reason for this delay is that Ted’s grassing brother David is not allowing Ted to use letters he wrote proving David’s a liar.

Friends of Ted Kaczynski

#60–61 Jun 2000

Arrested in 1995 as the Unabomber, Amerika’s Most Wanted, and accused of a 17 year-long anti-tech mail bombing campaign that left genetic engineers, cyberneticians, timber lobbyists and others dead and injured, Ted was sentenced to life without parole after a farcical trial in Sacramento, California, in 1998.

Ted is now held in Florence supermax, notorious across Amerika. Denied visits from nearly everyone he wants to see, Ted’s only real contact with the Outside is by mail. His publisher Context Books, used to cover Ted’s mailing costs but his deal with them fell through.

Please make your donations to support an anarchist political prisoner

A letter can cost as little as 36c

Ted Kaczynski, P.O.B 8500, ...

Lydia Eccles, P.O.B ...

Green Anarchist, BCM 1715, London WCIN 3XX, UK

Donations preferably in dollars and well-concealed cash. Clearly mark your donation ‘Friends of Ted Kaczynski’ and leave cheques ‘Payee’ blank. Donations straight to Ted should be by international money orders (IMO) and quote his prisoner number, 04475–046.

Editorial #1

SB #63 Jun 2001

Editorial #2

SB #63 Jun 2001

To get right to the point, yes, GA has split....

Comrades of Kaczynski Summer Solstice Communique

#64–65 Jun 2001

... Ted Kaczynski is an example of a modern hunter-gatherer. Although never able to live entirely off the system (he spent something like $200 or less a year on food, staples and supplies such as matches, excluding money spent on actions), Kaczynski is living proof that the civilised can make huge strides in attempting to go feral....

... As Comrades of Kaczynski, we remain in solidarity with every crack in every piece of concrete. We hope to spread similar cracks in the collective conciousness enforced by the Powers-That-Be, whether those powers are reformist / leftist / liberal groups trying to contain and control revolt or police officers ordering us back onto the sidewalks, off corporate lawns and eventually into jail cells and early graves. Any enemy of freedom and wildness is our enemy. No one is perfect, and in this light, we support all of our comrades both in physical prisons and in the mental prisons we are constantly breaking out of. The transition from theory to practice is a sloppy one, but one that Kaczynski made and made effectively. This ccivisation is most definitely collapsing, and all of us who love the wild are going to push this fucker over the edge.

No regrets in the war for the wild, bring on the fuckin; ruckus.

He Tried To Save Us by Comrades of Kaczynski

#64–65 Jun 2001

Pamphlets

He Tried To Save Us by Comrades of Kaczynski. Price from Anarchists Anonymous Distro, P.O.Box 580444 MPLS, MN 55458, USA.

This 80-page compilation of selected pieces by or about Ted Kaczynski (convicted of the Unabombings in 1998) includes his ‘Morality and Revolution’ from GA 60–61, pictures of Ted’s cabin under lock and key as evidence for his trial in a USAF hangar, and the original Postal Inspection Service wanted poster. Aside from Ted’s rather obviously polemical short story ‘Ship of Fools’ (first published in Off) and his 1971 essay (which his grassing brother claimed ‘resembled’ the Freedom Club manifesto, Industrial Society & Its Future despite its reformist conclusions), none of this material features on the very out-of-date and rubbishy main website regarding Ted K and the Unabomber case — not even John Zerzan’s ‘Whose Unabomber?’, which has been around since 1995.

The complete intro, with its “one person can affect tremendous change” tone, demonstrates the Comrades of Kaczynski’s revolutionary credentials. Surprisingly then, relatively liberal discussion of the legal aspects of the case are most interesting — Michael Mello and the New Yorker author showing up the disgusting way Ted’s lawyers acted at trial--denying him counsel of his choice, keeping him in the dark about outside media coverage and even supressing defence campaigns before final ...

[1] “An Interview with Richard Hunt”. Web.archive. 12 March 2005. Archived from the original on March 12, 2005. Retrieved 14 May 2015.

[2] “Counter Information on Green Anarchist”. www.counterinfo.org.uk. Retrieved 2016-12-27.

[3] “Green Anarchist Documents”. Stewart home society. Retrieved 14 May 2015.

[4] “Counter Information on Green Anarchist”. Counterinfo. 28 April 1999. Retrieved 14 May 2015.

[5] autonomous.org.uk Archived September 27, 2007, at the Wayback Machine

[6] Black writes, “Bakunin considered Marx, ‘the German scholar, in his threefold capacity as an Hegelian, a Jew, and a German,’ to be a ‘hopeless statist.’ A Hegelian, a Jew, a sort-of scholar, a Marxist, a hopeless (city-) statist — does this sound like anybody familiar?’ Full text available on The Anarchist Library at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-anarchy-after-leftism

[7] Hunt’s full biographical details can wait for his obituary, surely not far off following a mentally debilitating stroke two years ago.

[8] In fact, GA was first to interview Jake Burbridge and Jason Torrance, Earth First!s founders in UK, when they were still out painting dumpsters around Hastings at night. At this time, they hadn’t met exRainforest Action’s George Marshall, who had peacenik contacts that gave them numbers enough for inter/national headlinegrabbing spectaculars.

[9] Apparently as a result of a fascist customers officer, Jim White, that Hepple had sacked for involvement in CS gas smuggling insisting on his accuser being named at his industrial tribunal.

[10] We found Class War had more principle and humour than most workerist groups — not entirely devoting their whole programme to chasing anarcho-monopolist AK Presses favour and thus Chumba’s money — though they were (are!) still publicity hounds full of hot air.

[11] A Lie Too Far got an absurdly hostile review in Class War as their Leeds group was dominated by Searchlight’s Paul Bowman, who Red Action backed to the hilt in one bogus ‘inquiry’ after another as they were then equally complicit. As GA wouldn’t ‘toe the line’ RA had set on this, their ensuing fatwa meant hassle from their decidedly slow ‘street meat’ for years even after RA themselves broke with Searchlight. Now, of course, Bowman is a thoroughly nice chap and an environmentalist following a mental breakdown as a result of this affaire, though he split Class War and then bizarrely tried to dissolve his own faction before it was resolved. Red Action, of course, have an Irish line of their own to follow. Having tried to dominate AFA for so long through a combination of public rhetoric lauding ‘unity’ and behind-thescenes manipulation and thuggery, they’ve now thrown in with hopeless Socialist Alliance electoralism and Sinn Fein-style community-building through their front, the International Working Class Association (IWCA). I think, to date, they have one local councillor to show for their typically principled volte face.

[12] I was actually first to pitch a tent at Tothill, later an important protest camp. Unfortunately, due to bail conditions set after the Operation Washington arrests, subsequent involvement was limited to advising 3^rd Battle of Newbury on blockading contractor depots, etc.

[13] Hepple never offered to wrap our guns for us, but its difficult not to see the same sort of offer and the same consequences as both these parallel State ‘games’ targeting the direct action movement were played out.

[14] We later worked out that it’d have been cheaper for the cops to have bought up every copy of the zine we produced at £5,000 each than bring their prosecution, and ran a “£5,000 to cops” line on GA’s mast head to taunt them about it!

[15] Having begun his career defending such early-1970s ‘Robin Hoods’ as antiapartheid campaigners caught sabotaging the All Blacks rugby tour and pornographers, McDonald is ending it as the first Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) to be cautioned for cannabis possession.

[16] Hepple wasn’t the only one in Lancaster at the time that the police unreasonably failed to question on visiting there. This erstwhile Ecodefence editor of GA — though endorsed by perpetual naif ‘Grassy’ Noel Molland in characteristic stereotypical terms as a “good activist” — used to churn out sabotage manuals like billy-oh and was delighted every time one got national publicity — at the start of the Newbury campaign, for example, when he was good enough to attend a GA editorial meeting at the local university and give each of us something compromising on his usual theme the day before the cops simultaneously raided every known GA editor — except him, that is...

[17] Hepple / Matthews claims he only got into all this because of his wife’s interest in ufology rather than serving some State agenda, though full documentation questioning his version can be found in O’Hara’s extended and rather odd pamphlet, At War With the Universe. Nowadays, Hepple / Matthews has nothing to do with UFOs either, promoting wrestling in the Midlands under yet another pseudonym ‘Matt Violent’. (See, Tim, you did have to get yourself another name, just like we said you would that night in Southport..!

[18] The linguist Noam Chomsky and playwright Harold Pinter — the ‘usual suspects’, in fact.

[19] To give him his due, whatever else Hunt has said, even he has never said anything this offensive or stupid.

[20] GA has had so many problems with mother-fuckers, pro or anti, over the last twenty years that we now make a point of asking anyone wanting to get involved what their attitudes are on the subject. Those that just think it’s an odd question usually get in. Those that start raving insanely about childhood reminiscences involving having to wear the Little Lord Fauntleroy suit or how their mother was a saint or how she used to masturbate them, etc, don’t. Ever. No thanks — been there, done that.

[21] This joke appropriation of Irn Bru’s ad line — a traditional Glaswegian beverage I am partial to — met with an especially humourless, selfrighteous response from Booth, who wasted considerable bandwidth spouting Sax Wood-style about Alan Albon’s primordial soup on the Net. Particular satisfying, then, to see a later contributor to the list note that the ‘original and best’ GA at least pre-dated his and had the additional merit of not being pissboring. Not that this will make the slightest impression on Steve, of course, who assumes all adverse comment is the result of a global anarcho-primitivist conspiracy to prevent him achieving ‘deserved greatness’ rather than just being what it obviously is to the rest of us, fair comment.

[22] The six previous Irrationalist articles were (1) Anarchist Lancaster Bomber 4, August 1993, p. 7; (2) LB7, Autumn 1994 ...

Linked underneath each heading.

A text dump on Green Anarchist

An Introduction & a Critique

Wikipedia Page

Early years

The Nineties

The GANDALF trial

Booth and Rogers’ Green Anarchists

The Left Overs: How Fascists Court the Post-Left

Chapter 1: The Early Composition of Fascist Individualism

Chapter 2: The Creation of the Post-Left

Chapter 3: The Fascist Creep

Conclusion

— Primary Source Material —

Richard Hunt’s Vanguardism

Editorial: Pieces of Silver by Alan Albon

Industrial Slavery or Rural Freedom

How Adam Smith’s Theory of ‘Division of Labour’ Is Used to Exploit the Third World

Shovels or Guns

On The Periphery

The Geographical Periphery

The Political Periphery

The Mental Periphery

Two Decades of Disobedience: A retrospective on Green Anarchist’s first twenty years

Our Origins

The Hunt Years

The 4th Collective

The Gandalf Trial

The Home Clones

Splits and Schisms

Current Issues

An Interview with Richard Hunt

The Irrationalists Debate

Politics and the Ethical Void

The Irrationalists

Eat Shit or Fight Back: The Choice is Yours

One Office Block, One Blue Truck

Let a Thousand Aum Cults Sarinate…

I Have a Dream

Cold War into Cola War

New World Ordure

The Importance of Ethics

The Ethical Void

The Ethical Imperative To Act

Numbers are Not Important

Irrationalism: Steve Booth Against “The Machine”

The Return of The Irrationalists

Our Obvious Critics

But It’s More Than This

False Flag

Dancing with the devil: On the politics of Green Anarchist, again!

Class an irrelevance?

Maximalist Anarchism?

Zerzan and Reification

False Flag Again

Mouthpiece Micah

Fuckwit, His Guru

False Flag

The Irrationalists 7[22]

Introduction

In what way is irrationalism an outworking of anarchist theory

The state we’re in and where it’s all heading

Liberalism becomes totalitarian

What do we want? What do we really, really want?

An end to gesture politics

The future — more of the same, only worse

Types of protest groups

The uselessness of terrorism

An end to negotiation

Steve Booth on the Irrationalists

(1) Guilt by Associated Methods

(2) The Dogma of Pacifism

(3) Not Now .... Not Never —

(4) We Don’t Like It Because It Isn’t Nice....

‘Irrationalism’ and Revolution

Will the System Collapse of Itself?

Do We Deserve to Go on?

To Build the Strong and Active Protest Movement

That ‘Leftism’ is an Escape Mechanism

Non Hierarchical, Flexible, Hydra Headed Movement

Technophilia, An Infantile Disorder by Bob Black

The 4^th Collective