Friday, April 30, 2010
HUMOUR:
UTOPIA AND ANTI-UTOPIA:
Now for something a bit off the beaten path. The following mini science fiction story is from the British LibCom site. I admit it's something of an in joke, and non-anarchist readers of this blog (the vast majority of visitors) might not get the point. To anarchists outside of the primmie/post leftist cult, however, it will be amusing. To help the non-anarchists reading this I will say that there is a small section of the anarchist movement, mostly American, who think that a free society involves "abolishing civilization". Yeah, I know this is something like admitting that one has a cousin who exposes himself to small children. All that I can say is that this view is not that of the general anarchist movement at any time in its history, is not that of any large segment of anarchists today and certainly is not mine. Ok, enough explanations and disclaimers. Here's the story. Enjoy.
@@@@@@@@@@@@
A communist encounter with the anti-authoritarian warrior society
Several decades after the global libertarian communist revolution, a worker-delegate travels to the rewilded former Canada to carry out a humanitarian mandate...
The sound of engines droned in the air. Below, the serried ranks of dirty, ragged people toiling in the organic turnip fields paused in their labour and raised their faces to the sky, their eyes wide with wonder. Such a sound had not been heard in Hippyshit Sustainable Human Settlement for decades. Across the valley, the unmistakable silhouette of a helicopter could be seen making a beeline for the collection of decrepit huts where the locals dragged themselves off to bed each night after the day's back breaking work was done. A murmur of dull resentment rises from the onlookers. "Syndies"
*
Worker no. 365759 turned to the pilot. “How much further is it, no. 214119?” he asked, craning his neck to get a better look at the terrain as the sleek, grey flying machine sped over the undulating hills of what, back in the day, had been known as Canada. The landscape was breathtaking. The advent of cold fusion, some decades ago, had drastically reduced the need for land – what with virtually limitless power, multi-storey farms, and no reason to expand production further, huge swathes of land were left to revert to pristine wilderness.
“We're almost at the place,” said the pilot laconically, chewing on the end of a toothpick as he spoke. “Give it another five minutes and you'll be able to see it, over that ridge.”
Worker looked where the pilot had pointed, and saw a broad clearing on the side of the hill they were approaching. If he squinted, he thought he could see a group of people, spaced out at regular intervals along narrow ridges that cut across the stretch of brown earth. For a moment, he wondered what on earth they could be doing – then he remembered. Of course, they were farming... but by hand? Or were those clumsy things they were holding ploughs of some sort?
“Damn primmos,” muttered Worker's fellow passenger, no. 743101. “Why the fuck do they get charity. They choose to live in the dirt they should deal with it.”
Worker shrugged. “It's not like we need any of it,” he said. “It's mostly junk that gets rejected by the planning bureaus, or whatever left in the communal storehouse. And besides, a lot of them don't know any different – there's kids down there that've only heard stories about civilization.”
“Yeah, I guess,” said 743101, staring pensively out of the window.
*
“Dude!”
The Wise Guy of Hippyshit was not pleased. He glared down at the frightened child standing before him, her toy clasped in her grubby fist. Behind her, a crowd of sustainable humans looked on with disapproval.
“That is not cool, bro,” he said, shaking his finger authoritatively. “You know the rules – we'll have no round wheels in this town.”
The girl looked at the wooden toy in her hands, dejectedly. It was a simple thing, a block of wood with a couple of axles and four, uneven wheels, with a string attached.
“Are you... sure, about this, Bill?” asked one of the sustainable humans, tentatively. “I mean, they look sort of... useful. At any rate, they've got to be better than the triangular ones we're using at the moment...”
The crowd turned to the dissenter, glaring. Bill adopted a pitying tone. “Don't you, like, understand?” He said, stroking his matted, fucking disgusting beard with one hand as he spoke. “Round wheels are like, authoritarian. That's capitalist technology man. The triangular wheel is liberating. Round wheels, like, just exist to conform to capitalist notions of efficiency...” There were nods at assent at this. “If we have round wheels, the next thing you know we'll have schools, prisons, banks...”
He got no further in his exposition of the evils of capitalist technology, as at that moment, with a thunderous roar, the dark shape of a helicopter appeared over the roofs of the village.
“Oh SHIT!” shouted Bill. “It's the Syndies, man! I always knew this day would come! They're back, and they've come to impose their technology on us! Bad vibes, dude!”
*
The chopper set down in the village square – or the village irregular shape, since straight lines had been out of favour at the time it was constructed. It was made of uneven cobbles that had been worn smooth over the decades by the tramp of exhausted feet out to the fields and back again, day after day after day.
A crowd gathered quickly as the two workers and pilot began to unload. The adults mostly looked suspicious or hostile, but the children seemed fascinated with the novelty of this vast metal thing from the sky. Some began to edge closer to the chopper, dodging their parents attempts to drag them back.
Bill arrived just as the last of the supplies were being unloaded, his face contorted in a scowl of defiance. “Stay back!” he called to the sustainable humans crowding around the machine. “Keep well back, dudes and dudettes! You don't want to like, become a part of the technology and not the other way around!”
Worker looked at the man quizzically. Turning, he pulled out his iPhone, where he had saved a pdf of his mandate from the delegates' council back in Vancouver Municipal Commune.
“People of Hippyshit,” he read, “due to the rampant disease and malnourishment which is apparently causing widespread infant mortality in your community, the workers of VMC have elected to send you this surplus of medical supplies and dietary supplements for the care of pregnant women and children. We understand you perfect right to free association, and to live where and how you choose – however, we feel kind of bad about how many of you seem to be dying of the common cold. As a consequence, please accept this donation as a gesture of goodwill...”
Worker trailed off. The hostility of the crowd had deepened.
“They're trying to spread (impose) their evil Frankenstein technology on us, and they doubtless have few homosexual friends!” cried Bill, gesturing at the helicopter. “Anti-authoritarian warriors, attack!”
With that word, a mass of malnourished, diseased, filthy hippies flung themselves at the workers and began to beat at them with their fists. Cries of "For Hippyshit!" and "Smash the megamachine!" could be heard, as the crowd hurled themselves at the invaders.
“Fuck this shit!” shouted Worker over the din. “Back in the chopper!”
“Right behind you!” shouted the pilot, picking up two particularly gross specimens by their dreadlocks and knocking their heads together.
The three of them fought their way to the helicopter doors, and closed them on the mob outside. “Floor it!” Worker yelled to the pilot. He didn't have to be told twice; the helicopter roared into the air, leaving the crowd of howling primitivists behind.
“On second thoughts,” said worker, wiping primmo blood off onto his jeans, "you were right. Fuck 'em.”
Note: this fan fiction was inspired by billblake, unhinged author of 'Of Martial Traditions & the Art of Rebellion'.
A communist encounter with the anti-authoritarian warrior society
Several decades after the global libertarian communist revolution, a worker-delegate travels to the rewilded former Canada to carry out a humanitarian mandate...
The sound of engines droned in the air. Below, the serried ranks of dirty, ragged people toiling in the organic turnip fields paused in their labour and raised their faces to the sky, their eyes wide with wonder. Such a sound had not been heard in Hippyshit Sustainable Human Settlement for decades. Across the valley, the unmistakable silhouette of a helicopter could be seen making a beeline for the collection of decrepit huts where the locals dragged themselves off to bed each night after the day's back breaking work was done. A murmur of dull resentment rises from the onlookers. "Syndies"
*
Worker no. 365759 turned to the pilot. “How much further is it, no. 214119?” he asked, craning his neck to get a better look at the terrain as the sleek, grey flying machine sped over the undulating hills of what, back in the day, had been known as Canada. The landscape was breathtaking. The advent of cold fusion, some decades ago, had drastically reduced the need for land – what with virtually limitless power, multi-storey farms, and no reason to expand production further, huge swathes of land were left to revert to pristine wilderness.
“We're almost at the place,” said the pilot laconically, chewing on the end of a toothpick as he spoke. “Give it another five minutes and you'll be able to see it, over that ridge.”
Worker looked where the pilot had pointed, and saw a broad clearing on the side of the hill they were approaching. If he squinted, he thought he could see a group of people, spaced out at regular intervals along narrow ridges that cut across the stretch of brown earth. For a moment, he wondered what on earth they could be doing – then he remembered. Of course, they were farming... but by hand? Or were those clumsy things they were holding ploughs of some sort?
“Damn primmos,” muttered Worker's fellow passenger, no. 743101. “Why the fuck do they get charity. They choose to live in the dirt they should deal with it.”
Worker shrugged. “It's not like we need any of it,” he said. “It's mostly junk that gets rejected by the planning bureaus, or whatever left in the communal storehouse. And besides, a lot of them don't know any different – there's kids down there that've only heard stories about civilization.”
“Yeah, I guess,” said 743101, staring pensively out of the window.
*
“Dude!”
The Wise Guy of Hippyshit was not pleased. He glared down at the frightened child standing before him, her toy clasped in her grubby fist. Behind her, a crowd of sustainable humans looked on with disapproval.
“That is not cool, bro,” he said, shaking his finger authoritatively. “You know the rules – we'll have no round wheels in this town.”
The girl looked at the wooden toy in her hands, dejectedly. It was a simple thing, a block of wood with a couple of axles and four, uneven wheels, with a string attached.
“Are you... sure, about this, Bill?” asked one of the sustainable humans, tentatively. “I mean, they look sort of... useful. At any rate, they've got to be better than the triangular ones we're using at the moment...”
The crowd turned to the dissenter, glaring. Bill adopted a pitying tone. “Don't you, like, understand?” He said, stroking his matted, fucking disgusting beard with one hand as he spoke. “Round wheels are like, authoritarian. That's capitalist technology man. The triangular wheel is liberating. Round wheels, like, just exist to conform to capitalist notions of efficiency...” There were nods at assent at this. “If we have round wheels, the next thing you know we'll have schools, prisons, banks...”
He got no further in his exposition of the evils of capitalist technology, as at that moment, with a thunderous roar, the dark shape of a helicopter appeared over the roofs of the village.
“Oh SHIT!” shouted Bill. “It's the Syndies, man! I always knew this day would come! They're back, and they've come to impose their technology on us! Bad vibes, dude!”
*
The chopper set down in the village square – or the village irregular shape, since straight lines had been out of favour at the time it was constructed. It was made of uneven cobbles that had been worn smooth over the decades by the tramp of exhausted feet out to the fields and back again, day after day after day.
A crowd gathered quickly as the two workers and pilot began to unload. The adults mostly looked suspicious or hostile, but the children seemed fascinated with the novelty of this vast metal thing from the sky. Some began to edge closer to the chopper, dodging their parents attempts to drag them back.
Bill arrived just as the last of the supplies were being unloaded, his face contorted in a scowl of defiance. “Stay back!” he called to the sustainable humans crowding around the machine. “Keep well back, dudes and dudettes! You don't want to like, become a part of the technology and not the other way around!”
Worker looked at the man quizzically. Turning, he pulled out his iPhone, where he had saved a pdf of his mandate from the delegates' council back in Vancouver Municipal Commune.
“People of Hippyshit,” he read, “due to the rampant disease and malnourishment which is apparently causing widespread infant mortality in your community, the workers of VMC have elected to send you this surplus of medical supplies and dietary supplements for the care of pregnant women and children. We understand you perfect right to free association, and to live where and how you choose – however, we feel kind of bad about how many of you seem to be dying of the common cold. As a consequence, please accept this donation as a gesture of goodwill...”
Worker trailed off. The hostility of the crowd had deepened.
“They're trying to spread (impose) their evil Frankenstein technology on us, and they doubtless have few homosexual friends!” cried Bill, gesturing at the helicopter. “Anti-authoritarian warriors, attack!”
With that word, a mass of malnourished, diseased, filthy hippies flung themselves at the workers and began to beat at them with their fists. Cries of "For Hippyshit!" and "Smash the megamachine!" could be heard, as the crowd hurled themselves at the invaders.
“Fuck this shit!” shouted Worker over the din. “Back in the chopper!”
“Right behind you!” shouted the pilot, picking up two particularly gross specimens by their dreadlocks and knocking their heads together.
The three of them fought their way to the helicopter doors, and closed them on the mob outside. “Floor it!” Worker yelled to the pilot. He didn't have to be told twice; the helicopter roared into the air, leaving the crowd of howling primitivists behind.
“On second thoughts,” said worker, wiping primmo blood off onto his jeans, "you were right. Fuck 'em.”
Note: this fan fiction was inspired by billblake, unhinged author of 'Of Martial Traditions & the Art of Rebellion'.
Labels: anarchism, anarchist humour, humour, LibCom, primitivism, science fiction
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
CONSUMERISM:
EARTH DAY AND MARKETING:
Earth Day is coming tomorrow, whoop de ding dong. Most good ideas are subject to the law of inevitable chintz, and the whole hoopla around Earth Day may indeed be the primary modern example (though I am sure that there are many close competitors). What exactly is more absurd, the declining portion of leftists who imagine that 'ecology" poses some "fundamental paradigm" for changing society(and their absurd religious apotheoses in our dear "primitivists) for the better or those who buy into the "propaganda model" as promoted by the official sponsors of such events as Earth Day ? Who knows ?
What I do know is that the official promotion of Earth Day by government and corporation has gutted the original concept of any useful meaning. What I did't realise was how far this process had progressed. the story below is from the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood, and it questions the idea of the overwhelming corporate sponsorship of Earth Day. What Molly finds most jaw droppingly amazing is the idea almost mentioned in passing ie "Earth Day shopping". Do people actually do this ? That is truly amazing. Holy Jesus H. Christ ! Turn your back for a minute and the kids and the dog are wrecking the house. It is right up their with the anarcho-nonsense spewed across the internet (using the height of technology) to promote some idea of the end of civilization. The difference is that large numbers of people buy the former idea while the latter is confined to an ever diminishing cult. I guess it's the old Biblical adage of the beam in one's own eye.
In any case, if you don't find the idea of "consuming for the ecology" silly then what can I say ? Welcome to Orwell's dystopia.
$$$$$$$$$$$$
MARKETING EARTH DAY(AND OTHER STUFF) TO CHILDREN:
Between Sesame's new green Elmo and Nick's Big Green Help, the children's media and marketing industries are going green in a big way this Earth Day. Or are they? In today's Huffington Post, CCFC's Susan Linn and Josh Golin lay out the harms inherent in the environmental lessons promoted by companies whose profits depend on inculcating consumerism in children.
Between Sesame's new green Elmo and Nick's Big Green Help, the children's media and marketing industries are going green in a big way this Earth Day. Or are they? In today's Huffington Post, CCFC's Susan Linn and Josh Golin lay out the harms inherent in the environmental lessons promoted by companies whose profits depend on inculcating consumerism in children.
In the coming year, CCFC will work to make the connections between marketing to children and environmental degradation more explicit. If you have ideas for campaigns that highlight this link, please send them to ccfc@jbcc.harvard.edu.
A link to the article is below. Happy Earth Day!
---------------
Marketing Earth Day (and Other Stuff) to Children
By Susan Linn and Josh Golin
Have you done your Earth Day shopping yet? Between greeting cards, jewelry, mugs, and teddy bears commemorating the day, its roots in environmental activism have all but been forgotten. Now corporations use Earth Day to sell us on the belief that we can buy our way into ecological sustainability. We can't.
Marketing Earth Day (and Other Stuff) to Children
By Susan Linn and Josh Golin
Have you done your Earth Day shopping yet? Between greeting cards, jewelry, mugs, and teddy bears commemorating the day, its roots in environmental activism have all but been forgotten. Now corporations use Earth Day to sell us on the belief that we can buy our way into ecological sustainability. We can't.
Reducing consumption is essential to preserving the earth's resources and preventing its degradation. The same companies that are painting themselves green depend on the profits they earn convincing us to buy more than we need.
Nowhere is this more obvious, and more troubling, than in the world of children's media and marketing, where companies like Disney, Sesame Workshop, and Nickelodeon are eco-marketing as never before.
Labels: Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood, consumerism, crooks, Earth Day, hypocrisy, primitivism
Monday, October 15, 2007
ABOLISH RESTAURANTS:
The folks over at the LibCom website have added yet another interesting text to their online library, perhaps the best such collection on the internet. Titled 'Abolish Restaurants' it is a study by the Prole.Info group, an American left communist group. The essay is present at the Prole.Info site in either a comic book or text format(see the above link or Molly's 'Online Libraries' section under links). The LibCom site presents the text version only.
Abolish Restaurants is a thorough and penetrating study of the restaurant industry, its history, economics and internal structure. It is also a description of the ways that restaurant workers fight back against their exploitation and how these fight-backs are both partially successful and often derailed. True to its left communist perspective it ends with the call for the abolition of the whole "industry" of restaurants, of where meals and service are bought and sold and are produced by wage labour exploited outside of "real life".
This essay is truly comprehensive and enlightening, and is well worth the read. A long one...the LibCom printout runs to 24 pages, and the comic book format available at Prole.Info is 13.4Mb in a pdf format. I'm not touching that last one. This essay is at its best in its insider description of the nuts and bolts of what it is like to work in a restaurant, putting flesh on the bare bones of economic description and showing the workers as real human beings in the complexity of their situation. It is weakest in the "what is to be done" category. The author reject unions, self-management and other meliorist ways that people use to improve their situation collectively. The only sort of self-organization that meets with their full approval is the informal and, of necessity, highly temporary work group. There is, of course, an abiding faith that somehow, some way, some time, some sort of class organization will arise spontaneously to sweep away all the conditions of capital and its wage labour. The details of such organization are, however, more than slightly vague resembling an ecstatic religious vision shorn of concrete detail/superstition and beautiful because of its abstraction. But a political program or a plan of action...no and definitely no.
A MOLLY GUIDE TO LEFT COMMUNISM:
A MOLLY GUIDE TO LEFT COMMUNISM:
Here Molly has to digress. Non-anarchists and even the vast majority of younger anarchists can easily be confused by some of the labels assigned to a given group or individual's political theory. The whole subject of the "left communist" trend, very much a minority amongst the libertarian left is especially confusing. One reviewer of the Prole.Info group called them "insurrectionists", something they are most definitely not. Let me try to elucidate the matter, hopefully without adding to the confusion.
First of all one has to ditch the classical idea of politics as made up of parties sitting on a linear left right continuum where the only "fuzzy points" are where one spot on the line merges into another to either side. This vision is hardly realistic in mainstream politics, and it is particularly misleading in describing sectarian politics. The proper metaphor is more one of a moving blob of cells, each connected to many others and shading into them by multiple pseudopods. A rather messy picture, but one that more accurately describes reality than the linear model. This model is highly complex, but nowhere near as complex as the reality it attempts to describe.
Left communists are part of a political current that at one time included the situationists. They are pretty well Marxists by definition, holding to the sort of economics put forward in Marx's 'Capital' and not just giving it lip service but actually applying it over and over to describe practically everything else they pay attention to. Their devotion to Marxist "philosophy" is less obvious, but may still often be observed in what they write. At the very least they never deny it. One might say that people like this are the last Marxists left in the world as they hold to and utilize Marxist economics in a fully consistent and comprehensive way that no Marxist government ever did and that very few Marxists who claim the label do today. They differ from the conventional Marxist familiar to anybody unlucky enough to suffer through classes in the social sciences by actually using Marxist economics rather than giving it lip service and also in rejecting Marxist politics, not just the examples of it present in Marxist parties, ruling or otherwise, but the speculations and actions of Marx himself that set the tone for what Marxism was later to develop into. No doubt they would claim that their politics are as truly Marxist as their economics are, but they would be on rather shaky ground in this claim. The situationists were an example of this sort of left-communism, using Marxist economic categories to describe other aspects of life far from the factory gate. Sometimes using them as metaphors that were stretched rather thin from the perspective of an outside observer.
In their rejection of the politics of Marx left communists typically reject not just the concept of the 'Party' but pretty well anything else in the way of organization. that can exist for a period of time in non-revolutionary situations. The sterility of this point of view is pretty obvious. What exactly do you do then besides wait for the revolution- a revolution that most (but not all) of the left communists believe will be brought about by the impersonal actions of the economy described by Marx ? What is left ? You publish pamphlets and magazines (and now websites). That is actually pretty well all that left communists do as left communists. Many (most ?) are also active in many other aspects of social struggle, but they do this while checking their beliefs at the meeting hall door. No doubt that everybody in the whole world compromises, but in no other sane political tendency is the contrast between the ideology and the reality so dramatic. You really have to travel into insanity, such as primitivism, to get a greater contrast.
Left communists of course often (usually?) recognize that they have backed themselves into a corner with their descriptions of reality and criticisms of other methods of action in the here and now. Thus it is that they gradually shade into other political tendencies that are close to them in either ideology or tactics. 'Councilism" , also known as "council communism", goes a bit beyond the purest left communists is that they posit that there has been an alternative, the 'Workers' Councils' that have been thrown up in various revolutionary situations over the past century and a half. They see themselves as propagandists for this form of organization even though it cannot exist in the present except under an unstable condition of dual power. In Molly's opinion the councilists' idealize this form of organization. It has been at its best and purest in situations where it sprang by an almost virgin birth in societies in which everyday workers' organizations devoted to resistance have been reduced to practical nonexistence. Hungary 1956 and Poland 1980 spring to mind. Examples of this type show an invariable trend towards naivety and making the sort of ideological compromises that end up destroying the movement by co-option to the state- if the councils are not defeated militarily first. In other revolutionary situations where the ordinary people have long standing traditions of socialist resistance and organization, even maintaining their organizational coherence underground the councils become the theatre of factional struggle. The Russian Revolution is a prime example of this as was the post WW1 strike movement in Italy. In the Spanish Revolution the organizational tradition was so strong that the councilist phase was virtually bypassed entirely, except perhaps in the federations of rural communes, as the various factions signed deals with each other and avoided the whole idea of elected delegates. Council communists are also generally Marxist in economics, but they are nowhere near as focused on it as pure left communists. Some groups that evolved out of this tradition such as Socialisme ou Barbarie in France or Solidarity in Britain pretty well abandoned all of Marxism, becoming more libertarian socialist than left communist. But this is another long story.
Travelling in other directions left communism fades into the sort of libertarian socialism held by groups generally described as 'De-Leonist'. For the uninitiated (99.99999999% of the world's population) this is a form of anti-state socialism that believes in building a political party that will capture the state and then as its first and only act abolish the state, turning its administrative functions over to federations of industrial unions and local communities. This plan of action was set forward by the American socialist Daniel DeLeon in the late 19th and early 20th century and had an early, but temporary, vogue in the IWW after its foundation in 1909. Don't ask me how this would work. I'm merely describing it. The party that DeLeon founded, the Socialist labour party is pretty well much a a dead letter and has been for decades. For as long as Molly has been an anarchist (over 35 years now) anything that she has seen the SLP do is more in the line of trying to tear itself apart over the fine print of statements that have a negative chance of ever reaching more than 100 people, let alone influencing anybody. The general idea that DeLeon advocated was taken up with more success by the Socialist Party of Great Britain, though this also reduced itself to a tiny rump by a belly button lint picking obsession with having the "correct theory". Any Deleonist party worthy of the name also obsesses with the purity of its Marxism, but hardly to the extent that regular left communists do. Nor with anywhere near the same level of creativity that left communists, free as their small groups are from sectarian infighting, are able to apply.
While the movement with the name has become a tiny sect the general ideas advanced by DeLeon live on, divorced from the Marxist theology that they were embedded in. The general idea of "capturing the state by elections to abolish the state" is probably more popular today than it ever was. Actually more popular than a consistent anarchism Molly is sad to admit. The idea of "libertarian municipalism" as formulated by Murray Bookchin and his collaborators is a variation on this, though it is more libertarian because it restricts it efforts of capture to the local municipality. The whole social democratic trend, whether with or without revolutionary rhetoric-such as in Venezuela today, that borrows from the anarchist toolbox the ideas of popular assembly socialism and self management is merely a reformulation of DeLeonism without the moral consistency of the founder. The theory is that self-management, both by workers and by communities can be promoted by state actions while at the same time offering positions of control to the state and party functionaries that are the directors of this process of liberation (old buzz word) or empowerment (new buzz word). Molly is not a Marxist, but if she was she would say that this is the sort of thing that the rhetorical phrase "contradiction" really and truly applies to.
Another direction that left communists lean towards when they actually want to do something is vanguardism. These are people who believe that it is both necessary and desirable to build a vanguard sect to push the inevitable revolution a little bit forward. Sort of Leninism without the state or at least without the stated goal of building the sort of dictatorship that the Bolsheviks built. Once more I merely describe, not justify. The primary exponent of this sort of plan today in the International Communist Current, though there are others. At its best this sort of cadre building idea shades towards the more extreme section of the neo-platformist current in anarchism. At its worst...well I'll leave that to your imagination. These sort of people have perhaps an equal attachment to exegesis from Das Capital as regular left communists do- hence their attraction to many in this milieu when they look for something to actually do. But they are hardly anywhere as creative or attentive to the details of ordinary workers' lives.
Then, of course, there are the "insurrectionists". These are really a current within contemporary anarchism. If they are Marxist at all it is merely for the "show off" factor of false erudition. These people share the left communist distrust of organization that goes beyond the immediate and informal, hence the confusion that sometimes exists in describing left communism as "insurrectionist". Where they differ is in their elitism. Taking their cue from a certain brain dead section of anarchist history, a tendency that was always a minority and has been rejected over the years as the movement grew, they believe that only "exemplary actions" are needed to propel some sort of spontaneous explosion from the people. A people that they usually express endless contempt for. These people are vanguardists without the party. They usually express sympathy for acts of terrorism, petty or otherwise. Despite all their faults, left communists exude an aura of sympathy for the ordinary person and their struggles. They see the germs of action for a new society in the actions of ordinary workers, not in the masochistic posturing of some militant elite. Even at their most strident they hardly ever exude the sort of amoralism that "insurrectionists" do. No...they don't have the Stalin in the soul.
So, left communism is a particular philosophical trend on the margins of anarchism today. It actually has a lot to say that is of great value. As should be apparent from the above Molly's own sympathies lie with those left communists who travelled through councilism to a non-Marxist libertarian socialism. This, however, may be only of historical and philosophical interest, not a question that has any practical consequences today. As I said above left communists usually leave their more extreme ideology at the door, and tend to be much more reliable comrades in struggle than adherents of many other views. Someone who has watched the development of anarchism in the USA over the past few decades may form the opinion that left communism, particularly in its situationist version, is responsible for some of the kookier and less savoury aspects of anarchism in that country. I disagree. Sure you can trace a path from situationism to neo-situationism to primitivism and thence to "post-leftist anarchism" or "post-anarchism" or whatever these people may adopt as the flavour of the day. But this is the same as saying that everything in Stalinism is contained in Marx or that syndicalism and socialism lead inevitably to fascism ala Mussolini. No...history is not that linear. Much depends on specific historical contexts in specific countries. Chance also has a role to play. Without situationism, primitivism in the USA would have found its natural home as a religious cult. But this ideology was developed in the USA under particular conditions such as the absence of a viable socialist or anarchist movement that actually could do something. It also had the fortune to gain the adherence of a tiny number of people of not great but relative ability. The first was necessity. The second was chance.
Well, this screed has certainly expanded and strayed far from the original news report. Never let it be said that Molly doesn't put her own spin on the news. I recognize that the above, long as it is, is incomplete and contains errors. It is merely the effort of one person who has had enough experience to judge to put some rather confusing terms into a comprehensible framework. As I said these terms fade into each other. They are not simple either/or categories, but they represent political positions that are at least "intellectually convenient" to separate as "poles of attraction in a chaotic landscape". Without this sort of effort at categorization there is nothing left but a big mental mush---and a practice that is informed by nothing more than fashion and personal pressure. Clarity is a virtue.
Labels: anarchism, council communism, ICC, labour, left communism, LibCom, post-anarchism, post-leftism, primitivism, situationism, social democracy
Friday, May 25, 2007
all
POLITICAL DOCETISM:
Molly is presently reading 'The Politics of Jesus' by Obery M. Hendricks. This book is a "left Christian" piece of apologetics for considering the message of the Bible as one of social justice rather than individual morality. Reverend Hendricks is a professor of Biblical studies at the New York Theological Seminary and an ordained elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The argument of the book is extensive, and Molly hardly has the space to present all of it here- besides, I'm not finished reading it. Some parts of it are convincing. Others are less so.
What Molly wants to bring to light here is the use that Obery makes of the heresy of 'Docetism'. This was a heresy held by most gnostics and later the Manicheans that the actual physical body of Christ was an 'illusion', that Jesus only "seemed" human, and that, especially, his crucifixion and death were an illusion. At its extreme end this shades into the Platonic "cave metaphor" that all of existence is illusion. A western version of Maya if you will. (Molly aside; almost all the philosophical thoughts that can be thought occur in all traditions. Those that claim some "uniqueness" for a given philosophical or religious tradition reveal far more about their own desires for prestige than they do about the reality of such traditions) The gnostics were particularly elitist about this whole matter, following in the footsteps of Plato's elitism. The parting of the veil of the illusion was to be accomplished via the "hidden knowledge" that the gnostics were presumably privy to. This whole scam is more than slightly familiar as it echoes in endless variations down through human history. For those who are interested see the Wikipedia article on Docetism and also the more extensive Catholic Encyclopedia article on same. Molly has little stomach for the controversies of Christology here and now. The sword of Constantine decided these long ago, and medieval crusades against Albigensians and Burgomars merely wrote finis to the epilogue. Modern disputes about these matters are merely dim echoes of what could have been. As an aside the Qur'an teaches the same dogma, that the crucifixion of Jesus was an illusion.
The important part here is that Hendricks makes the point that right wing interpretations of the New Testament assume a sort of "political Docetism" that even if the interpreters hold orthodox Christian views they still try and make an unrealistic separation between the Christ of their choosing, concerned only with personal morality, and the real Jesus as a human being embodied in a real social, political and economic context as a 1st century Jew in a country colonized by the Roman Empire and viciously exploited by both the conquerors and their quislings ie the priestly aristocracy of Judea. Hendricks takes off from this in situating Jesus and his works and sayings in a much more radical interpretation that brings out the egalitarian and "justice seeking" aspect of the Christian message. As I said I am more convinced by some of Hendricks' arguments than I am by others, and I am particularly disappointed by the book's ignoring of its predecessors in both the Catholic left and the Protestant Social Gospel.
Still I find the use that Hendricks makes of the term 'Docetism' to be very much a good tool for looking at a lot of political thought. On the right the neo-cons and the shrinking Christian right hold to Docetist heresies. They believe that the real national and corporate interests that lead to wars and conflicts within societies are merely "illusion" and that it is some metaphorical "clash of civilizations" or "good versus evil" that drives history. They refuse to look at reality. They ignore real economic threats to families in favour of an illusionary ideological spook of some left wing conspiracy against "family values". Their politics is a politics of illusion.
Not that the "left" cannot be equally deluded. Through most of the 19th and 20th century the radical left was defined by Marxist illusions of great dialectical forces struggling for some "synthesis" that was presumed to be inevitable even if it was falsified by Marx's literary executor, Bernstein, over 100 years ago. The pseudo-scientific pretensions of Marxism, the bastard child of the Hegelian academy, were exposed long ago, but the lure of ignoring reality for a world of comforting abstractions was far too great. According to Marx and orthodox Marxism real history was an "illusion" that was exposed by the "hidden knowledge of dialectics" to be merely form in the working out of world history ala a scheme more desired than proved.
The spectre of Docetism infects the anarchist opposition as well. One merely has to consult the convoluted oracles of "primitivism" and "post leftism" to see it at work. Real struggles of real people are read, often via a very obvious covering of half digested convoluted rhetoric and pseudo-intellectual "analysis" that attempts to give an illusion of profundity to what is very crude in its reality, as "signs" of some great and overwhelming "collapse of civilization" or whatever. Contrary "signs" ie the full spectrum of reality are more than conveniently ignored. To each their own narrow, claustrophobic, world.
The ultimate, of course, is the academic fad of "post-modernism", a meme that infects fascists, Marxists, liberals and anarchists alike without apparent predilection for any ideological body. Only the American style of conservative seems to be immune, protected by an exoskeleton of ignorance, as intellectual conservatives who are aware of their roots,especially the fascist roots, are just as susceptible to this fad as the most naive 3rd year Marxist poly-sci student. This is the ultimate in Docetism as it not only says that "reality" is illusion, but that all talk about reality is similarly illusionary and that one can read in whatever meaning one wants to into the "discourse" of a "text". At its basis this depends on a Stalinist interpretation of "correctness" ie whatever one can force by political intrigue (or in Uncle Joe's interpretation by having more tanks).
Of course "movements" built on the illusion that all is illusion don't last very long for obvious reasons unless they tie themselves to a class system that grants the possessors of the "hidden knowledge" real and actual power to kill in reality(Tibetan Buddhism ?). Should the traditional left, Marxist or otherwise, continue to wallow in nonsense it will be replaced by a new left, perhaps based on the realism of Evangelical leftists such as Hendricks who are much closer to reality. To put it bluntly, the whole idea of traditional Christian theology with its trinitarianism and other contradictory beliefs is less of an assault on reason than many things held "sacred" by the left. There are indeed many 'Protestants' on the left who try and drag it back to reality. Molly is one of them. May we escape the inquisition of a traditional left in power.
Labels: books, christianity, Docetism, leftism, Marxism, Obery Hendricks, post-modernism, primitivism, The Politics of Jesus
Saturday, March 24, 2007
WHAT MOLLY MEANS:
Molly is in the middle of another "hit blitz" vis-a-vis her posts on the Menu Foods recall issue. What Molly has tried to do in this matter is to be as objective as possible and give the most appropriate references for both the public and her veterinary colleagues. My objectivity doesn't detract from my "anarchist" views because I believe that "the truth" is an anarchist value, and that ANY political view has to be congruent with reality or it is of no value. Molly is critical of the centralization of the pet food industry, just as she is critical of any other centralization. She points out the problems of "globalization" in that the imports of gluten from across the world affects pets (and perhaps humans) here and across the world, and she points out the irrationalities of a market based system for commodities such as wheat that leads to such imports. She further points out the irrationality of some pseudo-oppositions such as health food cultism, which have fed into the present problem- and may be in the news in the near future.
All this is from a "scientific" point of view which is nothing more than amplified common sense. I take the "scientific" point of view because it says that one should test statements in terms of evidence and not because one likes the rhetoric behind it or because "the enemy" says something else. Everything should be viewed in the cold light of sobriety without the usual emotional buzzwords associated with politics. This is, of course, threatening to those who want to construct grand political theories such as the now almost dead Marxists wanted to. It is not , however, threatening to anarchists who recognize the "provisional" nature of knowledge and who, unlike post-modernists and other ideologues, are willing to accept reality as a test of their theories.
Molly accepts these tests. She refers people to government agencies even though she opposes government because they are the best sources of information in the here and now. Molly knows that pretty well all "anarchist" sites that discuss science are unreliable to the point of total lies, mostly because they oppose an abstract concept of "science" that is pretty well an imaginary construction of ageing Maoists in the academy - without any connection to science as it is actually done. Primitivism is nothing more than "consistent Maoism", and their "utopia" is the same utopia as that of the Kymer Rouge. This, of course, is not all of anarchism, and many younger people have come forward to oppose this ideological mindset. Whether it be the people who want to make anarchism congruent with real evolutionary biology or those who see the potential in the technology of communication, the struggle is the same. The struggle is to save the idea of freedom from those who would restrict it to a religious cultism demanding the sacrifice of "technique".
Molly's present "hit flurry" has the value of introducing people who are concerned about their pet foods to the ideas of anarchism, just as her last "hit flurry" about the lunar eclipse had the same function. But perhaps even more importantly this blog can act to introduce anarchists to the ideas- and more importantly the state of mind that lies behind modern science. Anarchists are often just not "scientifically illiterate" but actually predisposed by some people's propaganda to remain in a state of ignorance. This blog hopes to give its little contribution to correcting this problem, if in no other way than to show how "looking up" is a more emotionally satisfying state than seeing your low opinions confirmed in a cult. The sky is more attractive than your belly button.
Molly
Labels: anarchism, blogging, health nuts, Marxism, primitivism, science
Thursday, March 22, 2007
CLIMATE CHANGE RESOURCES:
While looking over the latest edition of Scientific American to arrive at her door Molly came across an article entitled 'Conservative Climate' (Scientific American, April 2007, pp16-19). The article is all about how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change meeting in Paris on February 2, 2007 perhaps understated the effects of future climate change. The IPCC has continued to issue reports about their deliberations, the latest being 'Confronting Climate Change' on Feb. 27th. This report goes further than the initial report in that it addresses policy recommendations while the original report addressed only the scientific issues.
What Molly found most interesting about the article was how the SciAm report contrasted with numerous articles in what I call the "trash-con" press soon after the original report was issued in February. The trash-con press is basically those propaganda organs that "pretend" to a conservative view while, in actuality, trying desperately to make as much money as possible by catering to the lowest intelligence level and most violent emotions amongst the "conservative audience". You know-hang me high!, the "lib-conspiracy", the Papal infallibility of America, the etc.,etc.,etc.. These people give conservativism a very bad name. Just like every family every political position has its "trash relatives" in the family skeleton closet. Anarchism has its primmies, post-leftists and insurrectionists. Leftism has its unrepentant Stalinists. The difference is that you can add up the audiences of the anarcho-nuts and the Jurassic commies, and their combined audience multiplied by 10,000 wouldn't equal the audience of the trash-con publications. As the old saying goes, like Coca-Cola, Christ on the cross and syphilis these buggers are everywhere.
What Molly remembers in particular is that publications like the National Post and the Winnipeg Sun devoted "insults"(no better term is available) to the idea that there was "disagreement" amongst the scientists represented in Paris. The SciAm article points out where this disagreement came from ie from the delegations from China (more coal !) and from Saudi Arabia (more guess what !). Neither country is exactly famous for freedom of scientific inquiry.
So...in addition to the two reports mentioned above which can be accesssed from their websites so that you can see the original rather than some distorted version in the press Molly has decided to present the following resources for her readers. In our Links section the websites of the sponsoring organizations have been included in some cases rather than the original text given here. In all cases the text or page is readily accessible from the website in our 'Scientific Links' section:
- Global Warming Facts and Our Future from the Marian Koshland Science Museum
- Woods Hole Research Center, a site devoted to research on global sustainability.
- Global Climate Change Resources from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
- Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, a report produced for the Treasury of Great Britain.
5. Global Warming by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the US government.
As the astute reader can see none of the above are frothing, drooling ideologues fantasizing about the end of civilization and how they will direct other people's lives in that Gotterdamerung. These are resources that point towards the best of the worldwide scientific consensus on this matter, and they may be helpful in judging just how far from reality trash-con publications on this matter are.
Molly
Labels: climate change, Confronting Climate Change, ecology, Intergovernmental panel on Climate Change, neocons, primitivism, Scientific American
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
THE BEST OF THE BLOGS:
"ANTI-CIV ANARCHISTS" FROM ANARCHAFAIRY:
The following is a reprint from the New Zealand Blog 'Anarchafairy' mentioned previously. as the author mentions the ideology of "primitivism" hardly translates outside of North America and, in particular, its birthplace the USA. While Molly may disagree with the author saying that this ideology stands in the tradition of American individualism (it actually stands much more firmly in the tradition of American millenarian religious cultism) what he says is very perceptive. It should be seen as the statement of the classic "unbiased outside observer". Anyways here it is:
"I just received a copy of Green Anarchy(Issue 23) today- an American "anti-civ" journal.
Now, I must admit before going any further that I used to call myself something of an anarcho-primitivist. The images of going back to a simpler, more peaceful, "wild" undomesticated existence really did something for me, and in many ways they still do. But I think anti-civ anarchists have really lost the plot, and I'm really not surprised that this is a current largely confined to the US (and a little to Britain). (1)
Anti-civ anarchists are strongly influenced by insurrectionism(2), though they probably don't know it as they religiously claim to be "anti-ideology" This critique of insurrectionalism applies very well to the anti-civ crew. It seems that the anti-civ fetish with small-scale militant direct action, their perceived(REAL!-Molly Note) social isolation and their perceived backwardness of the majority of people are very much a reflexion of their desire for radical social change in the face of ecological destruction but the lack of mass struggle. I can understand their rejection of mass organization, but not their rejection of mass movements. They seem to be very much trapped in the American individualist tradition and quite out of touch with popular struggles in North America (!!!!!!-Molly)(excepting their fetishizing of indigenous struggle...they're wild peoples, you see). In fact, they remind me of the desperation of militant groups in 1970s US, the Weather Underground, who became more militant the more apathetic the general population became.(3)
The other major point of critique has to be questioning exactly what the fuck "civilization" is. Having read a lot of this, I know that the definitions(4) are all over the place. It seems bizarre to reify such a vacuous concept and create a whole political ideology seeking its abolition. They claim they seek the end of domestication, while "leftist" anarchists merely seek the destruction of the State and capitalism. What do they mean by domestication ? Well, at times it refers to human domestication, at other times it refers to animal domestication and at other times to all forms of domestication of life, including plants. Surely the first is the aim of any anarchist project, and the second the aim of any anarchist project with the slightest of an animal-lib tinge. The third is more bizarre, and obviously aims for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle simply not possible in a lot of countries (NZ included) (5) and not possible with current population levels. Their reasoning for it is based in Marxism, and some recent (6) , rather weak anthropological studies that point to the domestication of plants and the resulting surplus as the seed of domination. This fails to take into account all the anthropological evidence, from the likes of David Graeber, that show that hunter-gatherer societies come in both authoritarian and and non-authoritarian varieties, as do horticultural societies. See Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology for more on this(he takes a paricularly vicious swipe at John Zerzan(7) ).
John Zerzan, while were on the topic, also seeks as part of his abolition of civilization the abolition of time, language and symbolic thinking. Go figure. Thankfully most of the anti-civ people haven't taken this on board.
Anti-civ anarchists go to great lengths to characterize other anarchists as latent authoritarians, going so far as to claim that after our revolution 99% of social life will be the same. Well I certainly hope not. I would imagine the destruction of the State, capitalist relations, patriarchy, ecological domination, etc. would mean quite a major shift i daily life for most people.
Molly Notes:
1)I've personally observed and read about a very small number of Spanish and Italian adherents to this American export, though in both countries their influence on the much larger anarchist movements there is virtually nil.
2)Very true, sometimes the "personnel" is virtually interchangeable. Cheering on mindless militancy that can easily veer into terrorism is part and parcel of the American anti-civ fad.
3)One hopes that the analogy only holds for that part of American anarchism that is romantically attached to "summit-hopping" and perpetually losing street battles against the police. The phenomenon of 'Weatherman' was a symptom of a movement in terminal decline. One hopes that present day NA anarchism has grown up and moved on to better things rather than being hooked into nostalgia for the "glories" of the recent past.
4)So are the definitions of such things as "technology" in the wordplay that passes for "theory" in such circles.
5)Speaking from Canada it is still possible for a small number of people to live as "hunter-gatherers" here and, to a lesser degree, in the USA. What is actually astonishing if you stop and think about it is that a few people do indeed make such an attempt, but none ie exactly zero of the ideologues of primitivism have ever been known to do such a thing. An ideology that is never practiced by its proponents while others do make the attempt to live according to the dictates without professing the ideology. There is something more than slightly smelly here.
The high priests of primitivism in the USA have declared "ex-cathedra" that the accusation of "hypocrisy" is not applicable, but they have never said why it is not except for the fact that they have said it.
6)Actually the most cited anthropological studies amongst the primitivist cult are about 40 years old and have been well debunked decades ago. The whole matter of cultural materialism and the concept of "surplus" is not restricted to Marxism and is a matter of great dispute amongst the legitimate study of anthropology outside of cultism.
7)Zerzan may not be the total dip that his Papal pronouncements make him out to be. After all he acquires both fame and money from his bullshit, an accomplishment ! for somebody who has never acquired a useful skill to make his living in the real world. Those who take his nonsense as gospel, however, are quite likely to end up serving lengthy prison terms...but the Pope keeps on getting paid for interviews. In a low reptilian way he's a lot smarter than his followers. But never let us forget that the accusation of "hypocrisy" doesn't apply to these "cosmonauts of critique". They say so themselves.
Labels: AnarchaFairy Blog, blogs, David Graeber, primitivism, tactics, Zerzan
Friday, November 10, 2006
LINKOMANIA:
I've added another link to this blog under the 'Other Interesting Links' section. This is the UrbanRail.Net site mentioned in the previous post. The obligatory explanation follows.
There is little doubt that "technology" has its own dynamic, forcing society to follow certain paths even as the form of society determines what technologies will be developed and which neglected. A pretentious Marxist would style this sort of interplay of causation as "dialectical" so as to a)appear very smart and b)to obscure some other rather less savoury point that the Marxist wants to make. Both this sort of mutual determination, usually referred to in non-ideological circles as complexity and more formal "circular causation" are part of normal intellectual discourse and hardly need a buzzword such as dialectical to obscure their meaning.
The sociology ! of both Marxism in power and as an academic assembly line, as well as how "dialectic" became the butt of popular jokes in Eastern Europe under Stalinism gives more than a slight hint of how this obfuscation is much more a matter of a weapon of class rule or the aspirations of a would-be ruling class than clear thinking. It's always far better to say what you mean than to hide behind a pseudo intellectual phrase.
Be that as it may there are people in this world who are even fuzzier in their thinking than Marxists. I'll leave aside the neo-cons whose rule of the American Empire seems to be coming to an end and how they were captives of their own abstractions. That is an entirely different post (or 50). I speak, unfortunately, of some of my own "comrades" . There's a trend in modern North American anarchism popularly called "primitivism" that imagines that it has uncovered a much more basic form of "oppression/misery/hierarchy/etc..etc.,etc" than any classical anarchists have.
Some of these people(but unfortunately too few) have read their antecedents such as Shumacher, Illich and Ellul, but they haven't taken the lesson of the first two. They tend to follow in a debased form the manner of the latter. The first two always criticized "particular technologies" and often advocated alternatives. The latter usually based his writings on such a high plane of abstraction that he basically "meant nothing" in most of what he said. The saddest part of this trend is that some of them claim the "individualist anarchist" mantle via a presumed interpretation of Stirner. Now, I've read 'The Ego and His Own' more than once, and I can say two things. One is that Stirner should have been given an award for being an even poorer writer than Marx. It takes some doing. The second is that his book could have easily been boiled down to a few pages that basically stated that people are captives of their abstractions. Stirner called them "spooks".
A lot of modern day primitivism has a genealogy that traces back to an ill digested version of situationism, and, like the sits, they move in a world of thought where the real world rarely intrudes. At its best situationism is good poetry. At its worst it is word spinning in a self referential world that means nothing except the attempt of a self defined "elite" to "prove" how superior it is.
How this relates to "technology" is pretty obvious to be. There is no such thing as the "technology" in the abstract that primmies like to demonize while advocating other technologies and techniques. This is a "spook" in the full Stirnerite meaning of the word. The anti-technology rhetoric becomes a badge of distinction-and that is ALL that it is. When they lower their exalted selves to actually propose something they end up tailing ! so many of the people that they like to feel superior to. Growing a garden is great. This is despite the fact that the average primmie has far less experience and knowledge about same than a vast number of the normal people that they despise. Practically everything they propose is little more than a signpost for someone outside of their cult to notice their inferiority in practical knowledge.
That's all "individualist" stuff, and it certainly makes me hold my nose when reading their nonsense. What may be more important is that they have little-and usually nothing- to propose about how their dreams may become a social reality. Beyond joining their cult, of course. The whole matter reeks of religious proselytism rather than politics.
Which finally brings me to my point. The crowd cheers-the speech will finally be over. I have listed many scientific references in this blog for the simple reason that science is nothing more than amplified common sense. There's little doubt that there is a "sociology of science" that describes how theories come and go, but science has a little ace up its sleeve. It is one of the few-perhaps the only- human enterprise that has worked out a method of collegial self-correction. This method certainly contrasts with the methods of political theory, radical or otherwise where mistakes are usually not corrected but only explained away- at best.
Science's daughter "technology" certainly is so important that it has to be both noticed and commented upon -notice I don't use the buzzword "critiqued"; I have nothing to prove. But to be useful, or even interesting at all to people outside of a cult, the matter has to be specific. "Which" technology in which social setting ? I find the idea of urban rapid transit fascinating because I assume that people will continue to exist in their present numbers in the foreseeable future and I have no genocidal fantasies of reducing their numbers. I also assume that, while I might favour a population balance more screwed towards a rural dispersion that people have good reasons for choosing an urban living space- as almost ALL primmies do even while they spout their rhetoric. To me that's a given. retirement is when I move back to the country. Hence my liking for more rational-in many ways- methods of moving about a city. Urban rapid transit!
To my mind such a technology is libertarian in a much more fundamental way than jeremiads about the evils of our modern society. It CAN be accomplished. In the future I hope to find more such examples and highlight them here. "Technology" is neither good nor bad. it simply doesn't exist outside of the minds of ideologues. Certain techniques CAN be either good or bad. That is what anarchists should turn their attention to.
The crowd cheers and puts down its rotten fruit. The speech is over, and it lasted less than 1 50th of a Castro speech. Everybody files out, hopefully having learnt something. The speaker packs up and returns to the night, pleased with a attempt at style variation.
I've added another link to this blog under the 'Other Interesting Links' section. This is the UrbanRail.Net site mentioned in the previous post. The obligatory explanation follows.
There is little doubt that "technology" has its own dynamic, forcing society to follow certain paths even as the form of society determines what technologies will be developed and which neglected. A pretentious Marxist would style this sort of interplay of causation as "dialectical" so as to a)appear very smart and b)to obscure some other rather less savoury point that the Marxist wants to make. Both this sort of mutual determination, usually referred to in non-ideological circles as complexity and more formal "circular causation" are part of normal intellectual discourse and hardly need a buzzword such as dialectical to obscure their meaning.
The sociology ! of both Marxism in power and as an academic assembly line, as well as how "dialectic" became the butt of popular jokes in Eastern Europe under Stalinism gives more than a slight hint of how this obfuscation is much more a matter of a weapon of class rule or the aspirations of a would-be ruling class than clear thinking. It's always far better to say what you mean than to hide behind a pseudo intellectual phrase.
Be that as it may there are people in this world who are even fuzzier in their thinking than Marxists. I'll leave aside the neo-cons whose rule of the American Empire seems to be coming to an end and how they were captives of their own abstractions. That is an entirely different post (or 50). I speak, unfortunately, of some of my own "comrades" . There's a trend in modern North American anarchism popularly called "primitivism" that imagines that it has uncovered a much more basic form of "oppression/misery/hierarchy/etc..etc.,etc" than any classical anarchists have.
Some of these people(but unfortunately too few) have read their antecedents such as Shumacher, Illich and Ellul, but they haven't taken the lesson of the first two. They tend to follow in a debased form the manner of the latter. The first two always criticized "particular technologies" and often advocated alternatives. The latter usually based his writings on such a high plane of abstraction that he basically "meant nothing" in most of what he said. The saddest part of this trend is that some of them claim the "individualist anarchist" mantle via a presumed interpretation of Stirner. Now, I've read 'The Ego and His Own' more than once, and I can say two things. One is that Stirner should have been given an award for being an even poorer writer than Marx. It takes some doing. The second is that his book could have easily been boiled down to a few pages that basically stated that people are captives of their abstractions. Stirner called them "spooks".
A lot of modern day primitivism has a genealogy that traces back to an ill digested version of situationism, and, like the sits, they move in a world of thought where the real world rarely intrudes. At its best situationism is good poetry. At its worst it is word spinning in a self referential world that means nothing except the attempt of a self defined "elite" to "prove" how superior it is.
How this relates to "technology" is pretty obvious to be. There is no such thing as the "technology" in the abstract that primmies like to demonize while advocating other technologies and techniques. This is a "spook" in the full Stirnerite meaning of the word. The anti-technology rhetoric becomes a badge of distinction-and that is ALL that it is. When they lower their exalted selves to actually propose something they end up tailing ! so many of the people that they like to feel superior to. Growing a garden is great. This is despite the fact that the average primmie has far less experience and knowledge about same than a vast number of the normal people that they despise. Practically everything they propose is little more than a signpost for someone outside of their cult to notice their inferiority in practical knowledge.
That's all "individualist" stuff, and it certainly makes me hold my nose when reading their nonsense. What may be more important is that they have little-and usually nothing- to propose about how their dreams may become a social reality. Beyond joining their cult, of course. The whole matter reeks of religious proselytism rather than politics.
Which finally brings me to my point. The crowd cheers-the speech will finally be over. I have listed many scientific references in this blog for the simple reason that science is nothing more than amplified common sense. There's little doubt that there is a "sociology of science" that describes how theories come and go, but science has a little ace up its sleeve. It is one of the few-perhaps the only- human enterprise that has worked out a method of collegial self-correction. This method certainly contrasts with the methods of political theory, radical or otherwise where mistakes are usually not corrected but only explained away- at best.
Science's daughter "technology" certainly is so important that it has to be both noticed and commented upon -notice I don't use the buzzword "critiqued"; I have nothing to prove. But to be useful, or even interesting at all to people outside of a cult, the matter has to be specific. "Which" technology in which social setting ? I find the idea of urban rapid transit fascinating because I assume that people will continue to exist in their present numbers in the foreseeable future and I have no genocidal fantasies of reducing their numbers. I also assume that, while I might favour a population balance more screwed towards a rural dispersion that people have good reasons for choosing an urban living space- as almost ALL primmies do even while they spout their rhetoric. To me that's a given. retirement is when I move back to the country. Hence my liking for more rational-in many ways- methods of moving about a city. Urban rapid transit!
To my mind such a technology is libertarian in a much more fundamental way than jeremiads about the evils of our modern society. It CAN be accomplished. In the future I hope to find more such examples and highlight them here. "Technology" is neither good nor bad. it simply doesn't exist outside of the minds of ideologues. Certain techniques CAN be either good or bad. That is what anarchists should turn their attention to.
The crowd cheers and puts down its rotten fruit. The speech is over, and it lasted less than 1 50th of a Castro speech. Everybody files out, hopefully having learnt something. The speaker packs up and returns to the night, pleased with a attempt at style variation.
Labels: dialectics, links, Marxism, primitivism, Stirner, technology, The Ego and His Own, Urban Rail.Net, urban transport
Monday, September 25, 2006
Primitivism's Greatest Hits: Item #1:
(or, "if you can't detach the leech from your body at least make a joke about it)
One of my favourite "stupid primmie tricks" comes from a gathering of Earth First held some years back in one of the northern Plains States. The advertising for the event included an item about "do it yourself vasectomies" presumably to kiss Mother Earth's ass and act directly to reduce the number of evil human parasites on her glorious and holy body.
This is the sort of thing that you should never read while drunk because you keep coming back to it over and over thinking you've hallucinated what you just read. But yeah, it was true. The first thought that comes to mind is, "What a wonderful idea" because I can think of only a few categories of people more deserving of a 'Darwin Award' for removing themselves from the gene pool. Maybe the primmies can become one of those problems that automatically corrects itself. No need for any external intervention here. Something like turkeys who are bred for such big pectorals that they can't copulate anymore. Without AI they are screwed, but their very anatomy says they aren't screwed.
Well the fantasy of these half baked idiots "playing doctor" under the blazing sun of a prairie summer day is appealing-if sick. All that I can add is a little technical detail about how they could make their experience more "natural", "wild", "unalienated" and "in solidarity with both Mother Earth and her remaining tribal children. Forget those evil industrial alienating tools of sharpened scalpels that rob you of your connection to the universe. Two big rocks smashed together will do the job just fine.
This would indeed be primitivism's #1 hit.
Or as Mollymew would say, "There's more than one way to un-nut a nut".
(or, "if you can't detach the leech from your body at least make a joke about it)
One of my favourite "stupid primmie tricks" comes from a gathering of Earth First held some years back in one of the northern Plains States. The advertising for the event included an item about "do it yourself vasectomies" presumably to kiss Mother Earth's ass and act directly to reduce the number of evil human parasites on her glorious and holy body.
This is the sort of thing that you should never read while drunk because you keep coming back to it over and over thinking you've hallucinated what you just read. But yeah, it was true. The first thought that comes to mind is, "What a wonderful idea" because I can think of only a few categories of people more deserving of a 'Darwin Award' for removing themselves from the gene pool. Maybe the primmies can become one of those problems that automatically corrects itself. No need for any external intervention here. Something like turkeys who are bred for such big pectorals that they can't copulate anymore. Without AI they are screwed, but their very anatomy says they aren't screwed.
Well the fantasy of these half baked idiots "playing doctor" under the blazing sun of a prairie summer day is appealing-if sick. All that I can add is a little technical detail about how they could make their experience more "natural", "wild", "unalienated" and "in solidarity with both Mother Earth and her remaining tribal children. Forget those evil industrial alienating tools of sharpened scalpels that rob you of your connection to the universe. Two big rocks smashed together will do the job just fine.
This would indeed be primitivism's #1 hit.
Or as Mollymew would say, "There's more than one way to un-nut a nut".
Labels: anarchism, Darwin award, primitivism
Sunday, September 03, 2006
The Invasion of the Amish
There's an interesting article in today's Sunday edition of the local paper, 'The Winnipeg Free Press' on a new Amish settlement in the Plumas, Gladstone area of Manitoba. This will be their first Canadian colony outside of southern Ontario. There are also Amish colonies in 28 American states.
The Amish are another branch of the Anabpatist movement who believe in adult rather than infant baptism. They are actually an offshoot of the Mennonites, and like them they are pacifist. Menno Simons (1496-1561) was a former Dutch Roman Catholic priest who founded the sect. The Amish split off from the Mennonites under the leadership of Swiss preacher Jacob Amman in 1693 because they felt that the parent body was too liberal for their tastes. Their first American colonies were in Pennsylvania in the early 1700s, and they are known there as the "Pennsylvanian Dutch" even though they speak a dialect of low German (like about 2/3rds of Switzerland) rather than Dutch.
They have become a big tourist draw wherever they settle as their refusal of most modern technology makes their "horse and buggy" lifestyle a matter for sightseers. The Amish are divided into two denominations, the Old Order Amish who worship in their homes, and the Old Order Mennonites who worship in churches. The Manitoba settlers are of the latter denomination. Many of the locals in the area where they have settled are enthusiastic about the new colony, not just because of the immediate economic income but because of the potential for tourism that such a colony represents.
The author of the article, Bill Redicop, goes on to make many other points about the welcome the Amish have received in the community, about their aversion to having their photographs taken, and the general theology of their religion. Despite the aversion of the Amish to having photographs taken, in which they seem to be more severe than the most orthodox of Muslims-for the same reasons, "graven images,etc" there are several photos that accompany the article. I gather these were sneaked by the reporter or one of his confederates. I do wonder about the legalities of this.
A few questions come to mind from this article. The Amish use kerosene lanterns rather than electricity for lighting. This technology was NOT available at the time of the split in 1693. Neither was the electricity they use for cooling the milk that they produce. I'm sure that like the Hutterites and Doukhobours there are many other accommodations to the modern world that they have made while still pretending to hold to "the old ways". Any sect that refused to make any and all such compromises would have sunk into extinction long ago. Yet, I must admit that these sectarians are shining examples of consistency when held up in contrast to "sects in the making" such as the pseudo-anarchist 'primitivists' who make immensely loud noises about abandoning all technology and generally abandon no technology. If the "primmies" do rediscover something like vegetable gardening that huge segments of the population have known forever they make a big hoop and holler about their own crude achievements even though they are pretty well always less competent than over 95% of the population at their theologically coloured "return to nature:.
The other question is what in the nature of the Amish and other such sects has led to their prolonged survival as communities. Most of the modern examples of political or cultural sectarianism have passed into the black hole of history. Those that still exist (such as the Rainbow Gathering) give every appearance of being ready to expire with the senility of their adherents. Those that have stabilized resemble normal Churches (a wealth of New Age cults) or political parties. Lots of people have spilt an ocean of ink on this question. Authoritarianism certainly helps survival as does an excessive pride vis-a-vis the real world. The Amish certainly cultivate "humility" amongst themselves, like leftist sects who use identity politics for interpersonal manipulation, it is doubtful that their "humility" could stand the scrutiny of an animal behaviorist used to finding patterns of hierarchy in social interactions. But the losers in this competition can be compensated by an illusion of superiority to the outsiders. There are surely many other factors, but this is not the place to even begin to explore them.
There's an interesting article in today's Sunday edition of the local paper, 'The Winnipeg Free Press' on a new Amish settlement in the Plumas, Gladstone area of Manitoba. This will be their first Canadian colony outside of southern Ontario. There are also Amish colonies in 28 American states.
The Amish are another branch of the Anabpatist movement who believe in adult rather than infant baptism. They are actually an offshoot of the Mennonites, and like them they are pacifist. Menno Simons (1496-1561) was a former Dutch Roman Catholic priest who founded the sect. The Amish split off from the Mennonites under the leadership of Swiss preacher Jacob Amman in 1693 because they felt that the parent body was too liberal for their tastes. Their first American colonies were in Pennsylvania in the early 1700s, and they are known there as the "Pennsylvanian Dutch" even though they speak a dialect of low German (like about 2/3rds of Switzerland) rather than Dutch.
They have become a big tourist draw wherever they settle as their refusal of most modern technology makes their "horse and buggy" lifestyle a matter for sightseers. The Amish are divided into two denominations, the Old Order Amish who worship in their homes, and the Old Order Mennonites who worship in churches. The Manitoba settlers are of the latter denomination. Many of the locals in the area where they have settled are enthusiastic about the new colony, not just because of the immediate economic income but because of the potential for tourism that such a colony represents.
The author of the article, Bill Redicop, goes on to make many other points about the welcome the Amish have received in the community, about their aversion to having their photographs taken, and the general theology of their religion. Despite the aversion of the Amish to having photographs taken, in which they seem to be more severe than the most orthodox of Muslims-for the same reasons, "graven images,etc" there are several photos that accompany the article. I gather these were sneaked by the reporter or one of his confederates. I do wonder about the legalities of this.
A few questions come to mind from this article. The Amish use kerosene lanterns rather than electricity for lighting. This technology was NOT available at the time of the split in 1693. Neither was the electricity they use for cooling the milk that they produce. I'm sure that like the Hutterites and Doukhobours there are many other accommodations to the modern world that they have made while still pretending to hold to "the old ways". Any sect that refused to make any and all such compromises would have sunk into extinction long ago. Yet, I must admit that these sectarians are shining examples of consistency when held up in contrast to "sects in the making" such as the pseudo-anarchist 'primitivists' who make immensely loud noises about abandoning all technology and generally abandon no technology. If the "primmies" do rediscover something like vegetable gardening that huge segments of the population have known forever they make a big hoop and holler about their own crude achievements even though they are pretty well always less competent than over 95% of the population at their theologically coloured "return to nature:.
The other question is what in the nature of the Amish and other such sects has led to their prolonged survival as communities. Most of the modern examples of political or cultural sectarianism have passed into the black hole of history. Those that still exist (such as the Rainbow Gathering) give every appearance of being ready to expire with the senility of their adherents. Those that have stabilized resemble normal Churches (a wealth of New Age cults) or political parties. Lots of people have spilt an ocean of ink on this question. Authoritarianism certainly helps survival as does an excessive pride vis-a-vis the real world. The Amish certainly cultivate "humility" amongst themselves, like leftist sects who use identity politics for interpersonal manipulation, it is doubtful that their "humility" could stand the scrutiny of an animal behaviorist used to finding patterns of hierarchy in social interactions. But the losers in this competition can be compensated by an illusion of superiority to the outsiders. There are surely many other factors, but this is not the place to even begin to explore them.
Labels: Amish, anabaptists, Gladstone, leftism, Manitoba, Mennonites, primitivism, religion, sects, Winnipeg Free Press
Thursday, August 31, 2006
I still find it amazing that this blog that was intended as nothing but a personal diary of my reading has gotten response. Some people must hate me deeply-good! May I assure readers that most of the posts here will be very boring posts about scientific matters. Seeing as I am five chapters behind in the latest book I am reading, let alone the journal articles which have piled up I beg your indulgence in wasting your time further...
In regards to those who believe that they can appear to be intellectual by using the word "nascent"...I actually know the meaning of the word. But despite this I looked it up in a dictionary to confirm. It means "incipient" or "newly born". Of course this is exactly !!! the opposite meaning that I ascribed it to in a description of Wayne Price's EX-Trotskyism. The proper term in such a case would be "residual". It describes a habit of thought that has carried over into anarchism that leads to some very unfortunate conclusions.
These "conclusions",however, are much less unfortunate than the habits of thought amongst post leftists who imagine that they can misuse "big words" that they don't understand to "prove" the profundity of their desired conclusions.
Yes, I think that Wayne is wrong in his application of a private morality to "prove" that one should be in "critical support" of Islamic groups. But THIS is orders of magnitude removed from "critical support" of various things that NA "post-leftists" have advocated in the past. Do child molesters, psychotic murders such as the 'Unibomber' or people that believe that "civilization should be abolished" ,etc,etc,etc ad nauseum "really" deserve any argument besides the observation that they are weird,disgusting and insane ? These sort of things are archetypes of things that can ONLY exist in a cult that has ONLY recruiting members to the cult as a goal. So-called "intellectual" (pseudo) arguments around these matters merely demonstrate how far removed their advocates are from reality and how much they have taken a PSEUDO-MORALISTIC stance ie a private morality of "appearing to be more radical than others" as a way of governing their actions.
This pseudo-morality will be enforced in the same way as real morality is enforced, by ridicule and aggression. The pseudo-morality of the left where "critical support" is afforded to undesirable real actors in the real world actually has less of fantasy involved in it than the "critical support" afforded to much more marginal thugs by those who have unrealizable dreams.
Well, I'll continue to stand against this sort of horseshit. If anarchism becomes nothing but the emotional justification for desiring a good fight, I'll try and repell the nonsense as long as I can, and when I fail I am no longer an anarchist. As any anarchist who is sane would say.
In regards to those who believe that they can appear to be intellectual by using the word "nascent"...I actually know the meaning of the word. But despite this I looked it up in a dictionary to confirm. It means "incipient" or "newly born". Of course this is exactly !!! the opposite meaning that I ascribed it to in a description of Wayne Price's EX-Trotskyism. The proper term in such a case would be "residual". It describes a habit of thought that has carried over into anarchism that leads to some very unfortunate conclusions.
These "conclusions",however, are much less unfortunate than the habits of thought amongst post leftists who imagine that they can misuse "big words" that they don't understand to "prove" the profundity of their desired conclusions.
Yes, I think that Wayne is wrong in his application of a private morality to "prove" that one should be in "critical support" of Islamic groups. But THIS is orders of magnitude removed from "critical support" of various things that NA "post-leftists" have advocated in the past. Do child molesters, psychotic murders such as the 'Unibomber' or people that believe that "civilization should be abolished" ,etc,etc,etc ad nauseum "really" deserve any argument besides the observation that they are weird,disgusting and insane ? These sort of things are archetypes of things that can ONLY exist in a cult that has ONLY recruiting members to the cult as a goal. So-called "intellectual" (pseudo) arguments around these matters merely demonstrate how far removed their advocates are from reality and how much they have taken a PSEUDO-MORALISTIC stance ie a private morality of "appearing to be more radical than others" as a way of governing their actions.
This pseudo-morality will be enforced in the same way as real morality is enforced, by ridicule and aggression. The pseudo-morality of the left where "critical support" is afforded to undesirable real actors in the real world actually has less of fantasy involved in it than the "critical support" afforded to much more marginal thugs by those who have unrealizable dreams.
Well, I'll continue to stand against this sort of horseshit. If anarchism becomes nothing but the emotional justification for desiring a good fight, I'll try and repell the nonsense as long as I can, and when I fail I am no longer an anarchist. As any anarchist who is sane would say.
Labels: anarchism, morality, personal, post-leftism, primitivism, Wayne Price
Saturday, August 26, 2006
Matters From The Latest 'Industrial Worker'
The 'Industrial Worker' is the house organ of the IWW (http://www.iww.org , Box 23085, Cincinnati, OH 45223, USA).
The latest issue contains a few interesting matters. The first is an article by Eric Lee entitled 'War, Wobs and the Web'. Lee has a regular column in the IW, and he is also the webmaster for a labour solidarity site that I personally subscribe to. Seems that the IWW website linked to his personal webpage, but that some matters contained there were offensive to other Wobblies. No, it isn't what you think. FW Lee has been a member of the Socialist Party of the USA, a rather decent outfit, and his writings in this article and others make it very plain that he still holds a certain sympathy for their views. The problem was NOT "anarchist purism". The problem was that he also, horror of horrors, has sympathy for the people of Israel and, therefore, is less gung-ho to jump on the so-called "anti-imperialist" bandwagon of the American left in giving unconditional support to whatever is opposed to Israel.
Lee goes on the argue that there are disagreements in the IWW about such matters as Cuba or Iraq. He mentions these as examples of where an "agree to disagree" attitude holds sway because of the more important matter of "a different kind of trade unionism" which is actually what unites the IWW. There was a campaign waged against Lee from within the IWW, though you can bet that it gathered people who were not just non-members of the IWW but who oppose the organization. The campaign ignored Lee's work in raising solidarity funds for unionists in Lebanon because the American left DEMANDS total agreement with its goal of "politically correct" dogma. Lee mentions that he is probably in a minority within the IWW, even though his position is "up for debate" in England where he presently lives, "elsewhere in Europe" and in Australia. He even adds, perhaps as a slight, "perhaps even in the USA". I would express it in much stronger terms. The left in the USA is the most juvenile left in the world outside of a totalitarian regime. It always attempts to impose uniformity of opinion within its ranks with an arsenal of insult terms and with hysterical campaigns and conspiracies against any dissidence whatsoever. To make matters worse, despite its crude ideology of "anti-imperialism" it is always willing to try and impose its views on the left in other countries.
The American left is just as mindlessly convinced of its "righteousness" as the American right. When not cheerleading for restrictions of freedom within their own country or arguing for special privileges that almost always translate as not "uplifting the poor" but rather as schemes for getting money for those who "work product" could be defined as "social control"- if they have any product at all- the American left looks at those of us on the left outside of the USA as either benighted savages who have to be educated in the latest "ism" or, worse, as benighted savages whose abstract situation can be used for the furtherance of their own projects.
Lee ends his column with an argument for tolerance within the IWW of views that differ in matters that are NOT related to the goals of the IWW. I suspect that he is realistic enough to know that this will not end the campaign against him.
Also in the latest IW:
There's a report of an IWW gathering in the American Midwest entitled 'Midwest Wobfest". Besides being an encouraging sign of the revival of the IWW, something that real anarchists can be nothing but pleased by it has the very pleasing (to me) note that the gathering finished off "with a barbecue and more socializing". The reason I find this heartening is that you can bet bottom dollar that the barbecue didn't involve "tofu on a stick". One of the reasons why the IWW is worthwhile is that it attempts to go beyond the cultural ghetto of present day anarchism and engage ordinary people-most of whom yes do eat meat and commit dozens of other daily offenses against the political correctness that is fashionable but which has NOTHING to do with anarchism.
To be gross, you will know that anarchism has "arrived" when a hot dog salesman at an anarchist gathering can call out, "get your fried primmies, get your fried primmies here". At that point the primitivists will come to serve a useful purpose.
The 'Industrial Worker' is the house organ of the IWW (http://www.iww.org , Box 23085, Cincinnati, OH 45223, USA).
The latest issue contains a few interesting matters. The first is an article by Eric Lee entitled 'War, Wobs and the Web'. Lee has a regular column in the IW, and he is also the webmaster for a labour solidarity site that I personally subscribe to. Seems that the IWW website linked to his personal webpage, but that some matters contained there were offensive to other Wobblies. No, it isn't what you think. FW Lee has been a member of the Socialist Party of the USA, a rather decent outfit, and his writings in this article and others make it very plain that he still holds a certain sympathy for their views. The problem was NOT "anarchist purism". The problem was that he also, horror of horrors, has sympathy for the people of Israel and, therefore, is less gung-ho to jump on the so-called "anti-imperialist" bandwagon of the American left in giving unconditional support to whatever is opposed to Israel.
Lee goes on the argue that there are disagreements in the IWW about such matters as Cuba or Iraq. He mentions these as examples of where an "agree to disagree" attitude holds sway because of the more important matter of "a different kind of trade unionism" which is actually what unites the IWW. There was a campaign waged against Lee from within the IWW, though you can bet that it gathered people who were not just non-members of the IWW but who oppose the organization. The campaign ignored Lee's work in raising solidarity funds for unionists in Lebanon because the American left DEMANDS total agreement with its goal of "politically correct" dogma. Lee mentions that he is probably in a minority within the IWW, even though his position is "up for debate" in England where he presently lives, "elsewhere in Europe" and in Australia. He even adds, perhaps as a slight, "perhaps even in the USA". I would express it in much stronger terms. The left in the USA is the most juvenile left in the world outside of a totalitarian regime. It always attempts to impose uniformity of opinion within its ranks with an arsenal of insult terms and with hysterical campaigns and conspiracies against any dissidence whatsoever. To make matters worse, despite its crude ideology of "anti-imperialism" it is always willing to try and impose its views on the left in other countries.
The American left is just as mindlessly convinced of its "righteousness" as the American right. When not cheerleading for restrictions of freedom within their own country or arguing for special privileges that almost always translate as not "uplifting the poor" but rather as schemes for getting money for those who "work product" could be defined as "social control"- if they have any product at all- the American left looks at those of us on the left outside of the USA as either benighted savages who have to be educated in the latest "ism" or, worse, as benighted savages whose abstract situation can be used for the furtherance of their own projects.
Lee ends his column with an argument for tolerance within the IWW of views that differ in matters that are NOT related to the goals of the IWW. I suspect that he is realistic enough to know that this will not end the campaign against him.
Also in the latest IW:
There's a report of an IWW gathering in the American Midwest entitled 'Midwest Wobfest". Besides being an encouraging sign of the revival of the IWW, something that real anarchists can be nothing but pleased by it has the very pleasing (to me) note that the gathering finished off "with a barbecue and more socializing". The reason I find this heartening is that you can bet bottom dollar that the barbecue didn't involve "tofu on a stick". One of the reasons why the IWW is worthwhile is that it attempts to go beyond the cultural ghetto of present day anarchism and engage ordinary people-most of whom yes do eat meat and commit dozens of other daily offenses against the political correctness that is fashionable but which has NOTHING to do with anarchism.
To be gross, you will know that anarchism has "arrived" when a hot dog salesman at an anarchist gathering can call out, "get your fried primmies, get your fried primmies here". At that point the primitivists will come to serve a useful purpose.
Labels: Eric Lee, food faddism, Industrial Worker, internet, Israel, IWW, labour, leftism, primitivism, solidarity
