"It’s doubtful that the Unabomber ever read Zerzan" - Zander Sherman
December 25, 2015 3:47 PM   Subscribe

Even then [1995], Zerzan was probably the highest-profile anarchist in America. He was a fifty-two-year-old who earned his living as a babysitter. He lived in a housing co-op and didn’t own a credit card (even after computers became mainstream, Zerzan did most of his writing by hand). In appearance and temperament, he looked and sounded like Tommy Chong: a bearded baritone you could picture singing “Up in Smoke” while driving around with a doobie the size of a hot dog. If it weren’t for his two published collections of essays, Elements of Refusal and Future Primitive, Zerzan would have passed as another baby boomer with an aversion to adulthood. But in his writing, Zerzan espoused what is arguably the most extreme political philosophy on the planet: that the problem behind all the other problems—war, famine, disease, the environment—is civilization itself, and that the solution is to blow it up and start again.
posted by the man of twists and turns (126 comments total) 43 users marked this as a favorite
 
Damned Rousseauvians; no matter how much you debunk them, they keep coming back...
posted by acb at 4:13 PM on December 25, 2015 [8 favorites]


I think they represent a necessary and unavoidable strain in human thought. Some people have to be pushing for utopias, even if that is a luxury that most of us making the bitter compromise of decency cannot afford.
posted by howfar at 4:30 PM on December 25, 2015 [4 favorites]


It's neat how Murray Bookchin never existed
posted by BitterOldPunk at 4:33 PM on December 25, 2015 [15 favorites]


Primmies are great. A great many of them have actual survival/ist abilities or training, without the "fuck you, got mine" attitude. Must be tiresome to be constantly assailed with "if yr primitivist then why u use internet lol burn" and all, which is why it takes me aback at how cheerful a lot of them are. I'm not sure I would go so far as to call it the "most extreme political philosophy on the planet" - we have plenty of contenders for the category, with some political schools of thought calling for the extermination of whole races as opposed to tearing down industrialism, meanwhile a great portion of the world's population are already pre-industrial. I have a number of disagreements with primmies, sure, but I respect them.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 4:35 PM on December 25, 2015 [24 favorites]


The case that agriculture was a horrible idea that has caused a lot of misery does seem to be pretty strong.

Of course I like technology, and in fact high medical tech saved my life last year by roto-rootering my arteries and putting a stent in my nearly clogged Widowmaker. On the other hand, if I hadn't spent my first forty years eating mostly cheap carbohydrates maybe I wouldn't have needed that stent.
posted by Bringer Tom at 4:45 PM on December 25, 2015 [16 favorites]


This is such an interesting essay to me, because I almost became an anarchist until I realized that I valued my emotional autonomy more, and the relationships with my family and friends.

^^ I wrote the above comment before I got to the part of the article that discusses how Zerzan is adjusting towards moderation...through caring for his friends and family, haha! Dear goodness, this is a ridiculously well written piece of narrative journalism that phenomenally discusses anarchism in such a nuanced way.

I always think of anarchy as an ideology for broken-hearted idealists, who have lots of trouble recovering and feel horribly isolated by seeing how others appear to 'take it better' about society being so broken. It broke my heart when my chancellor gave the go ahead to pepper-spray my classmates, and it's always left deep impressions on me on how my classmates have coped differently with being violated by privatized state violence like that. I still remember vividly how I went mad for quite a few months and almost melted into anarchy, before I realized that it was pure folly for me to subscribe true loyalty and adamant purity to any ideology and group dynamics, especially within academic anarchic circles, and I quickly backed out. This awakens a lot of very, very old feelings from 2011-2013 that I should go write about now.
posted by yueliang at 4:46 PM on December 25, 2015 [31 favorites]


I always think of anarchy as an ideology for broken-hearted idealists, who have lots of trouble recovering and feel horribly isolated by seeing how others appear to 'take it better' about society being so broken.

That's an interesting take. I'm sure a lot of anarchists do hail from this perspective. Personally, I arrived at my conclusions while working in government, and not feeling so much broken-hearted or damaged as confused and frustrated by the dysfunctional nature of hierarchy, and asking myself some searching questions about what kind of world I want my child to grow up in, how that world would function, and what it would take to build that world. Anarchism is a very broad an umbrella, as the article points out, and that contributed to the nascence of the concept of intersection - or in this subject, synthesis, "anarchism without adjectives" and the like. I've met people who were definitely "fuck it all" types, others who were hippies going after full communism, and others still that apply the anarcho- prefix but are pretty much just closet Republicans. It's a tough bunch to pin down.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 4:57 PM on December 25, 2015 [11 favorites]


Point taken - I also tend to process from a feelings-first perspective, so that probably has a direct influence on the anarchists that I've interacted with. I appreciate your sharing though, it reminds me very much of my own experiences of talking to anarchists and some of the differences between them. It makes me want to pick up some literature and start reading about it again. World building is always important. (Feeling a bit hazy after reading the article, so apologies for the brief reply while I go process more about it.)
posted by yueliang at 5:08 PM on December 25, 2015 [1 favorite]


The case that agriculture was a horrible idea that has caused a lot of misery does seem to be pretty strong.

I was just thinking about the irony that agriculture has made us what we are and yet also works to destroy our bodies. Certainly there is a named paradox for this, right?
posted by [insert clever name here] at 5:19 PM on December 25, 2015 [3 favorites]


> almost melted into anarchy, before I realized that it was pure folly for me to subscribe true loyalty and adamant purity to any ideology and group dynamics

Anarchism does not require "true loyalty and adamant purity to any ideology and group dynamics," and I'm not sure where you would have gotten that idea. Anarchism is simply a refusal to subscribe to the general consensus that government is necessary, or (if you prefer) a recognition that humans function better with cooperation than violence-based hierarchy. I have been an anarchist since around 1970 and am pretty sure I know what I'm talking about.
posted by languagehat at 5:30 PM on December 25, 2015 [35 favorites]


Very interesting article. It gas sent me on so many satisfying and disturbing tangents.
This one?
Ten thousand people were marching to the Oakland Army Base to block the weapons arsenal from being shipped overseas. Just when it looked like they might actually do it, Ken Kesey took the microphone and told everyone to go home. “He then compared activist Paul Jacobs’s podium mannerisms to Mussolini’s, and ended his speech with a harmonica solo and the suggestion that everyone turn their back on the war and simply say, ‘Fuck it,’” a student at the Freie Universität Berlin wrote. In a statement reminiscent of Jean-Paul Sartre’s claim to be personally responsible for World War II, Zerzan later wrote that the protesters’ inability to stop the shipment of arms to Vietnam put the blame squarely on their own shoulders. “In other words, we failed that night, and millions died.”
Ken Kesey wrecked it? Why would he do that? Was he a plant or was he totally potted?
posted by maggieb at 5:42 PM on December 25, 2015 [6 favorites]


Also, this essay has little to do with anarchism. It's your standard celebrity thumbsucker/puff-piece, except that instead of famous actors the celebrities are John Zerzan, Ted Kaczynski, and Steven Pinker (the last of whom has nothing to do with anarchism). The most interesting bit was the one maggieb quoted about Ken Kesey and the protests. That, I'd like to know more about. Zander Sherman and his history of obsession with John Zerzan, not so much.
posted by languagehat at 5:45 PM on December 25, 2015 [9 favorites]


some political schools of thought calling for the extermination of whole races as opposed to tearing down industrialism
So you are saying the destruction of only a race or three, as opposed to 99% of living humans?
posted by idiopath at 5:45 PM on December 25, 2015 [1 favorite]


Humans are one of the most social animals on the planet. In the absence of other humans, wolf-children dont develop language.

But theae anarchists seem to think we're all sui generus individuals who would have developed a more pure human self if evil society hadn't gitten it's grubby hands on the nascent noble savage

Fuck these knuckleheads.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 5:46 PM on December 25, 2015 [19 favorites]


Hmm. While I don't actually think there's that much to support it, it's pretty clear, even from reading this fairly short article, that Zerzan's view is that our current forms of society are a specific historical development, damaging to human happiness and flourishing, not because they are social per se, but because of the particular technological, economic and cultural characteristics they exhibit.

The idea that anarchists are individualists is a very unusual approach to the philosophy.
posted by howfar at 6:08 PM on December 25, 2015 [11 favorites]


The most interesting bit was the one maggieb quoted about Ken Kesey and the protests. That, I'd like to know more about.
Just when it looked like they might actually do it, Ken Kesey took the microphone and told everyone to go home. “He then compared activist Paul Jacobs’s podium mannerisms to Mussolini’s, and ended his speech with a harmonica solo and the suggestion that everyone turn their back on the war and simply say, ‘Fuck it,’” a student at the Freie Universität Berlin wrote.
The quote is from Eleonora De Crescenzo's paper Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters: The Origins of the Psychedelic Movement Through the Lens of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Ken Kesey wrecked it? Why would he do that? Was he a plant or was he totally potted?

Probably more of the latter, but it's more accurate to say that Kesey was on the side of internal revolution. This is the time of the Electric Koolaid Acid Test, inner doors of consciousness, etc. De Crescenzo continues:
In Kesey's eyes, the demonstrations, marches and podium speeches were nothing but a reflected image of the current ruling system; they may promote different values but they still moved within the same mind frame. Kesey's aim was to change this frame, promote personal liberation and a more aware consciousness, and that these would eventually result in a change of the world.
posted by zamboni at 6:10 PM on December 25, 2015 [7 favorites]


Let's not forget that there is a lot of evidence for infanticide mostly towards female infants, and starving girls and women when food was in short supply in pre-civilian, hunter-gather times. Even Kaczynski seems to acknowledge this.

I'm sure it isn't strictly true, but anarchism seems to fall in the domain of the white male. For good reason; the rested of us would be screwed.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 6:12 PM on December 25, 2015 [15 favorites]


If civilization evolves out of humanity doing its social thing, why blow it up just to have the same problems occur all over again?
posted by a lungful of dragon at 6:12 PM on December 25, 2015 [4 favorites]


The primitivist argument for human health is utterly fatuous. Whatever the failings of the 21st Century Western diet, the average human life span is close to double the estimated lifespan of hunter-gatherers.
posted by twsf at 6:21 PM on December 25, 2015 [5 favorites]


I was just thinking about the irony that agriculture has made us what we are and yet also works to destroy our bodies. Certainly there is a named paradox for this, right?

It's called the Second Law of Thermodynamics. There was no pre-agricultural utopia. There is no agricultural-era utopia.

It's people fucking over other people, people having wars, raping and killing and abusing other people, and tearing down the things they built as much as they can. But in the interstices, there's a bunch of other people getting along and cooperating and making amazing things, and falling in love and fucking other willing people and having a good time and making a lot of babies they love and try to protect from getting fucked over. From day one until now.

Hardcore primitivists just have a pretty little non-religious Garden of Eden for their own specific wank fantasies, rooted in noble savage fallacies and peddling the idea that humanity was better off before X (Gay Marriage, Roe v. Wade, Civil Rights, The Enlightenment, The Decline of the Divine Right of Kings, Cities, Agriculture, pick your milestone) and I don't buy it for a second.
posted by chimaera at 6:33 PM on December 25, 2015 [31 favorites]


It's called the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

"It is impossible, by means of inanimate material agency, to derive mechanical effect from any portion of matter by cooling it below the temperature of the coldest of the surrounding objects."?
posted by howfar at 6:49 PM on December 25, 2015 [8 favorites]


There was no pre-agricultural utopia.

No, it wasn't utopia, but the causes of death and disease were much different than what we're used to. Humans are evolved to live on a diet of mostly protein and animal fat. The agricultural diet allows us to sustain very high populations but we don't live as long and we get a lot sicker. And a hundred malnourished farmers can overrun one healthy hunter-gatherer, so this is the way of life that has overrun the world.

When I realized I was pre-diabetic and stopped eating anything that drove my blood sugar over 140 mg/dl -- which basically meant I stopped eating carbohydrates -- the improvement in my health was literally miraculous. I effortlessly lost 40 pounds, my blood pressure dropped twenty points, and I regained a level of stamina in my forties that I had barely had in my twenties.

Of course it's possible to argue about how my pancreas got as broken as it is but the bottom line to anyone with a lick of common sense has to center around the fact that diabetes is considered an epidemic, even though it's not a transmissible disease. So how pray tell does this epidemic keep itself going? It has to be something we all do. I suppose it could be something in the air or water, but most likely it's the food.
posted by Bringer Tom at 6:51 PM on December 25, 2015 [6 favorites]


The agricultural diet allows us to sustain very high populations but we don't live as long and we get a lot sicker.

I am really not sure that this is an empirically well-supported claim.
posted by howfar at 6:54 PM on December 25, 2015 [28 favorites]


And this surge in diabetes is, oh, a couple of decades old. Not two hundred years, let alone 5- or 10,000 years. Sincere congratulations on improving your health by changing your own diet, but "we don't live as long [as hunter gatherers]" is simply untrue.
posted by twsf at 6:57 PM on December 25, 2015 [13 favorites]


Laws of Thermodynamics (as observed by Michael Jackson and Allen Ginsberg):

You can't win, you can't break even
And you can't get out of the game
posted by hank at 7:08 PM on December 25, 2015 [7 favorites]


Primitivism is not anarchism. Primitivism is not a form of anarchism. Anarchism is irrelevant to discussions of primitivism.
posted by Pope Guilty at 7:12 PM on December 25, 2015 [18 favorites]


It has to be something we all do. I suppose it could be something in the air or water, but most likely it's the food.

I posit that it is not the food (at least in isolation). Our society has changed how work gets done, and we perform much, much less physical activity than we used to. We moved to desks, and did 2 things that had a negative impact on our health: moved less and didn't eat less to make up for it.

What regressives seem to believe is that notion that the existence of externalities or mixed consequences is an indictment of the process itself. The diabetes epidemic (and other metabolic syndromes related to obesity and weight gain) is not an indictment of agriculture. It's an indictment of how in 2015, we relate to the products of our work. Namely, people eating the wrong amount of readily available food for their current situation.

Anarchism is irrelevant to discussions of primitivism.

I disagree with this last bit of your statement. Primitivism may not be anarchism, but there is relevance, as the venn diagram of primitivism and anarchism has some overlap.
posted by chimaera at 7:21 PM on December 25, 2015 [3 favorites]


No, it wasn't utopia, but the causes of death and disease were much different than what we're used to.

Yes, they were maulings from the animals we were running down and communal murder after you broke your leg running after said animal and became a drag on the group. Also things like basically any infection or bacteria, because without the delightful free time we had once we started growing stuff we wouldn't have spent time fucking around with plants and figured out some of them make you less sick, or dying because of the elements because solid and warm shelters are way easier to build when you're sticking to one place and have, again some free time to stack rocks.

Also music, literature, philosophy, really any culture besides scraping pictures of the stuff we hunt onto walls and tying their bones to our hair. That useless stuff.

Seriously, this hunter-gatherer shit literally involves running for an entire day or more after a single animal in the hopes that it collapses before you. Any who points to that as some sort of utopia is a fool.

a hundred malnourished farmers can overrun one healthy hunter-gatherer, so this is the way of life that has overrun the world.


That assumes that the 'farmers' killed all the 'hunters' which is totally not what happened. The 'farmers' were 'hunters' who settled down and started cultivating the grains which they had always eaten on the pass through more seriously. Other 'hunters' either noticed this and adapted their methods (and didn't have to stop eating meat somehow, because you can still totally hunt and amend your diet that way. The entire point of Ag is that it gives you time that you can spend on other things without neglecting food, hunters still hunted.) or didn't and were 'overrun' by a group of people who didn't depend on that deer collapsing first for their meal.


I've hunted my entire life and gardened and done farm work my entire life. If I had to choose one it's not even a choice. Even with all modern aids to hunting and growing with purely hand tools sans non-organic material fertilizer or pesticides, both of which I do, I would always choose the farming. Anyone who's actually done either would I think. This is a ludicrous idea to me.
posted by neonrev at 7:22 PM on December 25, 2015 [28 favorites]


"When I realized I was pre-diabetic and stopped eating anything that drove my blood sugar over 140 mg/dl -- which basically meant I stopped eating carbohydrates -- the improvement in my health was literally miraculous. "

The ability to have multiple diets comes from the fact that we're an agricultural society. We're not bound to our immediate surroundings, forced to move from place to place to survive. We can stop following the herds and the blooming flowers because we can grow our own food and we can create variety. A lot of modern diet problems comes from the realization that we shouldn't all have the same diets as our genetic structure, in its heterogeneous glory, differs due to our ancestry or just general recent mutations. We have the freedom to change our diets because of the different types of food grown year round. With the advent of vertical farming, food growing seems like it will become much more easier and environmentally friendly than before.
posted by I-baLL at 7:45 PM on December 25, 2015


Sorry about the diet derail. It was just an observation based on some other topics I've been reading lately and I thought it dovetailed nicely as it was sort of mentioned in the article. I wasn't trying to pretend that the noble savage was a thing, only that agriculture as a whole has had some real negative effects on health- heart health, teeth health, liver health etc.

[But while the diabetes and obesity epidemic is new to the last 3-400 years, it arose with the change in diet. Both just accelerated as our technology for agriculture and food processing advances. Exercise is nice, but it does fuck all for your teeth. I'm sure it's a lot of both actually. That being said, I think the rational answer isn't blowing up society, but using those big brains to solve these problems.]
posted by [insert clever name here] at 8:33 PM on December 25, 2015


"maybe I wouldn't have needed that stent."

because you would never have been born. Which is cool and all, it's surely the way I wish things had gone for me. But it's not, like, a philosophical requirement for anarchism and based on my experiences of sharing my viewpoint, probably not yours.

Zerzan's viewpoint is literally genocidal. It's not cool, and it's not anarchist. I do not share it; my only point of commonality is that I think he must also wish he had never been born. I wish the world well. I do not believe John Zerzan does.
posted by mwhybark at 8:40 PM on December 25, 2015 [2 favorites]


The primitivist argument for human health is utterly fatuous. Whatever the failings of the 21st Century Western diet, the average human life span is close to double the estimated lifespan of hunter-gatherers.


So, quantity over quality then?
posted by Slinga at 8:41 PM on December 25, 2015 [1 favorite]


Anarchism is simply a refusal to subscribe to the general consensus that government is necessary, or (if you prefer) a recognition that humans function better with cooperation than violence-based hierarchy.

You're saying those ideas are the same thing? I don't think they are, and I don't understand how anyone would get them confused.
posted by LogicalDash at 9:11 PM on December 25, 2015 [2 favorites]


What existing government operates without a violence-based hierarchy?
posted by clew at 9:26 PM on December 25, 2015 [4 favorites]


I'm going to presume to interpret Kesey here:

1). Although I was against that horrible war with all my heart, mind, soul and body, the 60's anti-war movement did seem to me at the time (and still does) to attract obvious future realpolitik Pol Pots like flies to honey.

2). I honestly think that even Kesey would agree that if you let his words dissuade you from following what the deepest part of your soul and conscience are telling you what is truly right and good, you're probably playing the wrong game anyways.

Love,

Another Baby Boomer with an Aversion to Adulthood
posted by Chitownfats at 9:30 PM on December 25, 2015 [3 favorites]


Only now, do we see the violence inherent in the system for what it is, but alas, it is too late…almost nobody has ever read Zerzan, and never will...
posted by littlejohnnyjewel at 9:35 PM on December 25, 2015 [1 favorite]


What existing government operates without a violence-based hierarchy?

I guess I'll interpret this as a response to me, since I don't see any other way to relate it to the thread...

Thinking that humans work better without violent hierarchy doesn't imply you think it's possible for such an arrangement to scale up to nation-state size, nor that you think it's possible or desirable to do away with nation-states.
posted by LogicalDash at 9:36 PM on December 25, 2015 [1 favorite]


Zerzan's viewpoint is literally genocidal.

I think to say that most of us should not have been born is in fact philosophically quite different from saying that most of us should die. I don't know enough about Zerzan to say whether he has advocated the latter in any real sense or only the former. I do think many of the supposed problems of agriculture are actually problems of having more than a very small number of humans in the world, which unless you do want to be genocidal makes primitivism a thought experiment at best.
posted by atoxyl at 9:41 PM on December 25, 2015 [6 favorites]


Murray Bookchin is way more my speed.
posted by atoxyl at 9:42 PM on December 25, 2015


I think to say that most of us should not have been born is in fact philosophically quite different from saying that most of us should die.

Oh, I concur. My understanding is that this differentiates my view from Zerzan's. I could surely be mistaken.

Without going into the article author's history of writing on Zerzan (l-hat, please expand), and therefore accepting that is quote is inherently more Zander than Zerzan:

"Zerzan acknowledges that his vision would reduce the human population “fairly quickly,” he doesn’t actually advocate violence."
posted by mwhybark at 10:02 PM on December 25, 2015



I was just thinking about the irony that agriculture has made us what we are and yet also works to destroy our bodies. Certainly there is a named paradox for this, right?


It's not really a name, but it's definitely something seen and described: Corn walking.

You can apply the same idea to other relied upon systems, say the military-industrial complex, or Big Oil and the Banks, or any other deeply organized institution that serves fundamental needs, but in doing so, serves itself, at some cost to all involved.

Or maybe that's your irony? We're all Anarchists, after all, if we really just look at it?
posted by notyou at 11:27 PM on December 25, 2015 [1 favorite]


I would say that "not possible" means "doesn't work" rules out "work[s] better", LogicalDash, so I was temporarily confused.
posted by clew at 12:00 AM on December 26, 2015


I guess I'm one of civilization's discontents, though I'd rather have it patched up than scrapped, as it clearly scaled better and through thousands of years of tinkering and technology some mitigating arrangements have been found.

Most crucially with the ability to store grain and accumulate wealth came inequality, slavery, and war. (When the source of your food is access to the grain storage and not participation in the hunt, you can be coerced by the few who control access.) Many European settlers to the Americas found the native ways of life superior and joined them. I believe it was the European discovery of alternate ways to organize society, including hunter-gatherer societies, that was the real impetus to the Enlightenment, which eventually did away with kings and aristocrats. (Trace the influence of native societies through Montaigne's "On Cannibals" and Shakespeare's "The Tempest".)
posted by Schmucko at 12:11 AM on December 26, 2015 [5 favorites]


I believe it was the European discovery of alternate ways to organize society, including hunter-gatherer societies, that was the real impetus to the Enlightenment, which eventually did away with kings and aristocrats. (Trace the influence of native societies through Montaigne's "On Cannibals" and Shakespeare's "The Tempest".)

That's kinda interesting;, wonder if there any historical or scientific work toward this argument. I.e. Explaining where did the Enlightenment come from?
posted by polymodus at 12:17 AM on December 26, 2015 [2 favorites]


So much here, but I think I'll mostly stick with a quote prompted by the "broken-hearted" comments:

"It is only through letting our heart break that we discover something unexpected: The heart cannot actually break, it can only break open ... To live with a broken-open heart is to experience life full strength ... When the heart breaks open, it marks the beginning of a real love affair with this world. It is a broken-hearted love affair, rather than the conventional kind based on hope and expectation. Only in this fearless love that can respond to life's pain as well as its beauty can we be of real help to ourselves or anyone else in this difficult age. The broken-hearted warrior is an essential archetype for our time." --John Welwood, Love and Awakening

...and this vignette:

About ten years ago, I was hanging out with a couple of anarchist friends in Eugene who were into Nonviolent Communication (NVC). They were into NVC because they saw it as offering an invaluable skill set for people who want to live by anarchist principles - navigating interdependent power with people rather than seeking to exert power over them or even with oneself (thx to Mary Parker Follett for these terms). These friends knew Zerzan, and he came by and hung out for a while (perfectly pleasant guy) and they got him to borrow Marshall Rosenberg's book on NVC.

Some time later I asked them what happened. Apparently when he returned the book he simply commented, "It's valid." I found this sad/hilarious, taking it to reflect that he had read the book in an exclusively analytical way (my friends had the impression that was about right). It was affirming I guess that he found it valid theory, but to me, anarchism or any other philosophy really only gains meaning as you live it. Anyway, not really sure this goes anywhere, but glad to hear that he has mellowed.
posted by johnabbe at 2:15 AM on December 26, 2015 [3 favorites]


to do away with nation-states.

I would suggest that international corporations have already done exactly this. I wish I could remember the sci-fi novel with what were pretty much multinational economic democratic co-ops..
posted by mikelieman at 2:42 AM on December 26, 2015


>It's your standard celebrity thumbsucker/puff-piece, except that instead of famous actors the celebrities are John Zerzan, Ted Kaczynski, and Steven Pinker (the last of whom has nothing to do with anarchism).

And once again Pinker shows up where he's least needed or relevant.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 2:54 AM on December 26, 2015 [2 favorites]


Right now, this very fucking minute, an interesting thing is happening. Abdullah Öcalan's Kurdish Worker's Party is holding significant territory in a multi-pronged fight against both Daesh and Syrian loyalists. There are people at the motherfucking barricades fighting for self-organizing egalitarian principles. This is not just an academic exercise.
posted by BitterOldPunk at 3:02 AM on December 26, 2015 [27 favorites]


I would suggest that international corporations have already done exactly this.

I understand that multinational corporations have somewhat eroded the power of the state but states are still the primary actors.

Again all of this utopianism is the province of the privledged white male. Only they can come up with these fanciful and mostly dumb ideas and spout them with a straight face. Those not so lucky know what the result will be.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 4:37 AM on December 26, 2015 [4 favorites]


Again all of this utopianism is the province of the privledged white male. Only they can come up with these fanciful and mostly dumb ideas and spout them with a straight face. Those not so lucky know what the result will be.

I am not serious enough about it (or sufficiently well-read) to feel comfortable calling myself an anarchist at all, but I fully sympathize with LanguageHat's formulation, "a refusal to subscribe to the general consensus that government is necessary, or (if you prefer) a recognition that humans function better with cooperation than violence-based hierarchy," as a statement both descriptively and aspirationally true.

But (and here is where the label probably does not apply to me at all) in a very practical sense I see the most benefit in reforming our world to lessen the violence and inequality, rather than any more utopian desires for a new society rebuilt on first principles. There is a lot of harm that comes from hierarchy and structure, but there is a lot of good as well. Social structures (including bureaucracies) are just tools like any other and it is up to us whether they are used for good or bad.

The lauding of pre-agricultural societies mostly seems ahistorical and strange to me, and says a lot more about people's discontents with modernity than it does any real historical experiences.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:03 AM on December 26, 2015 [6 favorites]


anarchism (traditionally) is much more than discarding government. it's a questioning of all power structures and so, in a sense, should appeal to all oppressed peoples. it's very much a movement from the political left. chomsky is a self-identified anarchist, for example. emma goldman is another famous example. many current-day anarchists care about intersectionality, there are anarcha-feminists, etc.

however, recently, libertarianism - ayn rand, etc - has become popular and somehow this has become confused with anarchism, by restricting "power" to "government" (largely, i suspect, because anarchism has a long, often distinguished, history, that libertarians want to appropriate).

sorry if this is obvious. i'm just wondering if it explains the "privileged white males" dismissal.
posted by andrewcooke at 5:35 AM on December 26, 2015 [11 favorites]


The ability to have multiple diets comes from the fact that we're an agricultural society.

Actually, this is exactly backwards; for most of the world's population there is only one diet, the relatively recent agricultural diet of cheap carbs to which many of us are poorly adapted.

The ability to live mostly on meat and dairy products is available to me mainly because I live in a first world nation with a lot of excess resources. The resources do not exist on this planet to feed ten billion people the way I eat. That is the very definition of privilege, and I know it.

We can argue all day long about what life was like for ancient peoples, but there is absolutely no doubt what happens to my modern body if I start regularly eating pasta and rice again. And it's not some paleo fad; I went through three hundred test strips figuring out what is safe for me to eat. I've been doing this since 2006 and I would probably be dead by now if I wasn't.
posted by Bringer Tom at 5:46 AM on December 26, 2015


Ehh, while it's true that anarchism fits very nicely into intersectional politics, let's not pretend that anarchists aren't overwhelmingly white males. Why that is requires more analysis than "well people are confusing anarchism with radical proprietarianism", which is of course also true.
posted by Pope Guilty at 5:49 AM on December 26, 2015 [7 favorites]


I would suggest that corporations haven't eroded the state at all, not least of all when they rely on the state to keep capitalism functioning and to defend their interests.

As for anarchists being a bunch of white dudes: depends entirely where you're looking. There are anarchist movements in the Middle East, amongst indigenous peoples in Latin America, and in Africa. No doubt a lot of anarchists in N America and Europe are white guys, but the blanket dismissal of anarchism as the province of white men is kind of a troubling thing to say.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 6:04 AM on December 26, 2015 [10 favorites]


anarchism (traditionally) is much more than discarding government. it's a questioning of all power structures and so, in a sense, should appeal to all oppressed peoples.

The reality is, though, that while some oppression comes from the state and other institutionalized power structures, so do a lot of protections, and conversely a lot of oppression comes from outside of those institutions. So anyone less privileged has to do that calculus to decide whether on balance they would be better or worse off without that institutionalized protection, and on balance people seem to feel that the protection wins.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:05 AM on December 26, 2015 [7 favorites]


anything with a long history, recorded and viewed by and within the patriarchal culture we swim in, is mainly white males. using that to criticise one particular sub-group seems somewhat pointless.
posted by andrewcooke at 6:08 AM on December 26, 2015 [7 favorites]


Mr. Cooke, you have made rethink the whole of human history.

Thank you.
posted by clavdivs at 6:17 AM on December 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


Another perspective is to consider if some hypothetical planetary disaster did indeed wipe out our existing systems, but we still had archives of literature. Would the literature of anarchism then be worth reading for insight into how to cooperate fairly without rigid systems of hierarchical governance? Or should we focus on Hobbesian literature of state-building? Will there be any use for the anarchically inspired technologies for decentralized communication and consensus?

My fatigue with people who reject anarchism altogether because "the anarchists" have failed to scrounge up a plausible blueprint for a new society—despite the obvious response that the idea of an imposed societal blueprint is exactly what anarchism rescinds—makes me more interested in looking at anarchism as a tendency, or as a general inspiring principle.

Chomsky, it turns out, put this well in an interview:
Well, anarchism is, in my view, basically a kind of tendency in human thought which shows up in different forms in different circumstances, and has some leading characteristics. Primarily it is a tendency that is suspicious and skeptical of domination, authority, and hierarchy. It seeks structures of hierarchy and domination in human life over the whole range, extending from, say, patriarchal families to, say, imperial systems, and it asks whether those systems are justified. It assumes that the burden of proof for anyone in a position of power and authority lies on them. Their authority is not self-justifying. They have to give a reason for it, a justification. And if they can’t justify that authority and power and control, which is the usual case, then the authority ought to be dismantled and replaced by something more free and just. And, as I understand it, anarchy is just that tendency. It takes different forms at different times.
The crucial problem for anarchists, just as for socialists and adherents of any other ideology, is how to go about in practice while maintaining legitimacy and justice. If anarchism is a wholesale blueprint, you might get the idea to abolish all states and hierarchies with violence and then replace them with whatever anarchy you've concocted. But that's an obvious contradiction: it'd just be you imposing your own system by force.

If instead anarchism is a tendency and a body of theory and praxis, then it can be useful in all sorts of situations, and the anarchist tradition can be a beacon of inspiration.

(And yes, this thread is really confused about anarchism vs primitivism.)
posted by mbrock at 6:56 AM on December 26, 2015 [15 favorites]


His (Zerzan) sole income is SOCIAL SECURITY. For fuck's sake.
posted by gt2 at 7:07 AM on December 26, 2015 [5 favorites]


We know what happens when people experience small scale (metaphorical) meteor strikes on the established ways of life or social order.

People engage in cooperative efforts to address the immediate exigencies of the emergency, and then begin to recreate private property, market exchanges, and civil hierarchy on whatever local basis or analogy most easily avails. Refugee camps, prisons, Warsaw Block communist states, etc., all look(ed) like this.

In other words, tear down all the banks in New York and six months later you are cursing the barter rate that the former Goldman Sachs traders operating from a repurposed Winnebago is charging you for the aspirin his brother imported from Brazil in the sailboat they used to race to Block Island: "It used to be twelve carrots to the bottle, now you want sixteen?" "I don't make the rules, man ... and your neighbor might be willing to offer me eighteen tomorrow."
posted by MattD at 7:16 AM on December 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


MattD, I'd be interested to hear about anthropological research backing that. I imagine anarchist anthropologists like David Graeber might not agree entirely.

Graeber's "Debt" mentions how barter economies arise when former currency-based economies break down. They don't seem to arise in groups that haven't been exposed to currency. And in history, currency economies were created by states and militaries.

So yeah, probably when meteors strike capitalist societies, people will try to get back to business as usual. That doesn't mean currency economics are built into the fabric of human nature. Especially when you consider that philosophy can change the world, not just describe it. If anarchism as an idea were more widely known, along with anarchic techniques, participatory economics, and so on, at least some groups might behave differently post-meteor.
posted by mbrock at 7:21 AM on December 26, 2015 [2 favorites]


Thanks mbrock. There's a lot of conflating going on in this thread.

Where's You Can't Tip a Buick when you need them?

Anarchism is a broad term, and the version coming from the academic left (which is of course not some grand unified theory) is often significantly different from its adoption by people who just want to smash some windows. Surprise, surprise.

But! Outside its unfortunate intersection with and co-optation by ideologue libertarian smash-the-state utopianism (into which the subject of TFA seems to clearly fall), anarchism is an interesting body of theory and a useful way to inform an understanding of relationships of all sorts, among states, citizens/migrants/taxpayers/dependents/colonials and states, individuals and collectives.

There's a difference between smashing the state and collectivizing in order to obviate those parts of it which you find unnecessary or abhorrent.

Sure, people tend to just recreate those parts, although that seems to have a lot to do with the people doing the organizing simply resorting to familiar structures--under duress and enfolded by powerful states, in all MattD's examples--rather than reinventing the wheel.

James C. Scott in particular did a lot of work on how this played out in SE Asia. Anarchism, like a lot of other Utopian extremes, has at least tried to theorize ways to live otherwise. And notwithstanding the incoherence of this Zerzan chappy, much of this tradition/theory/praxis is articulate, nuanced, and--again very much in contrast to this dude--humanist.
posted by aspersioncast at 7:44 AM on December 26, 2015 [5 favorites]


I have been an anarchist since around 1970 and am pretty sure I know what I'm talking about.

B doesn't always follow A.
posted by listen, lady at 8:30 AM on December 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


On the other hand, if I hadn't spent my first forty years eating mostly cheap carbohydrates maybe I wouldn't have needed that stent.

Not necessarily. Otsi the Iceman, eating the very definition of 'paleo', had hardening of the arteries - in fact, in a very active life, our heart is one of our weak spots: one good thump and the damn thing just tears open. No matter what you eat, in a primitive scenario, you're not designed to last much past 40 - which is why I find the 40-year old depression trough so damn interesting. If you can avoid trauma, you can really stretch it, but that's a whole other scenario.
posted by eclectist at 9:03 AM on December 26, 2015 [6 favorites]


The state is endogenous to human behavior. I don't see why running history again will result in a different and better outcome.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 9:32 AM on December 26, 2015


I don't see why running history again

Well, that can't possibly be the opposing argument, because it's not possible to literally reboot human history. Whatever the article is saying, it can't be saying just that. Evolution isn't repeatable; and of course the humans would generally retain some of our current knowledge - these are fair things to assume. It's not like running a backup app on your computer.
posted by polymodus at 9:55 AM on December 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


> Where's You Can't Tip a Buick when you need them?

off in the Kipling thread reminiscing about his dad. also making a math joke in that thread The Whelk put up, the one about photos from old NYC.

But anyway actually meaningfully engaging with the "agriculture??? good or bad???" question probably requires anthropologists with real training who've done real field work, rather than a Marxist computer programmer with a knack for David Foster Wallace pastiche.

That aside, though, one thing that may complicate this discussion is that it appears that the oldest cities actually predate agriculture. One reason I find the "cities first, then agriculture" theory so pleasing is that Jane Jacobs postulated it in a post-Death and Life book, and I ♡ Jane Jacobs.

Here is my totally unreasonable position from the last time we talked about the agriculture question — it starts off looking like a half-remembered synopsis of a Miyazaki movie, but don't let that throw you.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 10:51 AM on December 26, 2015 [5 favorites]


> I'm sure it isn't strictly true, but anarchism seems to fall in the domain of the white male. For good reason; the rested of us would be screwed.

Not only "not strictly true," but not even a little bit true, unless you think people other than white males are peculiarly privileged under a reign of violence-based hierarchy, for which I'll want to see proof. I suggest you ask the blacklivesmatter folks about how the state plays out at street level. And I suggest you work a little harder at understanding what anarchism involves before attempting to dismiss it using currently fashionable rhetorical tools.

> But (and here is where the label probably does not apply to me at all) in a very practical sense I see the most benefit in reforming our world to lessen the violence and inequality, rather than any more utopian desires for a new society rebuilt on first principles.

Absolutely, and one of the elements in my slow evolution as an anarchist is a weary recognition that anarchy will have to remain a useful habit of thought (or tendency, as mbrock put it) for not only my lifetime but my grandsons' lifetimes and probably for thousands of years to come (if we survive that long), until we evolve social mechanisms for avoiding the rise of brutes to power (and their consequent use of everyone else as tools to maintain their power by means of violence) that seems currently inescapable. I think of it as analogous to the position of someone thousands of years ago who realized that slavery was wrong and had to be done away with but couldn't see how to take even the first step towards that in a society based on slavery, surrounded by other societies based on slavery. Lots of changes have to happen first. Being the cockeyed optimist I am, I can sometimes manage to believe that we will make those changes, but being a realist I have no idea how.
posted by languagehat at 11:29 AM on December 26, 2015 [28 favorites]


another baby boomer with an aversion to adulthood.

for certain dubious definitions of 'adulthood'.
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 12:47 PM on December 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


Is there any system of mass social organization that has ever evolved organically that doesn't rely on some sanctioning mechanism?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 1:20 PM on December 26, 2015


"Current problems are too complex. Let's hit the reset button and hope for the best."

This line of thinking never has made much sense to me.
posted by Mental Wimp at 1:42 PM on December 26, 2015 [3 favorites]


anarchism in general does not equal anarcho-primitivism - I'm not sure I'd call myself an anarchist but there are plenty of people who do who have no time for the likes of Zerzan
posted by atoxyl at 1:56 PM on December 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


Aw, Zerzan and the Unabomber aren't friends anymore. And why? Because Kaczynski criticized Zerzan's book. Immature children stop being friends because they disagree, not mature adults. I think that says just about all I need to know about Zerzan. He's a child masquerading as an academic.
posted by ten pounds of inedita at 3:07 PM on December 26, 2015


Zerzan talked about gatherer/hunter societies and the five hour work day. The gatherers take in 90% of the food and the hunters 10%. Taking care of children and feeding them with the food you gather is all day, everyday, that is life. He is a theoretical, romantic anarchist.

I think retirement is as close to functional anarchy as most Americans get. But we don't have to account for every second of our lives. There is a lot of very pleasant anarchy to enjoy. Tiny pieces of anarchy abound. You know, get off my lawn! Or refusal to buy much. Refusal to worship the system, or be a believer in the big scam. No one has mentioned Abbie Hoffman, I sure liked his take on things. I did steal his book.
posted by Oyéah at 6:11 PM on December 26, 2015 [3 favorites]


"Is there any system of mass social organization that has ever evolved organically that doesn't rely on some sanctioning mechanism?"

I don't think so though there are a lot of social theorists who had some ideas or rather lack of them like our favorite mushcup Fourier. He wrote of no mechanism for control that I know of. I know that he wanted certain members of society to relegated to the farming phalanx.

I doubt a social system of that nature ever existed or ever will.
posted by clavdivs at 6:17 PM on December 26, 2015


languagehat: the anarchist scene that I was first exposed to would have been much improved with your presence, I'm sure. Unfortunately, that was the impression that I received a few years ago, but I do know that anarchy is very different from that, and I appreciate you sharing your comment since it's an area I haven't re-visited in a long time.
posted by yueliang at 10:59 PM on December 26, 2015


Also - in glorious hindsight, I should have probably prefaced my initial comment of, "I don't actually believe that's anarchy, these are my old impressions" since I'm pretty sure I said the equivalent of "feminism is about killing men" when it comes to misinformation about anarchy. Those were old memories, and /old/ impressions. But commenting on MeFi is a learning process! So much apologies.
posted by yueliang at 11:11 PM on December 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


I want to go back to this for a sec:
Ten thousand people were marching to the Oakland Army Base to block the weapons arsenal from being shipped overseas. Just when it looked like they might actually do it
Is there any illusion among anyone involved that there was the remotest chance of their being successful in doing anything but delaying one small part of the war from being implemented for a very short time? Or was the conceit that this small success would have empowered the antiwar movement beyond what it was in the sixties by orders of magnitude?

Maybe it's just really late (because it is) or I've had a lot of holiday sugar (because I have), but that's just bizarre. Kesey's conceit of trying to change the war by just sort of ignoring it doesn't seem so precious, if only by comparison.

Also, has anyone remarked on the similarity between this longing for the primitive life and Tyler Durden's similar exhortation to imagine pounding corn (well, his version didn't get rid of all agriculture) and climbing the Sears Tower on vines that would never grow in Chicago's climate but never mind that?
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:40 PM on December 26, 2015 [3 favorites]


The problem with the "re-run from Start" idea is that there's really no reason to suppose that the same basic trajectory wouldn't occur again. Agriculture wasn't a one-time fluke, it appeared in numerous places and times independently. And eventually, probably, someone would come up with the idea of burning coal instead of wood - although I suppose we could just burn all the fossil fuels in the ground so that our future neoprimitivist descendants aren't faced with that particular temptation. I'll suggest it to the next anarchist I run into.

And once again Pinker shows up where he's least needed or relevant.

He's the author of a well-received and evidence-stuffed book presenting a counter-case to the picture of pre-agricultural life presented by Zerzan and Kaczynski. That seems pretty relevant. Although the reference to him being an anarchist for a couple years when he was a teenager ('cause that's unusual as hell) seemed shoehorned in there to lend an additional and unnecessary personal connection. But perhaps I'm biased. I come down much closer to Pinker's perspective on civilization than I do Z&K's.

I've noticed that in anarchist/neoprimitivist discussions (PopeGuilty's warning upthread notwithstanding, they do tend to turn up together a lot) there's a clear conflation of the problems of civilization for human welfare (hierarchy, violence, dietary and health problems, etc.) with the problems of industrial civilization for the environment. I think that historically these are different issues. A world which still operated at Iron-Age levels of social organization would be (as it was) a shithole for most of its inhabitants but wouldn't be faced with, e.g. climate change or global mass extinctions. An industrial civilizations such as ours solves a lot of the problems for human life quality that pervaded previous versions, but at massive environmental costs.

Is there any illusion among anyone involved that there was the remotest chance of their being successful in doing anything but delaying one small part of the war from being implemented for a very short time? Or was the conceit that this small success would have empowered the antiwar movement beyond what it was in the sixties by orders of magnitude?

In activism, you try a lot of stuff and some of it sticks and some of it doesn't. Sometimes small things can lead to larger ones, if you demonstrate success on a small level this can be used as an argument to convince more people to invest time and resources into a larger project (hell, this is true in most areas of life, not just activism). There's a tendency among some to only see things like the Million Man March as "real activism", but behind every huge effort like that there's a whole lot of slowly building groundwork and practice on a much smaller scale. When Rosa Parks and her fellow activists were planning her bus protest, they were presumably assuming they'd just be attacking "one small piece" of a much larger social problem.
posted by AdamCSnider at 3:08 AM on December 27, 2015 [6 favorites]


^Flagged as fantastic. I really like the Rosa Parks angle.
I can really appreciate this as it does something other then evoke pathetic handwringing, "what can be done, I don't know we're to begin".
posted by clavdivs at 6:44 AM on December 27, 2015 [2 favorites]


Let's not forget that there is a lot of evidence for infanticide mostly towards female infants, and starving girls and women when food was in short supply in pre-civilian, hunter-gather times.

Why is this kind of thing necessary? "Because this behaviour happened in some places in the past, it's obviously going to be a concrete result of the process we're talking about." It's similar to the argument in climate change discussions where people are talking about ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and someone says, "Oh, you just want us to go back to the Stone Age!" Well, sure, but nobody said anything about forgetting the entirety of human history. It's like the clash of end-times fantasies.
posted by sneebler at 8:55 AM on December 27, 2015 [1 favorite]


> Is there any illusion among anyone involved that there was the remotest chance of their being successful in doing anything but delaying one small part of the war from being implemented for a very short time?

So you think no one should ever do anything unless it's guaranteed to have widespread and lasting success? That seems an odd attitude to me.
posted by languagehat at 9:01 AM on December 27, 2015


Thing is, anarchists seem to disdain actual success, like "highlighting the contradictions of the system" and making symbolic gestures, standing in confrontation to things is more important than having a plan and goals and executable steps towards making things better.

Anarchism in America is Revolution LARPing.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 10:09 AM on December 27, 2015 [1 favorite]


So you think no one should ever do anything unless it's guaranteed to have widespread and lasting success?

Not at all! But let's go back to the context of the original quote: "In a statement reminiscent of Jean-Paul Sartre’s claim to be personally responsible for World War II, Zerzan later wrote that the protesters’ inability to stop the shipment of arms to Vietnam put the blame squarely on their own shoulders. 'In other words, we failed that night, and millions died.'" Zerzan's description of the outcome assumes that there was the possibility of a success condition.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:24 AM on December 27, 2015


Thing is, anarchists seem to disdain actual success, like "highlighting the contradictions of the system" and making symbolic gestures, standing in confrontation to things is more important than having a plan and goals and executable steps towards making things better.

Anarchism in America is Revolution LARPing.


Anarchists nothing, that's 99% of what the left gets up to. I want to find a way to neatly excise the phrase "speaking truth to power" from the collective subconscious.
posted by Pope Guilty at 12:21 PM on December 27, 2015 [3 favorites]


So you think no one should ever do anything unless it's guaranteed to have widespread and lasting success?

I find that the amount of effort I'm willing to devote to some (particularly political) action is pretty proportional to the degree to which I think it's likely that the action will contribute to the accomplishment of some actual, effective end. Now it's true that everyone's judgement will vary here, both in regards to the degree of effort worthwhile and even in regards to the definition of an "effective end," but, yes, I do think that the promise of some tangible, material success is practically a requirement of any effective political action.

Any anarchism that goes beyond a general preference for the less authoritarian, less violent solution in any given situation—which is to say any anarchism that seeks to immanentize anarchy in the world on a large scale—is, like every other fringe political theory of the right or the left, just another church for unbelievers.

(Aside, I'm curious about the degree to which an endorsement of "primitivism" or even just anarchism in general correlates to an endorsement of other kinds of woo. Among the primitivists, particularly, I'm betting you'd find a lot of anti-science, anti-medicine beliefs as well.)

anarchism seems to fall in the domain of the white male.

I do see an element of bro-ishness to much of what's called anarchism and particularly primitivism on the internet, but it's not as if people of color can't entertain their own fantasies of stateless glory. The Moorish Scientists, the Washitaws, the Nuwaubians, etc., demonstrate that.
posted by octobersurprise at 1:17 PM on December 27, 2015 [1 favorite]


Great thread. A few thoughts:

Primitivism, of the Unabomber persuasion, strikes me as misguided and an over-reaction. But it does speak to the general disillusionment with civilization, and as such would be ignored at our peril. People romantising the past and advocating a do-over are proto-Pol Pots and ought to be seen as canaries in the proverbial coal mine. That's not counting the crazies.

That said, we are wrong to consider ourselves superior to Hunter-Gatherers, and in fact have much to learn from so-called Bushcraft. Ray Mears is a good example of a more enlightened reaction.

On anarchism: here I think again there is a lot of conflicting interpretations, but that is a feature, not a bug. Anarchism is (or should be) exactly opposed to the dogmatic approach, instead being a fragmented buffet-style of political philosophy, rooted in skepticism and wariness of authority.

On an everyday level, I see anarchism all around. In the group of friends who use consensus to decide which restaurant to eat at. In the volunteer theatre company that creates a show without money or coercive direction. In the family that gives and receives without keeping a monetary tally of debts owed.

These are examples that I have experienced just in the last few weeks, I could think of more given time. We all live according to anarchist principals at least some of the time. Someone asked about the default human political philosophy; I'd argue anarchism is as good a contender as any, it only depends on your preferred definition.
posted by Acey at 1:26 PM on December 27, 2015 [4 favorites]


So you think no one should ever do anything unless it's guaranteed to have widespread and lasting success? That seems an odd attitude to me.

No but the fact that anytime utopian societies are attempted to be put into practice they either work to the extent that only the truly committed partake (like some communes where joining is voluntary) or they devolve into brutal violence and quickly end in failure. But that's beside the point really if anarchism doesn't actually proscribe anything particular.

What anarchist thinking needs to grapple with is: why, everywhere, does violence based hierarchy occur out of anarchy? How can self origanization occur when there is no sanctioning mechanism?

The state in manifold forms endogenously arose all around the world. This suggest that there wasn't a cultural or ideological predisposition that lead to the state, but rather the material structure of human interaction that led to the state. What structure can lead to another organizing principle not relying on violence or the threat of violence?

Critiques are nice and useful but the convincing ones offer some plausible alternatives that remedy the flaws of the object being critqued. Anarchism hasn't succeeded on that front.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 3:40 PM on December 27, 2015




"Oh, you just want us to go back to the Stone Age!" Well, sure, but nobody said anything about forgetting the entirety of human history.

Well for a start, returning to pre-agricultural society would have to involve eliminating 99.9% of the human population. In such a situation, there's not going to be much room for much but survival. There's not going to be room for much specialization, either. So it's doubtful history supposed survive as anything but scattered, garbled legends.

I don't know anybody who favors primitivism who actually menstruates (though I'm willing to believe there are- women who do- there's always exceptions). Primitivism involves no Pill, no condoms, no prenatal care, and premodern childhood death rates of 25%. Just who gets more freedom out of this arrangement again?
posted by happyroach at 2:42 AM on December 28, 2015 [2 favorites]


> Thing is, anarchists seem to disdain actual success, like "highlighting the contradictions of the system" and making symbolic gestures, standing in confrontation to things is more important than having a plan and goals and executable steps towards making things better.

Anarchism in America is Revolution LARPing.


You don't know a damn thing about anarchism or anarchists; please take the trouble to learn something before shooting off your mouth.

> Not at all! But let's go back to the context of the original quote: "In a statement reminiscent of Jean-Paul Sartre’s claim to be personally responsible for World War II, Zerzan later wrote that the protesters’ inability to stop the shipment of arms to Vietnam put the blame squarely on their own shoulders. 'In other words, we failed that night, and millions died.'" Zerzan's description of the outcome assumes that there was the possibility of a success condition.

Ah, OK, that makes sense; thanks for clarifying.

By the way, I just came across a quote that may help some people wrap their heads around the problem with the state; it's the entry for the year 859 from the medieval Annals of St-Bertin:
The Danes ravaged the places beyond the Scheldt. Some of the common people living between the Seine and the Loire formed a sworn association amongst themselves, and fought bravely against the Danes on the Seine. But because their association had been made without due consideration, they were easily slain by our more powerful people.
Just to unpack that for you, the "Danes" are the famous Viking raiders, and this passage describes the only known popular resistance to them during the Carolingian period. The local aristocracy were, of course, afraid of the Vikings, but they were more afraid of their own subjects acting without their authorization and control ("without due consideration," incaute), so they slaughtered them. They would rather lose their territory to the Vikings than lose control over "their" people. That's the statist frame of mind in a nutshell.
posted by languagehat at 9:47 AM on December 28, 2015 [2 favorites]


And the alternative to the state is...?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:04 AM on December 28, 2015


> And the alternative to the state is...?

Ooh, burn! You've just destroyed centuries of anarchist thinking with a single well-placed question! Thanks for showing me the error of my ways!

Here's a hint: if you'd lived a couple of millennia ago, you'd be asking just as smugly "And the alternative to slavery is...?"
posted by languagehat at 12:06 PM on December 28, 2015 [1 favorite]


This suggest that there wasn't a cultural or ideological predisposition that lead to the state, but rather the material structure of human interaction that led to the state.

I think you're conflating a number of distinct ideas, here, and apparently assuming that anarchist thought hasn't addressed these issues. To be brief, you appear to be positing a somewhat Hegelian form of dialectic, leaning on the notion that there is something intrinsic to our experience as interacting subjects which leads inevitably to the state. The thing is...the basis of all modern socialist (and by extension anarchist) thinking lies in explicitly rejecting that assumption, and instead arguing that the dialectic you are thinking of exists only in its material (which is also to say historical and contingent) context. It doesn't pretend that there are not material reasons why states arose (indeed it does precisely the opposite of that) but it does contend that it is unreasonable to think of history as a continual opposition of the same forces, and more reasonable to take the view that the forces that drive history are themselves historical, constituted and changed by the material conditions of life and the world.
posted by howfar at 12:39 PM on December 28, 2015


No I'm not positing a Hegelian dialectic or anything remotely like that. It's not continual opposition of some unknown force, the state is a very elegant solution to sanctioning unwanted behavior. That is why is arises everywhere. Since every collectivity faces the same sanctioning problem.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 12:51 PM on December 28, 2015


Here's a hint: if you'd lived a couple of millennia ago, you'd be asking just as smugly "And the alternative to slavery is...?"

I am attempting to read this as a hint about what the alternative to the state is. I do not understand what is being hinted at.
posted by LogicalDash at 12:59 PM on December 28, 2015


Ooh, burn! You've just destroyed centuries of anarchist thinking with a single well-placed question! Thanks for showing me the error of my ways!

This kind of response seems demonstrative of the faith-based nature of anarchism as a political theory. Because confronted with the anarchist assertion that the state with its monopoly on legal authority and physical force isn't necessary, "What is the alternative?" seems like a perfectly reasonable question. "How successful have anarchist polities been?" is another reasonable question. That some particular anarchist doesn't want to engage with them on some given occasion is understandable, but doesn't make the questions any less important or less valid. They are the questions that must be answered if anarchism is ever to be anything other than a "tendency" or an ideal.
posted by octobersurprise at 1:44 PM on December 28, 2015


No I'm not positing a Hegelian dialectic or anything remotely like that. It's not continual opposition of some unknown force

This seems like a highly uncharitable reading of Hegel. I'm not sure that I actually recognise Hegelianism in that, in fact.

the state is a very elegant solution to sanctioning unwanted behavior.

A horse is an elegant and effective means of transport, that doesn't tell anyone anything about whether motorcars work.

That is why is arises everywhere.

Is it? It seems like you may potentially risk begging the question here. The fact that states exist is undeniably highly significant, but you seem to be indicating that they are necessary, without telling us why you think so.

In general, I don't see why languagehat should feel any obligation to do other people's reading for them. It's really as simple as going to the Wikipedia page "Anarchism" and looking at various proposed forms of organisation.
posted by howfar at 1:54 PM on December 28, 2015


I am attempting to read this as a hint about what the alternative to the state is. I do not understand what is being hinted at.

Actually you could make a good case that the answer to both questions is "technology."

In the ancient world it was not practically possible to sustain a large city-state without slave labor. Even if you tried to implement a fair labor market it wouldn't have worked because who's going to take the somewhat important job of emptying all the chamber pots? And of course technology had a lot to do with the abandonment of slavery in more modern times, where slavery was considered a necessity for certain critical industries until technology began to change that.

As for the state, one of the main reasons the utopian anarchistic society depicted by James P. Hogan in Voyage From Yesteryear is believable is that it is a post-scarcity society and with machines providing everything people need for comfortable survival, there are no powerful forces to align people with would-be strongmen. (This is stated explicitly by one of Hogan's characters in the story, too.)
posted by Bringer Tom at 2:05 PM on December 28, 2015 [2 favorites]


I don't see why languagehat should feel any obligation to do other people's reading for them.

Neither languagehat or anyone else is under any obligation to do or explain anything here. It's not that important. Being as this is a space for discussion, however, the injunction to "do your own reading" seems like just another way of choosing not to discuss the topic.
posted by octobersurprise at 2:09 PM on December 28, 2015 [1 favorite]


You get snippy answers to those questions not because no one has a good answer, but because the questions have been answered over and over and over again (and also because it's usually clear when the asker already knows that they're going to dismiss any answer they get). The Conquest of Bread was published in 1892, ABC of Anarchism in 1929, and versions of An Anarchist FAQ have been floating around on the internet for almost 20 years.

Here's my extremely brief 101 response: there's some variation among the different tendencies, but the Wikipedia article on anarchist communism explains one popular approach and mentions a number of historical attempts to implement it, inevitably during periods of extreme social upheaval and in the face of violent opposition. The aforementioned Anarchist FAQ has a lot more detail; section I.5.5 is likely of particular interest. Regarding the "sanctioning problem," it depends what exactly is meant by that phrase. But a typical anarchist response would probably involve collective structures that emphasize participation and dialogue instead of coercion (e.g. assemblies using direct democracy, small groups using consensus, perhaps some form of restorative justice).
posted by Gerald Bostock at 2:16 PM on December 28, 2015 [4 favorites]


> "What is the alternative?" seems like a perfectly reasonable question.

It certainly is! It's one I've been wrestling with for almost half a century, and anarchists collectively have been wrestling with for a lot longer. It's very difficult, just like (say) "What is the alternative to patriarchy?" But, just like feminists, I'm completely fed up with people who show up at the door with nothing but native wit and a little snark and expect to have centuries' worth of debate and analysis spoonfed to them. If your takeaway from that is "Haha, languagehat doesn't know how to answer my deadly question," I can live with that.

On preview: what Gerald Bostock said.
posted by languagehat at 2:17 PM on December 28, 2015 [7 favorites]


You get snippy answers to those questions not because no one has a good answer, but because the questions have been answered over and over and over again ...

Well, then, if anarchists have so clearly worked out everything, then the question might be "Why aren't there more large scale anarchist polities?"
posted by octobersurprise at 2:22 PM on December 28, 2015


And this is why nobody can be bothered to explain. You're not actually interested in the answers.
posted by howfar at 2:47 PM on December 28, 2015 [4 favorites]


"What is the alternative?" seems like a perfectly reasonable question.

The alternatives happen all around us, all the time. I'm seeing a lot of assumptions based on the notion that anarchism would be a sudden collapse of hierarchy, resulting in chaos and people committing murder with impunity. But anarchism is something you do; not something you believe. It is the non-hierarchical, consensus-based model of organizing labor and resources. In our everyday lives, a great deal of how we work and how we distribute resources is conducted without the need for a hierarchical structure to mediate things; we mediate them between ourselves, with accountability reinforced by the community at large rather than by a police officer, or a bureaucrat. To me, this is a far more humane option. You wanna talk about people being able to run around and kill others with impunity, with no accountability whatsoever? We already have those people, and they're called the police. How many times this year have you read about a cop murdering someone, and getting away with it, if a grand jury even elects to convict them at all? There is no accountability in a hierarchy, unless you happen to be at the bottom of the pile.

The question of why there aren't large-scale anarchist political bodies is like asking why, if horses are birds, they don't have wings. It's a localized method of organization, first of all, and second, attempts at trying to organize say, a village, or even a neighborhood, in this manner will often attract law enforcement or the military, depending on the size of the project. They tend to get overwhelmed and crushed, and then critics point and say, "See? Anarchism doesn't work." while at the same time ignoring places like Rojava, or the deep south of Mexico, or any of dozens of communities across the US.

What anarchism proposes (and there are so many, many flavors of anarchism that I'm trepidacious about making this generalization) is that accountability for the community is reinforced by the community rather than a hierarchy with the power to inflict violence without said accountability. That's really the long and short of it. It may be a utopian fantasy, but it's one happening to varying degrees all over the world, and its full realization is not so far removed from the world we currently live in.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 3:05 PM on December 28, 2015 [6 favorites]


There is no accountability in a hierarchy, unless you happen to be at the bottom of the pile.

This isn't necessarily true at all.

But all of what you say is well and good when we talk about small groups of people. But its pretty clear from the commenters here that anarchism is not merely a way of addressing the question, "how do we organize small groups of people", but rather, "How do we organize all groups of people?". Which is an entirely different issue. Anarchism when posited as a solution to the state has no mechanism by which it can credibly punish deviant behavior, since impersonal coercive punishment relies on the possibility of violence. So anarchist societies may work when people can exit the agreement, or when the type of people who are allowed to participated are already committed, or when non-violent social sanctioning has the possibility of working.

This is exactly why violence-based hierarchy arises everywhere that the problem of sanctioning: the possibility of violence or ostracization is an incredibly effective way to punish behavior from people who won't be deterred by other means. And anarchists even recognize this! From the Anarchist FAQ on crimes: "Therefore, some sort of justice system would still be necessary to deal with the remaining crimes and to adjudicate disputes between citizens."

So anarchism: violence based hierarchy is bad, except when its necessary. Which is of course a perfectly reasonable position but is also pretty vacuous too.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:31 PM on December 28, 2015


Even within societies underpinned by violence, people engage in processes of consensual arbitration and adjudication. Battei din, for example, do not derive their primary efficacy from the enforceability of their judgments, and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission was explicitly founded on the modification and (in some cases) suspension of standard means of violent coercion in achieving justice.

Neither of these are what one would describe as "anarchist institutions", and they may be argued to rely on the coercive nature of the polities they exist within, but they demonstrate the role that non-coercion has to play in the administration of justice, and raise questions about how far that can be taken. Hence we're back at a complex range of questions that require thought and discussion in good faith, not hasty attempts at dismissal.

I'm inclined to stop interacting with people when they appear to value winning the argument they have framed for themselves more than they value mutual illumination of conversation participants. That's an example of a non-coercive sanction which may be effective when employed consistently.
posted by howfar at 12:36 AM on December 29, 2015 [3 favorites]


Hence we're back at a complex range of questions that require thought and discussion in good faith, not hasty attempts at dismissal

I and others have written a good bit here and simply poo-poohing my standard regurtitation of the game theoretic and historical literature on state formation as a hasty dismissal is, like much behavior here, childish.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 5:58 AM on December 29, 2015


I think the "hasty dismissal" was directed at some of the glib summaries of what anarchism entails that keep popping up and seem to willfully ignore how it actually functions in favor of how someone imagines it functions, if which there have been plenty. I don't think scolding people as "childish" is helpful or accurate.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 6:03 AM on December 29, 2015


Like: So anarchism: violence based hierarchy is bad, except when its necessary, derived from "Therefore, some sort of justice system would still be necessary to deal with the remaining crimes and to adjudicate disputes between citizens" is a mischaracterization. Nowhere in this pullquote from the FAQ is hierarchy or even violence brought into the picture. This is just an assumption shoehorned in by imagination. In reality, there are any number of non-violent, consensus-based models for justice that could be employed - based, again, upon consensus-built rules for how justice is determined and conducted. So when someone ignores something this basic in favor of repeating their own pre-determined idea of what anarchism is, repeatedly, I think a certain frustration that there's mischaracterization at work is entirely understandable.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 6:14 AM on December 29, 2015 [4 favorites]


"reality, there are any number of non-violent, consensus-based models for justice that could be employed - based, again, upon consensus-built rules for how justice is determined an"

I agree. Olaf II having the Thing act in accordance to the new doctorine for example.
posted by clavdivs at 1:22 PM on December 29, 2015


There's a lot of conflation between right wing bullshit and anarchism in this thread.

The original flavor of anarchism, and arguably the most popular nowadays, would be more accurately labeled as anarchist-communism. It is a strictly left-wing ideology and has nothing to do with Zerzan or any other strains of primitivism.

Most people who self identify as anarchists are just communists who have a bad taste in their mouth from Stalin and Pol Pot and think that humans could successfully pull off full-communism if we didn't build a huge state to manage it, which I don't think is an unreasonable proposition in 2015.
posted by thsmchnekllsfascists at 9:17 PM on December 29, 2015


> The original flavor of anarchism, and arguably the most popular nowadays, would be more accurately labeled as anarchist-communism.

From when are you dating original anarchism, and who do you take as its founder/first prominent exponent?

> Most people who self identify as anarchists are just communists who have a bad taste in their mouth

This has not at all been my experience (and it certainly isn't true of me), but anarchism is so marginal one's own experience counts for very little. I'm curious as to where you're getting your information from; if there's some reliable poll/study of anarchists, I'd be interested (though I'm wondering who would fund such a thing).
posted by languagehat at 8:49 AM on December 30, 2015


I keep forgetting to say: above I compared the state to patriarchy; I personally think there's a deep connection between the two, and that we'll never get rid of one without getting rid of the other. If anyone's interested in that idea (which I'm surprised isn't more often discussed, except that feminists are probably reluctant, understandably, to associate themselves with an even more marginalized and reviled movement/theory), you might check out one of the few books relevant to the subject, the edited volume Freedom, Feminism, and the State: An Overview of Individualist Feminism (Amazon, LibraryThing).
posted by languagehat at 11:06 AM on December 30, 2015


You don't know a damn thing about anarchism or anarchists; please take the trouble to learn something before shooting off your mouth.

Everything I know about anarchists I learned on the streets of Oakland livstreaming during Occupy, and at the General Assemblies. Everything I know about Anarchism I learned from talking to self-identified anarchists during one of the most street-politics active times in a generation.

So maybe you're not the type of anarchist to dump a beer on the Revolutionary Communist Party's book table on May Day out of some masturbatory re-enactment of some last-century ideological purity grudge. Maybe you're not the type to smash windows at Whole Foods and call it revolutionary gesture. Maybe you're not the type to carve shields out of garbage can lids, put on your balaclava and square off with the cops riot-line in some ceremonial coup-counting gesture.

But basically you can take a flying leap off the pier w/ your "please take the trouble to learn something" blather.

I fucking spent time on the streets with Anarchists while OPD was coming at me, batons out. I listened to what they said, espoused, and tweeted.

Listening to Anarchists have to say is why nobody in America takes Anarchism seriously.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 10:51 AM on January 2, 2016


I can recommend some good books on anarchism if you'd like to understand it as a political philosophy.
posted by howfar at 11:47 AM on January 2, 2016


Thanks, but I'll pass, and I'll tell you why. Because I've read the wikipedia article AND talked to on-the-streets anarchists. That was enough.

I don't really care about the philosophical niceties and moral high-ground Anarchists describe themselves as claiming. I don't care about how many non-stateists can dance on the head of a highlighted systemic contradiction.

I care about on the ground, real world politics that affect real life. And on that front, Anarchs are a marginal presence in American politics, espousing notions that are not taken seriously by American culture.

Modern people don't want to fucking go to a General Assembly and vote on every fucking last thing like some Greek City-State. They want peace, security, justice, a job, and to take their family to a movie on Sat night. Most people don't see themselves primarily as individuals, but as members of a community, tribe, some form of social identity.

And for all their coup-counting, window-smashing, contradiction-highlighting black-bloc-&-garbage-can-shields street theater Anarchs seem to be so fond of, not a damn one of them seems to have read Sun Tzu when it comes to actually squaring off w power. At least not the ones I've met.

I'm sure there's more to it, in greater and more sympathetic detail in the theory books. But so what?

What matters is how it is put into practice on the ground in real people's lives.

And by those lights, Anarchism in America is revolution LARPing.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 10:16 AM on January 3, 2016


Ah, know-nothingism, a hallowed American tradition. Nice to see it still has adherents!
posted by languagehat at 11:11 AM on January 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


I'm sure there's more to it, in greater and more sympathetic detail in the theory books. But so what?

The intersection between anarchists and libertarians at this very spot astounds me. The rickety structure of dubious assumptions upon which both build their theories and the wild-eyed, well, not acceptance of, but rather insistence on the truth of these assumptions, and in the face of much historical evidence to the contrary, is eerily similar. They only differ in the assumptions.
posted by Mental Wimp at 10:54 AM on January 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


Would you care to expand on that point?
posted by howfar at 12:34 PM on January 5, 2016


I mean, it could literally be made about any two bodies of theory and be just as enlightening.
posted by howfar at 12:35 PM on January 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


I'm going to hazard a guess: "zero enlightening."
posted by Joseph Gurl at 2:58 PM on January 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


>"Oh, you just want us to go back to the Stone Age!" Well, sure, but nobody said anything about forgetting the entirety of human history.

happyroach: Well for a start, returning to pre-agricultural society would have to involve eliminating 99.9% of the human population. In such a situation, there's not going to be much room for much but survival. There's not going to be room for much specialization, either. So it's doubtful history supposed survive as anything but scattered, garbled legends.

Thus illustrating my point. I don't really think the people who say "you just want us to go back to the Stone Age" have any idea what they're talking about. They're only trying to inflate an ignorant opinion into something that sounds terrible. (Yes, reducing the amount of fossil fuels burned means an automatic end to agriculture, menstrual products and birth control.) Assuming the worst possible outcome to any widespread change as a rhetorical tactic to avoid any discussion of change.

Similarly, assuming that taking a technological step back to... the 18th C., the 12th C.... I don't know, the 5th C? will cause us to revert to infanticide because someone believes that happened in most times and places that aren't the 20th C. West is the same tactic.

So, my fantasy about Adult Anarchic Primitivism involves 1) making choices, and 2) taking responsibility. For example, infanticide isn't necessary in a society that chooses to educate people about birth control, both chemical and behavioural. But what about Freedom? See 2) above. Restricting population size to match available resources is also a choice, unless your solution to every problem is growth and a sturdy faith in technology.
posted by sneebler at 6:42 PM on January 5, 2016


Mod note: A couple of comments deleted; "fuck you" still not okay on Metafilter.
posted by taz (staff) at 1:07 AM on January 10, 2016


Would you care to expand on that point?
posted by howfar at 12:34 PM on January 5 [+] [!]


I mean, it could literally be made about any two bodies of theory and be just as enlightening.
posted by howfar at 12:35 PM on January 5 [1 favorite +] [!]


I'm going to hazard a guess: "zero enlightening."
posted by Joseph Gurl at 2:58 PM on January 5 [1 favorite +] [!]


Of course, people within these two camps are unable to see my point and probably view all other theories of government as equally frail. All I can or care to say at this point is that there is a reason neither is or ever has been a mainstream philosophy.
posted by Mental Wimp at 10:27 AM on January 11, 2016


>All I can or care to say at this point is that there is a reason neither is or ever has been a mainstream philosophy.

Well, if that's your response, it appears you believe that the way things are is the way things ought to be.

Truly we are living in the best of all possible worlds.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 3:49 PM on January 11, 2016 [2 favorites]


« Older Ja, weQ   |   mywar_yuichiro Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments