A Late Response to Brendan Simms.

Last week, I read a piece on anti-Semitism in The Evening Standard in which the writer - Brendan Simms - argued that it is connected with 'anti-capitalism' and 'anti-globalization' on the nationalist Right. He even went as far as to suggest that it was anti-capitalism which led Adolf Hitler to anti-Semitism. In his mind Simms actually conflates Hitler's rage against the Versailles Treaty with anti-capitalist sympathies. Hitler was enraged by the defeat and humiliation of Germany as a burgeoning imperial power. Furthermore, it was this treaty which was used by the British and French empires to engender an inevitable crisis within Germany that helped create the conditions for the rise of the Nazi Party. Instead Simms claims Hitler "accused" internationally-oriented Anglo-American capitalism for the destruction of Germany, as if the consequence was not an actuality at all. Ironically, it was the financial hub of American capitalism that imploded in 1929, taking the world economy with it, that led directly to Hitler's victory in 1933.

Sadly Mr Simms seems short on historical perspective. It has become somewhat fashionable to claim that the Left is a harbinger of anti-Semitism and belongs in the same ballpark as Fascism (if not worse, for some). He wants to situate the Left as a natural ally of Hamas, Iran, and even Hungarian neo-fascists, for its commitments to 'anti-globalization' and anti-capitalism. He claims these forces are coalescing against Israel and liberal democratic capitalism. I wonder if Mr Simms was present at the dinner where George W Bush consorted openly, for money, with self-declared 'Messianic Jews' converted to Christianity in order to bring on the Rapture. The anti-Jewish ramblings of Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and John Hagee, might not be so easy to swallow. Even still the article is packed with innuendo like "This makes [anti-Semitism] dangerous not just to Jews but to those seen as their allies, most of the Western capitalist democracies, or plutocracies, as anti-Semites (but not only they) often call them." That point requires more pause for thought.

It wasn't that surprising to find that Mr Simms is a prominent figure in the Henry Jackson Society, that heroic brigade of laptop bombardiers for whom there is never enough blood to spill around the world. It is awfully convenient for the Henry Jackson Society to discover that their enemies are all virulent anti-Semites. It presupposes that the actions they back to the hilt have an immaculate moral character. There's a switch-side to that coin. To what degree can the aggressive foreign policy of the US and Israel be defended morally, that includes the criminal use of white phosphorous against human beings in Fallujah in 2005 and in Gaza in 2009. The easy way is to simply slander the critics and opposition while the killing frenzy reaches a peak. This is a part of what Douglas Murray seems to think of as a struggle for civilisation over relativism. Actually the opponents of mad-dog neoconservatism are closer to where progressive republican Immanuel Kant stood in the late 18th Century. Far from relativism. More like the core of the Enlightenment.

Someone should tell Mr Simms that the only thing that brings anti-Semites together is Judeophobia, apart from that they can be pretty varied, as anyone who has put a few minutes into researching the Far-Right. Anders Behring Breivik, the Butcher of Utoya, managed to be pro-Israel and anti-Semitic in his writings. Holocaust denier Nick Griffin can't make his mind up on the subject, pledging support for Operation Cast Lead one minute, and then accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing the next. Perhaps Simms has the on-and-off talks between the Israelis and Palestinians in mind when he penned the article. As Alexander Cockburn wrote in 2004 "Over the past 20 years I've learned there's a quick way of figuring out just how badly Israel is behaving. You see a brisk uptick in the number of articles here accusing the left of anti-Semitism." Yesterday we found Prime Minister Netanyahu accusing John Kerry of being an 'anti-Semite'. The Palestinians suspect the talks are a smokescreen and have good reason to reckon so.

This comes as Danske Bank, the biggest Danish bank, divests from an Israeli company on the grounds that it is tied to settlement building. Then there were those EU sanctions last year. Clearly the Israeli government can see the creeping impact of its isolation in the international community. So it is a testament to Netanyahu's paranoia that he would attack his closest and most important allies in the world. But his fears may well come to fruition if the US backs down at the UN. And that would almost certainly mean the Palestinians would get a state of some kind. Meanwhile the Hank Jackson know-nothings - which includes the combined mental might of Michael Gove, David Willetts, Denis MacShane, and not just Douglas Murray - can get back to their domestic agenda of ripping tax-payer money out of public services to feather the nests of the ultra-rich. It's clear what people like Murray and Simms want, and it isn't civilisation.

Eco-Fatalism: Towards Certain Doom.

When it comes to the environment no one really disputes that there is an on-going change taking place in the atmosphere. Even with the 15 year hiatus in rising temperatures, the only dispute is over the extent to which we might say that the change we're seeing is a natural occurrence or the consequence of human activity - whether or not it is anthropogenic to use the proper term. The debate is framed between the people who believe that we are responsible for the change, and that we should alter our behaviour in order to offset it or even prevent it; and the people who believe it is a natural occurrence which would be happening even if we hadn't developed an industrial civilisation. Yet there is an angle which is neglected, the scientific position that it may well be too late for human activity to turn back the tide and that the change is coming whether we like it or not. And there is substantial support for this view within the scientific community. But the media prefers the more simplistic version of the debate: deniers versus believers.

If you think about it this is not the dichotomy which we face whenever this issue is raised in discussion on the BBC or elsewhere. Why is this such a contentious issue for rightists? Really it's because this question leads in such a radical direction that the theory is subject to so much right-wing 'scepticism'. The Right has hooked onto the trajectory of environmental concerns, ultimately towards alternative forms of coordination in the economy and specifically some kind of rational planning apparatus. Any amount of evidence is not enough when it comes up against the need to safeguard the already existing system and account for its infinite-growth paradigm. A modest change in political economy is less easy to imagine than the end of the world, which is what the eliminate change 'sceptics' accept and embrace. Not only is the end of the world the only imaginable outcome, it is the preferred outcome to any attempts at ecological planning as that might mean the end of capitalism. And that remains the case even if the warming is a natural occurrence.

In short, this is not scepticism but fatalism. It would be better to accept certain doom than to go socialist. You might imagine a dreary fellow in a grey suit and a blue tie going "Why bother? It's over anyway" as the perfect surmise of the Delingpole school of environmental 'scepticism'. As the Iron Lady once said, there is no alternative - not even to the apocalypse! Though there is a flip-side to this coin, if we are doomed - which is more than plausible by this point - then why not go socialist? There isn't much to lose after all, there is the possibility that we can save ourselves and there is the possibility that we can't. Not much else. We won't know whether certain doom is inevitable if we don't take action.

American Progress.

The painting by John Gast of American Progress should be looked at with the advantage of hindsight and situated in its historical context. Note the way in which the barbarity of civilisation is externalised onto the Native Americans. You can see Winthrop's Protestant claim of America as a 'shining beacon' converging with the technological innovations of nascent capitalist society. The white settlers laid claim to both faith and reason in their colonisation of the New World. Significantly, when Native Americans first encountered white settlers they regarded them as just another rival tribe to be bartered with. There was no recognition of the encroachments into the New World that the process of settler-colonialism would necessitate. The tribal pluralism of Native Americans may have held them back from seeing the threat for what it was. It was easy for the settlers and backers in Britain to divide and conquer the indigenous population and expand ever westward. The push for independence only came in the Thirteen Colonies after King George III had tried to slam the breaks on expansion in 1763.

The millions of Africans kidnapped and transported were members of a variety of tribes. As David Roediger has noted the slave ships were incubators for black identity in that the people imprisoned aboard them were wrenched, brutally, from the context of tribal life. Paradoxically, it was the inhuman conditions of slavery which created the basis for Black nationalism and pan-Africanism to emerge. This is not to defend slavery or settler colonialism, but to acknowledge the immense contradictions in the anfractuous passages of history. Since it first was an outpost of British power, America has seen not just one but two revolutionary ruptures. The most obvious one was against the British Empire and the second came in the form of the Civil War between industrial capitalism and slaveocracy. The Civil War brought a period of primitive accumulation to an end in the South, furthered capitalism and significantly centralised the state. Then came the first imperial adventures (to cross saltwater) in the late 19th Century.

In coming decades there will be much more scepticism shed on America's founding point as its imperial hegemony begins to go into decline. The growing criticism may well be further facilitated by the technological advantages that we enjoy today. Unlike the British Empire the first cracks of scepticism are already visible in the American ideology, almost pre-emptive of the breakdown.

Claims of 'East' and 'West'.

It is an illusion of liberal society that the language we use can ever have a neutral application, in the strictest sense, for it carries all sorts of hidden cargo - some of it intentionally so, no doubt. You only have to look at the discourse around the Middle East for a demonstration of this and that’s before we even get to the details of the various crises. The very designation of the region as the ‘Middle East’ has a historical and political significance in itself. There is no longer commonly heard talk of a ‘Near East’ or even a ‘Far East’. The days when the Balkans and Greece are seen as otherly to the rest of Europe are hopefully gone. Of course, Turkey is the exceptional case, typically viewed as a middle-passage from the West to the East. Yet the example of Turkey ought to prompt serious questions about the widely accepted and most problematic division of ‘East’ from ‘West’. The assumptions built into such statements are in dire need of a vigorous unpicking.

It’s not the case that the difference boils down to a distinction between Islamic and Christian culture. If this were the case then not only would Turkey not be European, but neither would Bosnia be considered European. We would then be led to the suspect conclusion that the level of Muslim population determines the un-European nature of a society. In contrast, many would assume that Europe ends at the borders of Greece even without Islam in mind. And this in turn would lead us back to the old colonial signifier of a ‘Near East’ from which we must be on guard. It used to be that Greece was a part of the ‘Near East’ along with the Balkans, yet it has been confined as the ‘Middle East’ to the territory ruled by the Ottoman Empire in the last century or so. The terms ‘Near’ and ‘Middle’ imply that the region is defined in relation to the rest of Europe, though not as a part of the same region. Serbia may be more near than far as with Singapore, while Syria falls in the middle from where we sit. Yet no one would draw Indonesia as Eastern with the same connotations as Syria.

No one talks about the ‘Near East’ or the ‘Far East’ with any serious today, but the 'Middle East' remains in our vocabulary as stubborn as ever. Given the hybridity of European countries, the distinction can no longer be maintained on the contours of ‘race’ and instead the language of ‘culture’ fills the breach. This is where the talk of a clash of civilisations enters, with the West is defined as civilised only negatively against the barbarism of the East. For the nationalists, Christian identity is worth emphasising because it isn’t Islamic. In the conflicts erupting from Yugoslavia’s demise in the early 90s it was the claims to civilisation which prefigured the exclusion of an Other. So-called Christian civilisation was under threat in the Balkans, as people like Karadžić claim, and therefore it was necessary to resort to ultra-violence.[1] As ethnic identity became determined by religious affiliation Orthodox Christians became Serbs while Muslims remained Bosnian regardless of the heritage they may have shared.

In light of this we’d do best to note that human civilisation has never been homogenous, nor monolithic, and certainly not ahistorical. We may reiterate these points with regard to the variety of cultures in the world. If we then accept religion and culture as socially constructed, responding to a need in human society, as well as constitutive of identities, this ought to be obvious. In this sense culture is partially determined by its material basis, while culture retains its own capacity for productivity and not all of its development can be reduced to the material.[2] It should surprise no sensible person then that the economic formations in the region have been conducive to religiously infused forms of politics. Due to the transient condition of society the interdependence of the economy and its cultural effluvia may lead to serious contradictions. The unbridled forces of the market tend towards relativism, pluralism and pragmatism, are fettered by tradition, order, cohesion and moral realism.[3]

It’s an inescapable problem for modern societies. Some, like Britain, have become increasingly secular and that has actually solved the problem to a large extent. This secularisation of Britain seems to have come about with a displacement of religion to the state. Ironically, it may be the absence of a separation of church and state in Britain which maintains its secularity in everyday life. Meanwhile the US remains as fervent as ever in spite of its formal laicism. Yet there is nothing English about the Church of England, other than its peculiar head, no Christian value which can be monopolised by the British state. More and more British society is comfortable with its relativizing economy and its religious-state establishment. The problem for those who complain of the threat of immigration to British values is that there are no such values. There is nothing uniquely British about emotional restraint, even if it is a cultural value.[4] As Eagleton points out, the moral values of  the ‘natives’ and the ‘foreigner’ hold much common ground than we might first assume when customs and beliefs differ.[5]

There may be a probability of a cultural transformation, but there are no values under threat and culture was never a unified and ahistorical continuum to begin with. Likewise, if we take Islam and Christianity as sharing a common ancestor, namely Judaism, then we shouldn’t lose sight of the common ground either. As a monotheistic tradition it lays claim to universal truth, and this was a huge advance on polytheism with its multiple truths taken for granted. It was a necessary shift for culture and civilisation to undertake, moving from particularism to universalism.[6] This laid the groundwork for the Enlightenment to come many centuries later. In this way we may understand secular society as necessarily post-monotheist, its own universalist claims holding ancient precursors.[7] The predisposition of religion towards an aversion from Enlightenment values does not necessarily amount to an incompatibility between religious conviction and a liberal society.

The British Right has long maintained that the United Kingdom is separated from Europe not just by the seas, but by its culture, language and history. Strangely, we find this view of the Anglo-Saxons can be found among the dirigiste conservatives of France and has a history of its own going back to Charles de Gaulle if not further. It rears its head in odd ways every so often in French politics, yet it is a recurrent motif of British political discourse. The paucity and anaemia of our ‘national’ identity can easily be overlooked when there is an Other within reach. Thus we once raved about turbans and now it’s the much maligned niqab. Likewise, it doesn’t matter if we can’t define our so-called ‘Western’ values - that we must protect from the hordes about to swarm across our borders - as we can reassure ourselves that we are not like the Other. Not only is this danger of xenophobia underestimated, we have overlooked the role we could play in counteracting the very presuppositions of the debate to be had.

In this way we find that the conservatives may have succeeded in defining Britain as somewhat alien to Europe then we should undo the colonialist designation of ‘Middle East’. It seems not just necessary but preferable in countering the absurd narrative of permanently clashing civilisations. The region may be better designated as West Asia, that’s including everything from the Iranian plateau to Anatolia. It includes not just Israel but Palestine and the surrounding Arab petro-states, as well as the Kurdish land in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. The Arab Spring should dispel all orientalist twaddle about the imperatives of the one-party state over the peoples beyond the Turkish middle-ground. If we are to take monotheism as running westward in its universal claims then we can’t pretend the claims made by the Enlightenment ends at the doorstep of Europe.

---

[1] http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/europe/karadzic-no-genocide-we-killed-in-self-defence

[2] Eagleton, T; Culture and Barbarism (2008):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UN6FcBXlIcA

[3] Eagleton, T; Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (Kindle edition, 2010) p.142-143

[4] Eagleton, T; Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (Kindle edition, 2010) p.150-152

[5] Ibid.

[6] Gray, J; Straw Dogs  (Granta, 2002) pg.125-126

[7] Ibid. pg.126-127

 

Who is the Enemy?

 

You may have heard that Malala Yousafzai has been flown into Britain to receive medical treatment. On October 9th Malala Yousafzai was gunned down on the bus home from school after taking an exam, her friends Shazia Ramzan and Kainat Ahmed were injured in the shooting. There wasn't any doubt as to why Malala had been attacked. Soon after a spokesperson for the Taliban claimed "She is a Western-minded girl. She always speaks against us. We will target anyone who speaks against the Taliban." Naturally, Malala has become a symbol of the struggle for women's rights in Pakistan which has been an espcially uphill struggle, to say the least, since the radicalisation of Pakistani society beginning in the late 1970s and carried through under a military dictatorship in the 80s. A very unwelcome development as Pakistan became a nuclear power over the same period of time. It's easy to see this incident framed within the paradigm of the 'clash of civilisations' between Islam and the West.

Not that any of this was opposed by the United States, which has long taken Pakistan as a major strategic ally. The struggle for women's rights is not unique to Pakistan, we shouldn't overlook the women in Saudi Arabia have been protesting just to drive their own cars. And that's really the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the trampling of basic freedoms in that oily Kingdom. We also shouldn't assume we're so much more advanced in the West because we pledged to establish pay equality (and have yet to deliver). The right to choose is still under threat in the US, where the state of Georgia has opted for a bill which obliges women to carry still-born fetuses to full-term because cows and pigs do. It's demonstrably clear that the fight of feminists has yet to win out even in the 21st Century on many fronts. The outrage provoked by the attack has nothing to do with a concern for women's rights, it's primarily about the political significance of the shooting. This is why we need to think seriously about Huntington's famous paradigm.

The suggestion of a cultural clash between Islam and the West is dubious for the main reason that these suggestions only emerged after the Berlin Wall crumbled. Until then chaps like Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis had been more preoccupied with cheerleading the Cold War, Israel's expansion and denying the Armenian genocide. It's worth noting that the most extreme incarnation of political Islam in the world remains to be Saudi Arabia, the oldest ally of the US in the region and a long-time favourite of many other European governments. Are we talking about bombing Saudi Arabia? No, but we talk about bombing Iran on a regular basis. It's never about human rights or cultural differences, even if Iran had an immaculate human rights record it would be damned constantly for taking a line independent of American hegemony. Right now, by comparison, Pakistan is an increasingly dysfunctional client-state of the United States in its domestic and foreign affairs. Of course the country's turmoil comes up only when it is problematic for particular interests.

Even still Pakistan remains on the forefront of the 'War on Terror' in the minds of Western policy-makers. It was only last year that Osama bin Laden was assassinated in a compound surrounded by Pakistan's military elite. This is the same military which has lost all credibility in the country as it can't even defend the country's sovereignty. Demonstrably so, as Pakistan has been repeatedly struck by US drones and we pay no attention to the dozens of teenage girls killed in those strikes. The ongoing war in Pakistan is what led to the brief peaceful arrangement in the Swat valley, allowing the Taliban to wage its campaign to close all the girls schools in the area. It's worth noting that the Pakistani government came to this settlement after thousands had been killed and a couple of million people had been displaced in the valley. This is where Malala lived at the time and became involved in activism for women's education at just eleven - she even took up blogging for the BBC.

It's not to invalidate Malala's important work to acknowledge that there are cynical reasons behind the media reaction to the case. The Pakistani government and prominent clerics have condemned the assassination attempt, have they condemned the constant bombing by US drones? Imran Khan, cricketer-cum-politician, has taken a strange stand recently after leading a march against the drone strikes and just after the shooting. He claimed that "It is very clear that whoever is fighting for their freedom is fighting a jihad… The people who are fighting in Afghanistan against the foreign occupation are fighting a jihad." It could well be a goofy swing from a populist who is still much more liberal than the people who fired into a school bus to kill the young activist. All of this just seems symptomatic of the incessant turmoil which has wracked Pakistani society over the decades. The ruling-class of Pakistan presides over obscene corruption and stoops to new lows of incompetence on a regular basis. It's a situation which would prompt disenchantment from any culture.

When we try to think about how to make progress in the Middle East it's important never to overlook the devastated political sphere that has created a void for radical Islamism to fill. Of course, there are those who argue that to offer a rationalisation of Islamist terrorism is to excuse the culprits of their crimes. Yet it's funny that no one would ever suggest that an investigation into the historical conditions that led to Nazism excuse Hitler of his crimes. The first steps towards positive change in the Middle East will be in the crafting of a new politics, that's why the Arab Spring is such a vital series of events. The simplistic position that holds "Islam is the enemy" fails to even recognise that the Islamic extremists are the enemy of most Muslims in the world. And that is what the shooting has shown more definitively than the discourse on the subject in the past decade. The future of the Middle East is not in theopolitics. It's a political struggle within the region, not a war of regions defined by homogenous cultural blocs.

Spain's Pain.

Santiago Carrillo just passed at the age of 97, perhaps the last major figure of Spanish leftism to have fought in the Civil War and participate in Spain's transition to democracy. He became a major figure in the rising Eurocommunist movement, which could be understood most fairly as an attempt by the Communist Parties of Europe to take an independent line from the Soviet Union. It took the form of an embrace of the democratic norms and institutions of Western Europe in a bid to differentiate itself from Trotskyism. As the Civil War broke out Carrillo was brought into the orbit of the Soviet Union and he was later complicit in the Paracuellos massacre - in which some 2,000 prisoners were shot. The massacre was taken up as an instance of "red barbarism" by Franco's Nationalists. General Franco claimed that the war he waged on Republicans and the Spanish Left in the 1930s was a crusade for Christian civilisation - and he found common cause with reactionary rightists of all stripes to this end.

Franco's Falangists had finished the Second Republic by 1939 and in its place crafted what would be Europe's longest reigning dictatorship. The anarchist revolutionaries of Spain were crushed by the combined forces of Fascism, Stalinism and Western democracies. For the reactionaries in Spain it meant the end of the social upheaval and rebellious unionism that had threatened the fabric of Spanish society for too long. Francoism in Spain was born out of a negation of radicalism, at first Franco only promised a return to order and an end to the revolution. Yet he endorsed liberty, equality and fraternity in his first proclamation. He was quick to promise the middle-class the reversal of land reform, the banning of trade unions along with the parties of the Popular Front. The General went further to promise the return of the monarchy and defence of Catholicism. Leading conservative intellectual William F Buckley, Jr. described Franco as an 'authentic national hero' and condemned the left-wing government as 'visionaries, ideologues, Marxists and nihilists'.

As noted by Richard Seymour, the priority in rural areas of Spain during the Republican era was land reform and the countryside was subject to high unemployment. This helped the Popular Front government to spring up with the promise of quick land reform. The unemployed peasants couldn't wait for the government to deliver and opted to occupy large estates, starting with 3,000 farms in the province of Badajoz. The government legalised the early occupations given the amount of civil unrest and hundreds of thousands of peasants were resettled. The seizures provided not just land and work, a democratic forum was opened up where arguments were waged over the whole future of how the society would develop from then on. It was this which General Franco conquered and destroyed, the peasants and leftist leaders were swiftly done away with. Franco set out to undercut the Left with promise of nationalisations, even the Falange flag was designed to mimmick the flags of the anarchists they intended to annihilate.

Today the very radicalism that the Spanish Fascists had fought to eradicate has resurfaced in the time of austerity and widespread despair. As Fascism collapsed and Spain became a monarchical democracy Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo came to power in Marinaleda in 1979 and, as the rest of the world fell under the spell of neoliberalism, embarked upon the construction of a pocket of what has been described as a 'communist utopia'. There in Marinaleda there is no need for mortgages, while full employment has almost been achieved Sánchez Gordillo has sought to move to a common ownership of land and establish wage equality. Housing is now a right in Marinaleda, taxes are low and the groundwork of a direct democracy laid down. This continues while the rest of Spain suffers an unemployment rate of 25%, even the rest of Andalusia endures a 34% unemployment level. The situation is actually more dire than it is in moribund Greece in this regard. Everywhere there is disaffection and it has taken on living forms in the streets.

The Mayor of Marinaleda has become a prominent figure seen as a surfer on the tall waves of popular anger at the sight of the government handing billions to banks and cutting services to cover the bill. It's obvious he is not a lone-wolf either. The 8 million strong indignados have protested for hundreds of days against the austerity regimes of the established Left and Right of Spain's mainstream politics. The indignados have no faith in the formal institutions of representative democracy anymore. The striking miners of Asturias have taken to firing homemade rocket launchers at riot police and blocking off roads. It was the Asturian miners who were put down by Franco's forces in 1934 only to awaken from their slumber in 1962 and fight valiantly. Franco killed 3,000 miners in 1934 and captured many thousands more, but still they rose up again. Now it's the austerity regime of the Spanish government backed by the Euroconservatives at the heart of the EU that the miners are fighting against.

The egalitarian pocket Marinaleda stands out in Andalusia where around half the arable land is owned by 2% of the land-owners. In the Mayor's own words "The concentration of land ownership in Andalusia is 10% higher than it was in the Second Republic. They tried an agrarian reform. But it was annulled with Franco's coup d'etat... The agrarian reform is still pending." Sánchez Gordillo has been most controversial for orchestrating the looting of supermarkets. It was an act of civil disobedience to grab lentils, oils, beans, chickpeas and milk in order to redistribute the supplies through food banks to the poor. The police have been unable to arrest Sánchez Gordillo given his immunity as the Mayor of Marinaleda. The renegade Mayor has issued calls for other mayors to follow his example and for the occupation of empty buildings owned by the banks. A welcome cry in a country with 800,000 empty homes and millions in need of affordable housing. The death of European social democracy gives many good reason to seek out a more radical solution.

Did you swim here?! Did you swim here?!

I was recently invited to an anarcho-primitivist talk with John Zerzan as speaker by my friend Marmaduke Hutchings. It was packed out with around 120 to 130 people going on my own estimations. It also became apparent that this crowd were already won over and weren’t here to pick a fight with Zerzan. The talk was at Raven’s Row near Spitalfields, there some of his books as well as t-shirt slogans and videos exploring primitivism were on show. After the talk there was food and booze available to the audience. God knows who bankrolls that place. It would be a lively discussion that night. The questions and answers opening featured talk of the ‘proto-fascist’ Batman movie and suggestions that the victims of the recent shooting were really ideologically complicit in the ‘proto-fascistic’ regime. It should be noted that Zerzan didn’t endorse this position. At one point the discussion was derailed over the topic of drug consumption, which culminated with a statement to the effect that “Although koalas are addicted to eucalyptus, they don’t commit genocide.”

 

The height of hilarity was when John recalled the culmination of a questions and answers session that took the form of a man yelling at him "Did you swim here?! Did you swim here?!" The initial emphasis of the talk was on community and its notable absence in our world before making it clear that we don’t want the ‘old hell’ of patriarchal domination and hierarchical control. Rather we want the ‘new hell’ which would be a prelapsarian organic whole of individuals set free from all the old forms of domination and power. The problem here is that there isn’t really a beginning. You can trace these problems to domestication, but then you could trace the roots of domestication back even further. Ultimately you could end up with the view that it is the human race that’s the problem. So we should enjoy the ride and await the end with the knowledge that there will be a great beginning after man. There is nothing that can be done about the fundamental condition of humanity, which we are really just rapacious homonidesand nothing can be made of us.

 

 

You can easily see where the conservative ethos of John Gray would clamber into bed with the nihilistic poetry of Charles Bukowski. Of course, Zerzan stresses that he isn’t a ‘collapsist’ who’ll be singing in a meadow while it all falls down. But it is easier to dream of tearing it all down than overthrowing one system for another. When it got topical as Zerzan took up the Batman shootings as an example. Noting the same old songs, the two primary responses in the narrative around the shooting were that the killer is simply evil or that there are too many guns in America. But the US has always been full of guns and there hasn’t always been these shootings, he notes, the same goes for violent psychos. The almost recreational violence and mass-killing must be a social phenomenon, a symptom of the technological society where there are more shootings than elsewhere. This isn’t particularly insightful, as the most violence can be pinned down to where there is a high concentration of available firearms, political fear and social alienation.

 

It’s the techno-culture stupid! It’s ideological and not neutral in any sense. The rolling back of cultural solidarity comes at the same time that the technological ideology pitches its universal solution. It will connect each of us, but it actually helps to atomise us. It promises us a better world and reduces us to passive appendages of machines. We are increasingly inert in our reliance on GPS systems, the internet and mobile phones. In Japan you can buy bathing machines which close over you like a coffin. In South Korea there is robotic teaching, hugging and even French-kissing. He could’ve included the sex doll craze in Japan, that there are many men who prefer fake women that they can keep in the boot of their car to real women. We’re at the end of sensual experience.In the background of the problems which plague our civilisation Zerzan sees technological domestication at the root of it all: overpopulation and environmental degradation as well as drugs and disease. According to this view industrialisation generates cancer and other diseases.

It’s not just that domestication removes us from what used to be ordinary aspects of human life. He notes that America is an over-drugged society where it has gotten to the point that the drugs can actually be detected in the water supply. There are 80 million Americans with sleeping disorders, tens of millions using drugs to get through the day.In the same vein industrialisation coupled with domestication that the problem of overpopulation came about. The advent of agriculture was the beginning of this. It was the mistake to go from taking what nature gave to us for free to attempts of controlling and engineering nature. When confronted the horrors of pre-civilisation Zerzan maintains that cannibalism, head-hunting and genital mutilation are all products of domestication. He knew Freud’s writing on civilisation in the aftermath of war, that the civilisation is a construct for regulating the suppressed forces of violent sexual urges inside us. Domestication is a wound that never heals, it’s a machine for happiness that creates unhappiness.

According to this view private property emerges from domestication, John Zerzan contrasts himself against the Marxists here. He skips over the materialist reading of history, that the productive modes of exploitation create the pre-conditions for the next stage. In this way slavery and feudalism created the necessary conditions for capitalism to emerge, in turn capitalism may lead to socialism. Zerzan would probably reject this as another notion of technological progress, for him every political project is reducible to this fetish for technology. But it seems as though Zerzan, to some extent, wants technology without technology as he claims that there are other ways of powering respiratory machines than the systems we fall back on today. His example of electricity generated through cycling. At the same time it could be said that the anarcho-primitivism to which Zerzan subscribes really falls into the ease with which we can imagine the collapse of our entire world than it is to foresee a post-capitalist future.

In the same way that Zerzan dismissed the ‘same song’ of the American narrative around shootings to differentiate his position from conservatives and liberals he made time to distinguish himself from the other factions of the Left. Even though Zerzan may not see himself as a man of the Left, it is the case that the anarchist tradition comes out of 18^th Century classical liberalism and developed into libertarian socialism in the 19^th Century. The free-market libertarians are really a 20^th Century phenomenon, another outgrowth of classical liberalism. For him the Left and the Right are both subject to the ideological shibboleths of technological progress, this dynamic is something to overcome and transcend. In a classic display of left-wing sectarianism Zerzan made periodic slights against Noam Chomsky and environmentalists, the main competition to his position at the eco-libertarian end of the radical Left. Really this is where Zerzan comes across as ultra-leftist and as we shall see he’s not adverse to forms of comfortable resistance.

Chomsky is wrong to claim that there isn’t a way of eliminating technology and even if there is we shouldn’t. Yet Zerzan isn’t all that clear about how we can break apart the system and return to that land of ‘Once upon a time…’ where there is no racism, homophobia, misogyny and no more hierarchical authority, no statism and no capitalism. When pushed on this Zerzan seems to opt for a dichotomy of ‘small actions’ such as cycling and ‘big acts’ of violence. He shirked away from any kind of mass-violence in a Khmer Rouge style destruction of society. Though he doesn’t evade the endorsement of political violence, it has to be about the destruction of private property. In such cases Zerzan stands on the side of rioters, the Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front. He also shirked away from a sudden collapse as that would reap a high body-count, in this sense Zerzan seems like less of an anarchist as it would imply a gradual transition. Rather than simply endorse the coming collapse of Western civilisation as a new hope, he calls for a primitive future.

This is where the ultra-leftist sectarianism converges with comfortable resistance and the nostalgia for a world outside of all our modern problems. Similarly the Greens can be damned if they deny that the system can’t be saved through innovations to eventually replace fossil fuels with sustainable energy. As much as the eco-Right are deluded in their plan to save capitalism through carbon caps, it isn’t the case that the eco-socialists are about the preservation of capitalist society. Really many Greens share Zerzan’s nostalgia for a human community of communities which precedes the horrors of industrial capitalism. In his vision community will instil responsibility in the same way that it is in co-ops as the ‘fuck-ups’ are present at meetings where collective deliberating goes on and everything is discussed democratically. This is where it’s clear that Zerzan is a product of the 60s, when the commune movement hoped to establish an alternate society free of any kind of power structure only to find the old structures were quickly reconstituted.

It seems then that there would be a need for conservatives to hold it all in place once it had been achieved. Actually you could read a conservative nostalgia out of Zerzan's view of the past. Amnesia is for reactionaries, though he isn't guilty of wiping away inconvenient truths it is the case that the anarcho-primitivists are selective about what they want to go back to. It is fitting then that Zerzan stands by autonomous deference within the system, this way we can all do our bit in the resistance. There is a conservative side to this also, as we remain inside our bubbles without televisions and mobile phones reading about the future primitive. The political is not just an individual decision, if we want to change the world we need collective acts and organisation. The wish almost matches the nightmares of many environmentalists: that we could sit still for too long and the world as it is would be gone forever. But this would be a crude anarcho-primitivism. The more civilisation, the more neuroses seems to summarise Zerzan’s position – it’s better to go back than to continue forward, backwards is forward!