A text dump on Green Anarchist

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

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

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

The Nineties

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

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

The GANDALF trial

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

Booth and Rogers' Green Anarchists

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

The Left Overs: How Fascists Court the Post-Left

March 29, 2017

A few months ago, the radical publication, Fifth Estate, solicited

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

In Solidarity, ARR

Chapter 1: The Early Composition of Fascist Individualism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 2: The Creation of the Post-Left

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 3: The Fascist Creep

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

--- Primary Source Material ---

The Irrationalists Debate

Politics and the Ethical Void

#43_44 Autumn 1996

The Irrationalists

#51 Mar 1998

(click to expand)

Steve Booth on resistance in the new millennium

Eat Shit or Fight Back: The Choice is Yours

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

One Office Block, One Blue Truck

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

Let a Thousand Aum Cults Sarinate…

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

I Have a Dream

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

Cold War into Cola War

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

New World Ordure

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

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

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

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

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

The Importance of Ethics

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

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

The Ethical Void

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

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

The Ethical Imperative To Act

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

Numbers are Not Important

It doesn’t matter how many of us there are, one, a hundred, or a thousand. All that matters is that I myself act. The duty to act against the tyrant system is always present and cannot be evaded.

...

Irrationalism: Steve Booth Against “The Machine”

Black Flag #215 Nov(?) 1998

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Return of The Irrationalists

#54-55 Mar 1999

John Connor on reaction and Civilised values

...

Our Obvious Critics

...

But It's More Than This

...

False Flag

#54-55 Mar 1999

An expose of the Black Flag racket

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

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

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

Black Flag #217. 1999. Pages 33-35

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Class an irrelevance?

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

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

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

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

Which helps explain why GA does not identify any agent for social change and instead relies on "irrationalist" acts. It is probable that the return to a "Hunter-Gatherer" style society would result in mass starvation in almost all countries as the social infrastructure collapses. Indeed, it is tempting to insist that the primitivists have ceded the right to be taken seriously until they come up with a consistent response to the key question asked by Brian Morris of John Zerzan in Morris's article "Anthropology and Anarchism" (Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed #45):

"The future we are told is 'primitive'. How this is to be achieved in a world that presently sustains almost six billion people (for evidence suggests that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is only able to support 1 or 2 people per sq. mile)... Zerzan does not tell us."

Green Anarchist's responses throw up too many issues, though, for us to embrace that luxury.

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

Maximalist Anarchism?

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is not, then, a politics of resistance in the sense one might understand a politics of everyday life as embodying strategies of resistance to the encroachments of capital upon everyday life; resistance is substituted by play, artistic self-expression (why not shopping?). As Moore himself concedes; real issues of strategy and tactics in the battle to regain control of our lives are abandoned to "the very science fictional question of 'what if...?'"

Zerzan and Reification

Moore is not the only primitivist to have a problem with the issue of agency. John Zerzan, by far the most engaged and stimulating of the primitivist thinkers, in an article "Reification: That Thing We Do" (Anarchy #45) starts with an examination of the use of the term "reification" as employed by the Marxist Georg Lukacs

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

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

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

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

Raymond Williams once argued that "communication is community", that man as social being is defined by interaction through language. Zerzan has it that "the reification act of language impoverishes existence by creating a universe of meaning sufficient unto itself." As Brian Morris describes it "All those products of the human creative imagination -- farming, art, philosophy, technology, science, urban living, symbolic culture -- are viewed negatively by Zerzan -- in a monolithic sense."

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

If what Cassirer called the process of creative destruction, of "man" as subject, "doubting and seeking, tearing down and building up" has led us to "these dark days" then there is no way forward. Power pervades everywhere, again. All that is left is to live quietly in the world, the "reverential listening" of Martin Heidegger, or "living-in-place" as the deep ecologists Berg and Dasmann put it. But living-in-place seems much like knowing your place, and not much of a recipe for change, and even Arne Naess acknowledges that "only look at" nature is extremely peculiar behaviour. Experiencing of an environment happens by doing something in it, by living in it, meditating and acting" (Ecology, Community and Lifestyle).

In practice, Zerzan draws back from embracing the notion of "living-in-place" in the here and now, faced with the rottenness of "place" as it stands. His best writings are full of celebrations of worker resistance to work life, luddism, the 1977 New York blackout lootings and riots. For Green Anarchism though, it is not so simple. The contradictions of primitivism -- Zerzan's theoretical abandonment of the revolutionary subject, Moore's bourgeois individualism -- lead practical, direct action politics down a blind alley. We can't stand where we are -- we can't go forward because power is everywhere and human agency is ultimately reifying. The dead end of primitivism lies precisely in the fact that there can be no positive agency for the primitivist transformation. All that's left then is what Booth and Colike to pretend is the "non-ideological".

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

"the participants in riots and insurrections throughout history; luddites, Regulators, Whiskey Rebels, Rebecca and her Sisters, Captain Swing, King Mob,the Paris Commune of 187l, Makhnovists, the New York City boogie till you puke party and power outrage of 1977, the MLK assassination riots, May 68 in France and so forth."

In this, he stands as part of the best of our movement's tradition, anarchism as the voice of the "swinish multitude."

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

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

False Flag Again

#57_58 Autumn 1999

We expose the disinformers

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Mouthpiece Micah

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Fuckwit, His Guru

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False Flag

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The Irrationalists 7

#57_58 Autumn 1999

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

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Introduction

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In what way is irrationalism an outworking of anarchist theory

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

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Liberalism becomes totalitarian

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

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An end to gesture politics

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The future - more of the same, only worse

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Types of protest groups

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The uselessness of terrorism

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An end to negotiation

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Steve Booth on the Irrationalists

Added to Insurgent Desire on 14 Nov, 2000.

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

To deal with the Oklahoma and Tokyo objections:

(1) GUILT BY ASSOCIATED METHODS

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

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

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

(2) THE DOGMA OF PACIFISM

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

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

(3) NOT NOW .... NOT NEVER -

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

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

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

(4) WE DON'T LIKE IT BECAUSE IT ISN'T NICE....

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

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

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

'IRRATIONALISM' AND REVOLUTION

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

WILL THE SYSTEM COLLAPSE OF ITSELF?

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

DO WE DESERVE TO GO ON?

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

TO BUILD THE STRONG AND ACTIVE PROTEST MOVEMENT

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

THAT 'LEFTISM' IS AN ESCAPE MECHANISM

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

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

NON HIERARCHICAL, FLEXIBLE, HYDRA HEADED MOVEMENT

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

Technophilia, An Infantile Disorder by Bob Black

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Letters against Primitivism by Iain McKay

Green Anarchists celebration of terrorism against the general public

Dear Anarchy,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

yours in solidarity

Iain

Bob Black and the primitivists

Dear Anarchy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wish Anarchy all the best for the future!

yours in solidarity,

Iain

Bob Black, the Aum Cult and the Oklahoma Bomber

(letter to Anarchy)

Dear Anarchy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

yours in solidarity

Iain McKay
Glasgow

Support for Ted K

The Unabombings: Communique #1

#39 Autumn 1995

This is a message from the terrorist group FC.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Free Ted!

#42 Summer 1996

Stop the FBI frame-up of Ted Kaczynski

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

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

...

Industrial-Technological Society Cannot Be Reformed

#42 Summer 1996

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

Restriction of Freedom is Unavoidable in Industrial Society

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simpler Social Problems Have Proved Intractable

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

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

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

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

Revolution is Easier than Reform

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

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

Top Ten Reasons to Vote Unabomber

#42 Summer 1996

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

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

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

Free Ted!

#43_44 Autumn 1996

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

Fixed Ideas and Letter Bombs

#45_46 Spring 1997

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

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

FCs tract strangely begins with several pages critical of leftism Stringer still this criticism relies completely on psychology (and that of a rather crude pop[-] form) FC use this as n basis, later on. for a more general description of the psychology of people under the industrials system.

FC see leftism as having a psychological basis in ’feelings of inferiority'’ and 'ovcrsocialisation'. Modem amencan leftism is certainly based in what Mux Sinner called ragamuffinism and Nietzsche called ressentiment" Some recent anarchist writings have referred to it as the ’’ideology of victimisin' This ideology does seem to reftecl and promote feelings of inferiority, but FC seems to be, unfamiliar with these ideas and adopt instead a methodology reminiscent of pop psychology in their critique Fortunately for FC, leftists are apparently so afraid of any sort of criticism, that they could only respond to FC’s inadequate criticism with hysterical yammering.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ‘power process ' is a psychhlogical model and. like all such models, springs from and is only useful w ithin u specific social context The ‘oedipus complex’ was a model developed in Victorian Europe which worked well for explaining much of the sexual psychology of victonun Europe Iver time il has pruned less and less useful and is nowe used <»nlv bv die-hard Freudians It has no applicability ro ancient Romans, Hopi Indians. Mbute pygmies, medieval English jicasants, etc The “power process' assuming irt has any application outside of pop psychology would also have to be understood in terms of a specific social context FC’s attempt to univcrsulise it leads lo a sloppy understanding of history and anthropology.

FC's anthropology is about 30 years behind the lunes FC socm to assume that primitive people needed to spent most of their time and energy satisfying biological needs It has been preitv well established that even in harsh envinximenls. the amount of time primitive people spent m activities which provided their basic needs is about one quarter of the amount of time spent by the average pcrason in industrial societv at work In other words, primitive pu»»ple got the things they wanted wrth less effort than most of us expend to get what we want In fact since there was no lime schedule which they had to follow to perform these activities, so thev could he done whenever «ine pleased (except in emergencies), it can be argued thast primitive societies were societies of total 'leisure With the nse of agriculture and cities about iO.tXK) yeasrs ago. the new technological sy stem doubled the amount of time that those who used it had to spend m meeting their basic needs and placed this activity on a *tnct seasonal time schedule — this could be considered the origin of work Industnal technologs drasticallv increased both the amount of work tiime and the ngidits of scheduling necessan f<» work So most

(xxiple in our society find themselves so exhausted bv activities not of their own making that in what little leisure time thev have they often chooac to vegetate through passive entertainment This problem is ahenatum EC are not completely unaware of thu in otu society people do rau satisfi their biokvgical needs AUTONOMOUSLY, but by functioning ax parts of an immense social machine

Alienation is noi merch a psychological problem Often the most alienated people arc the m»»st adjusted to their alienation Alienation is the realm of a social system m which our Ines, our activities and our interactions arc not our own to create as we choose, but haw been made for us in such a way that we become the pretpertv of society I he wav s oJ fulfilling our needs and.wants become ven convoluted and indirect, like a Rube Goldberg machine — but it isn i comical I want ftxxL shelter, a few things in give me pleasure So I travel — In car or public transit iwhich have bcawne another necessity I -- to a place where I spend eight hours — not masking niv own food »w shelter or phivihtngs — Inil maybe 'hullling papers ar welding paru to parts or serving food tn ■trangas .v sitting tn front of a computet processing information that means nothing to me 1 do not do these things because they give me am pleasure — usually thev arc miserably tedious tasks In themselves these

Civilisation as a system of social relationships makes my life and my corporation lor which I do (hex tasks ..ne ,hc _ac^j_vj-ti_es alien to me, so that they are

Mxnal system - m other words me " "

nerve piBjsKcs alien lo me What 1 get fin giving up io much of my life to >crw an alien cause is munei So after wi>rk. I have to go out to the shops with the tivmk’v I got from working to get kxxi clothing and pleasure items I want - vince n is as compulsory as a job. thi> chopping time should also be c» Hinted as w ork tunc — and J must pay rent to a land-lord or mortgsage to a hank fdor shelter In fact, with the cxceptnwi of a few who refuse, most people sacrifice most of iheir lives to huv survival and a few plastic trinkets Here there is a goal, an eflart of (he most horrendous sort and the attainment of liasic necessities — but there is no life, not one that is mv own

Ibc ledu*.'logical system is an essential part of this ahenasuon but not the totality A complex social system incorporating work. technology, capital, authmtv. ideology (including religion) and w on. all of which are integrally mien ui this is what turns our Ines into mere resources for society And it must be attacked in its totality bv those of us who want to take hack our Ines FC * “power process seems to me to have a meagre, palijctic view of the world as a constant struggle for -•unival This may well indicate the meagre, sdngv social context from which it springs — for the present era certamh is that But such meagreness will never get us out of tins mess That will take something strong and lively, something so certain of its abundance Oiat it has no fear of squarxiering Stimer speaks of such a thing calling it one s “own might the might of which one makes «me s life one s own. and so cornm u» have an excess of lie — and it is this, rnv lite as mv own, and n«A “the freedom to go tlirough the power process' . that I want

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

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

FC are obvmuslv aware of llic sv starnc

not my own, but are molds into which I am to try to fit. I try to destroy the system for myself as a way of taking back my life.

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

FC define freedom^ as The opportunity t<» go through the power jxocexs ' The only freedom I consider lo be worth pursuing is that my life he mv own to determine fruit nn interactions be my own to create, that rm iiclfienjuvmcnl be central to liow I Ine my life FC may try to claim that (hi* is uh/it tlsc 'power pfoyeM” is. but (heir own use of the (erm proves otherwise It is a fixed idea through which to interpret the world and w hich one should sacrifice oneself The desire for self-determination and scif-cnjoymcni will move me to fight for inysclf and possibly even to sacrifice vane ihtnys. but J will sacrifice them lo mysrlf and will never sacrifice myself Itoi adherence to a fixed idea (such as the power process ) moves one to tight for the CAUSE, to sacrifice oneself to the

CAUSE As I will show, EC call tor just such self-sacrifice, showing that the |x»wcr process’ lias nothing to do with making one's life one’s own. but is a fixed idea to be served having laid the grvnuxiwork wiolh die fixed idea of the power process FC now present their “analysis’ (more a description) of industrial- (ccghnological socictv FC introduce this jwrt of their essay with fiovc principles ot histiry As with most radicals for whom “history " is a central concept, thev refrain from defining it I find the five principles to be useless abstractions Ihev arc concerned with vast social trends and express only the most banal generalities about these trends The only positivbe thing I have to say on il is that they would lead anyone who desires individual self-detcmunaUon to conclyudc that they musty destroy society itself But FC use these principles' as logmas ny which ihev interpret induxtnal society

Nonetheless, this is the best section of FC s essay Their descriptions of this society are often accurate, though their interpretations are fcrquentlv shallow and poorly thopught out because of Ihor dqjendence on fixed ideas and dogma

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

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

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

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

For FC the destruction of [tlx* industrial) svsiem must be the revolutionaries ONL Y goal no other goal can be allowed to compete w ith that one

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

fhosc who have a cause with which to fight rather than fighting for themselves want converts So FC recommend a method of propagandising which involves inventing an ideology of “Wild Nature vs Induslriusl technology Ihn manipulative strategy hardly seems conducive to promoting individusl (or small group) autonomy FC’s strategy seems to promote a large grouop dynamic whec a few would lead and most would follow If this did not seem mostly like FC's fantasy, 1 would find this part of FC's ideas detestable Bui FC arc explicit rthc destruction of the industrial system must be the top priority For this, wc should be willing to support dictatorships if that will destablisc the industrial system, support agreements like NAFTA and GATT if they can mask? the system topheavy and so easier to push over, and have lods and loads of children because children of revolutionaries supposedly bec<»me rcvolutionariocs (al least according to the genetic theories to which FC apparently subscribe), For FC. there is no social context in which these things arise and for which they occur — capitalism technology, the slate, the family - all arc nothing for FC. onlv industrial technology and its destruction matter FC make an important point when they tell us that primitive people ru individuals were actually much better able to take care of themselves than industnalused people who haw aUowud themselves lo become dependent on an immense social system Hie significance of this for me is that it means (hat. to a much grweater extent than we can know, their lives were their own But is it only industrial technology dial ends this ownness? I haw already pointed out that hunter- gatherers apparently pursued the activities necessary for survival without compulsion, except in emergenev situations >eg droughts, severe storms), doing them when tliey felt like it — more for the joy of it than out oi need Individuals ware constantly figuring ways of making these activities easier and more enjoyable but these wavs werre not immense systems, but merclv tools and methods thin individuals could make and use lor them selves The rise of agnculturc(nol to be mistaken for small-scale gardening) was the intnoductivn of a technological system It created a compulsory seasonal schedule for the production of food But agriculture did not nsc in a vacuum Archaeological evidence indicates that agriculture developed in conjunction with the rise of early cities Cities mav, in fact, have come first There can be no doubt that a concept of exclusive (private or communal) property must have coincided with the development of agriculture There is also evidence of a connection between religion and agriculture The early cities already give evidence of structured hierarchies and a specialised warrior class which can nghliy be called a slate and its armv In other words, the technological system of agriculture arose as pasrt of an integrated social system - whast we call civilisation Ihis system, in its totalirty and thnxigh all of us structures (technology, the state economy, religion the family, work exclusive property .). took the lives of individuals from (hem and made these lives the propertv of society John Zerzan has presented evidence in a number of his writings that this ahenastion began well before the rise of civilisation, but this system of social rchitionshijis called civilisation changed life qualitatively in ways fruit made alienation a central defining quality of life The fatalism and religiosity that arc so much u part of agricultural societies can be seen as an expression of this alienation Peasants feel more as though things happen to them than (hat they du things Industrial technology certainly made a further qualitative change in the nature uf alienation Though farmers are forced to comply with a time schedule rad kt than doing things in their own tunc, they still (in peasant cultures, ru>t in agribusiness) arc directly producibng their food In industrial society, the activities into which one is forced in order to cam survival are not even directly related to one's survival needs in any way. They have become complexdy alien But once again, the Uxlinology is only part of an entire complex, integrated social system, all of which acts together to guarantee fruit we can only gain our survival by giving up our lives to the reproduction of the social system Those of us who want our lives back anno! limit ourselves to

FC ss "only goasl" We have much m.ore to destrov than the industrial system — wc have the whole civilisation to bring down and will attack it on asll fronts, the state and its protectors (cops, the military, bureaucrats ), economy (capitalism, work, property rights asnd so on), technology, religion, education, the family, ideology... And we won t do this as a cause, but selfishly , because we want our lives back I want to determine my own life, create my own activities and interactions for my own enjyment So any “revolution” that demands that I sacrifice mvself for its cause is as much my enemy as the social system which demands the same of me < )nlv a revolution which attacks society in a way that allows indinduusls to take back their lives interests me, and such a resolution would grow out of the revolts of uidividuals against their own alienation, not from u mass programme

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

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

Afterword: Some Thoughts on Violence

While there has been little response at all to FC’s essay, the rwactiobn to their vuiolence has come from nenrlv all sides Even Tad Kcpley's mostly sympathetic article in Anarchy. A Journal of Desire Armed #42 was tainted with morahsms regarding violence, in spite of Tad s claim to the contrary Tad says

The anti-authonianan who niakes use of violence ... must be aware of the contradictions in destroy mg to create, tn using violence in the hopes of creating a world without violence

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

Tad Keplev and the critics of violence are wrong, Taking a life is not the ulumate act of domination Forcing someone — or hundreds, thousands, millions, billions - into dependency on a social system that bleeds their Ines away to rcpnxlucc itself and in exchange for survival (in the worst cases, not even that) and possibly also a few trinkets and glass beads - that is the ultimate act of domination The killer lavs no claim to the life of the victim until thev kill them, and even then they lay no claim to the life but only to the ending of that life Domination consists of forcing people to give away their life energy while they are living Certainly, donunators (or dominating institutions) sometimes kill to enforce their power, but as the cliche says "the living envy the dead" FC’s targets are precisely people who choose, bv their research or other work activities, to uphold and increase domination The "absolute irrevocable removal" of such a person takes nothing away from me that I would want to keep Because I am selfish. I will never willingh sacrifice myself, but I will gladly sacrifice anything or anyone that interferes with my ability to create my own hfe and interactions as I choose 'Human community’ is an abstraction Real interactions and associations arc those experienced by individuals - cither as self-determined creations or as impositions - not the mystical connections which spnng from such abstractions as humanity' or species being My interactions with cops. high-Uxh researchers m social control, stale bureaucrats, capitalists, religious leader* or any other authority figure, no matter how indirect the interaction. is one in which I am imposed upon, one aimed at making mv life alien from me Such an interaction can only impoverish me Ihc death of any such a figure of authonny. therefore. docs not impoverish me and may well enheh me Indeed, il can add a little brightness to my hfe. knowing that I have successfully managed to attack, in however small a wav. the structures of authority - even if that involves killing someomc who has willingly chosen to be a bully-boy lor authority. Certainly, it makes more sense tactically to attack targets of more significance than anty individual can ever be in maintaining authority — but such attacks on property also get condemned by those in power as mindless terrorism' And they are equally condemned by those who prefer to do nothing but continually beg the state to. please, abolish itself and, in the nicantine. be nicer to poor, sweet, harmless little anarchists

I am not meaning to be overly harsh to Tad His article at least shows some sympathy for FC's hatred of the technological system and avoids he reactionary hyslena found in Slingshot and numerous <h1k.t anarchist periodicals Bui m his assessment of violence. Tad seems to be kissing a bit too much pacifist ass Destruction of n global social system will involve violence, and that violence would not be ironic or contradictory' with its goal, it would be the uncons trained expression of the passion that those who are taking their lives back feel against the system that keeps them alienated

Free Ted K

#49-50 Sep 1997

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

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

Concerning The Case of Theodore Kaczynski

#51 Mar 1998

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Theodore J. Kaczynski
January 26, 1998

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

The Framing of Ted Kaczynski

#51 Mar 1998

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

Write letters of support to:

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

Emporia State

#56 Jun 1999

John Moore on the Crystal Palace and its aftermath

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

— John Carroll

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

May 1998

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

Welcome to the Milton Keynes of the soul.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Designer labels

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

The myth of postindustrialism

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

The capitalist imperative: adapt or perish

A third alternative: rebel!

August 1998

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

Summer 1999

Total eclipse.

"I do not find it difficult to survive here"

#56 Jun 1999

A letter from Ted Kaczynski on his imprisonment

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

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

...

Ted K. Update

#56 Jun 1999

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

...

Ted K Update

#57-58 Autumn 1999

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

...

Ted Speaks

#57-58 Autumn 1999

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

Kaczynski’s story represents a parable:

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

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

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

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

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

— Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire, 1968

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Statement from Ted Kaczynski

#59 Mar 2000

Dear GA,

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

Friends of Ted Kaczynski

#59 Mar 2000

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

Friends of Ted Kaczynski

#60-61 Jun 2000

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

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

Please make your donations to support an anarchist political prisoner

A letter can cost as little as 36c

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

Lydia Eccles, P.O.B ...

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

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

Editorial #1

SB #63 Jun 2001

Editorial #2

SB #63 Jun 2001

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

Comrades of Kaczynski Summer Solstice Communique

#64-65 Jun 2001

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

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

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

He Tried To Save Us by Comrades of Kaczynski

#64-65 Jun 2001

Pamphlets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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