Letter from Green Anarchist
Dear Subversion,
Thanks for Subversion 21 - keep us on your mailing list.
In response to 'Green' Communism, you still fail to distinguish between technology
and tool use. You should know from John Zerzan's definition in the GA you quote from
that technology is 'the ensemble of the division of labour'. According to Mumford's
Technics & Civilisation, the first technologies were ancient armies and work-gangs, not
their weapons and tools. The real issue is how they were organised, not how they
were equipped.
Subversion thinks that uttering the magic word 'Capitalism' explains everything but
it should be obvious that a society divided heirachically between organisers and
the organised can never be equal or free. Mumford's ancient armies and work-gangs
preceded capitalism by several thousand years and he also suggests the rise of the clock and
the consequent intensification of organisation around it created capitalism. Unlike
FC, we aren't reductionists. It's not simply a case that technology is economically
determined or vice versa - there's a dialectical relationship between the two.
We're amazed you 'cannot conceive of cities going', as if they weren't as much a product
of history as everything else. Cities are technology, a complex process that has
to be organised in a way that makes a future free and equal society impossible. You'd
be less enthusiastic about Bookchin's 'libertarian' municipalism if you took David
Watson's point on board that 'the city as polis created not only politics, but the
police.' If you're talking about 'breaking them down into more human size', you're
either effectively arguing for an end to cities or not talking about a scale that's really
'human' after all. As to this bit about 'planting trees', we've been around long
enough to call it tokenism when Statists do it.
Your comment about 'a return to back-breaking labour' shows you haven't understood
the first thing about anarcho-primitivism. Scarcity is a product of Civilisation,
the powerful rationing those powerless and dependent on them, to exploit and control
them. Nature is abundant as demonstrated by hunter-gatherers who work under 20 hours a week
to meet their basic needs. They're in control of that work too - it's unalienated.
The more civilised things have got, the harder we've had to work. You surely won't
disagree that civilisation has been built on the extraction of surplus value - our ancestors'
sweat - but there's more to it than that. We've also had less control over the work
we do (and every other aspect of our lives) the more complex, interdependent and
organised the economy has become. We have to challenge such organisation itself, not
just the organisers, or any new society will otherwise just reproduce the old one.
Your comments on appropriate technology for a post-revolutionary society are an inappropriate compromise based upon a fundamental misunderstanding.
Holding a stage view of history, you seem to think communism will come out of capitalism's
contradictions but all we can see is a society which is encroaching more and more
on us and making us all more and more dependent on it in the name of 'liberation
from Nature'. That won't free us from alienation, it's just more separation. We got
it right at the start and for the vast majority of human history. People were free,
equal and self-determining when primitive communism prevailed, without even the individualist distinction between Self and Other - as Bookchin himself argued in his seminal
Ecology of Freedom, Chapter 5, before reformist municipalism addled his brain. Civilisation,
whether capitalist or not, won't facilitate our liberation - only its destruction and the end of our dependence on it will. All the truly radical currents in history
appreciated this as obvious - you might find Zerzan's Who Killed Nedd Ludd? most
instructive here. Your ridiculously misrepresentative caricature of GA's revolutionary
strategy is half a decade out of date but even here our emphasis on direct action and
breaking dependency comes through.
You do indeed ' have much to learn' from groups like 'Reclaim the Streets' as they
have rejected the compromise with Civilisation your presentation of Capitalism as
a be-all and end-all implies. Liverpool's significance was not that the dockers took
RTS on board - RTS had been doing other revolutionary stuff for years - but that more archaic
conservative, workerist currents weren't seen by them as worthy of the same consideration.
Rather than referring readers to the poisonous smears of Bookchin and his partner
Janet Biehl, you'd have done better concluding 'Green' Communism by referring them
to David Watson's Beyond Bookchin (Black and Red, Autonomedia, 1996) and Bob Black's
Anarchy Beyond Leftism (CAL, 1997) to ensure they will have something useful to contribute
to the struggle in the future.
Yours, for the destruction of Civilisation.
Oxford GAs.
Green Anarchist can be contacted at: BCM 1715, London WC1N 3XX, UK
This page hosted by
Get your own Free Home Page