Letter from JM
Dear Subversion,
I would like to respond to the essay 'Green Communism' printed in your most recent
issue.
This essay is so ill-informed and wrong-headed that it really does not make a serious
contribution to debate. There are so many basic errors in the essay that it would
take an entire essay to address its mistakes! So rather than critique its fundamental
flaws, I will just focus on some key points. I cannot - and would not want to - speak
on behalf of all individuals involved in the anti-civilisation anarchist current,
but as someone participating in this current I want to offer a personal response
to the inaccuracies and slurs aimed at what your essay reductively refers to as 'anti-technological
anarchists'.
First, your writer could do everyone the favour of taking anti-civilisation ideas
seriously, rather than just engaging in uninformed assertion and smear tactics. Anti-civilisation
anarchism is not 'militant reformism'. It does not just 'call itself anarchist'. Anti-civilisation anarchists do not merely 'claim to be anarchists' and certainly
haven't 'fallen for the lies of capitalism hook, line and sinker'. Part of this is
sheer ignorance. (Using Bookchin's Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism as a guide
to the anti-civilisation current is like using National Front propaganda as a guide
to understanding the lives of Black Britons. Your author's cheap jibe (taken from
Bookchin) that at least in the kind of society Zerzan envisages no one would have
to read 'the crap he wrote' cuts no ice, as your author clearly hasn't read Zerzan anyway,
but just parrots Bookchin!). But part of this consists of outright smears. Your author
wants to undermine anti-civilisation anarchists by name-calling: they're not anarchists, they're liberals; they're not revolutionary, they're reformists; and they don't
have a sophisticated analysis - they're naive and (of course) capital's dupes. Give
anti-civilisation anarchists some credit! Judge the ideas. Look at the primary texts,
not Bookchin's second-hand distortions! Know what you're talking about before you publish
work on it!
Anti-civilisation currents extend the classical anarchist analysis beyond the traditional
emphasis on capital and the state. Of course, capital and the state are important
sources of power and need to be abolished through revolution. There's no argument
there. But there are other forms of power which preceded both and which need to be abolished
along with them, if an anarchist revolution is to succeed. Your author writes "...the
destruction of the environment is the result, not of civilisation, not of technology, but of the domination of the planet by capital." But power - including the
power to engage in environmental destruction - developed before capital. Capital
is just the latest (and deadliest) form assumed by power, and civilisation is the
name anti-civilisation anarchists use to characterise the ensemble of social relations and techniques
of coercion and control within which capital and the state emerge.
"Capital would like us to think that the problem does not lie in the control of production
and the existence of wage labour", writes your author. It's reductive to say that
'the' problem can be located in any one issue. But in one respect your author is
right. Production and labour is a crucial problem. But the problem is far deeper than
your author seems to suspect. The issue is not merely 'the control' of production,
but the abolition of production; not merely the existence of 'wage labour', but the
existence of labour in any form. Anti-civilisation anarchists aren't just 'anti-technological
anarchists': they want to abolish power in all its forms, including work. To assert
a pro-technology anarchist position means envisaging the continuation of labour in
an anarchist society. But who is going to force people to labour in a power-free society?
Not me! Are you? And will you want to keep on working? I won't!
Anti-civilisation anarchists recognise that work is in itself a primary source of
oppression. But your author, appropriating wholesale Marxist analysis, assumes that
there are such things as productive forces. These are just the alienated energies
of people working for capital. If everyone stops working, the 'productive forces' disappear.
And so, incidentally, does technology! Technology, in a sense, is a red herring.
Anti-civilisation anarchists oppose it because it is a powerful means of oppression,
alienation and environmental destruction. But a more fundamental issue is the destruction
of the whole social nexus - i.e. civilisation - that makes its very production and
usage possible.
In resistance,
JM.
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