Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (134 page)

As Peter Lamborn Wilson, he has investigated the
Orgies of Hemp Eaters
(2005) and searched in
Ploughing the Clouds
(1999) for the psychedelic Irish Soma plant. For him
Angels
(1994) are the
Messengers of the Gods.
Faced with the tyranny of mechanical and analytical reason and the all-pervasive surveillance of the modern State, he believes that one of the best ways to subvert them is in the realm of the ‘magical’ and the ‘marvellous’ in which images can be manipulated to influence actions and events.

In
Pirate Utopias
(2003), he imagines the adventures of Muslim corsairs and pirates from the Barbary coast who set up an independent republic. His essays on the margins of Islam in
Sacred Drifts
(1993) show him to be a radical Muslim in the tradition of Sufi mysticism. Rejecting the authoritarianism and sexual repression of contemporary Islam, he explores the esoteric spirituality of its misfits and outlaws. He believes that religions can provide a form of ‘subversive orthodoxy’: ‘Capital triumphs over the Social as against all spiritualities, spirituality itself finds itself re-aligned with revolution.’
²⁹
In an essay on ‘Crazy Nietzsche’, he argues that the wounded madman was a prophet of a religion ‘without authority’.

Hakim Bey’s most influential book to date however has been
T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone
(1985). Its subtitle is ‘Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism’: the former reflects the ‘Chaos of Being’ while the latter is a tactic to overthrow the Society of the Spectacle. In the book, he celebrates ecstasy, joy and the marvellous, calling for gratuitous generosity rather than violence. He advocates a ‘syncretism of anarchy and tantra’ and an ‘
amour fou
’ to subvert the relations of power.

As for his notion of a ‘Temporary Autonomous Zone’ (TAZ), which has struck a resounding chord among the young, he refrains from defining it precisely. It is clear however that he considers them as ‘free enclaves’ which can be created here and now, within the shell of the ‘megacorporate information State, the empire of the Spectacle and Simulation’. As such, the TAZ is like ‘an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerrilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen,
before
the State can crush it’.
³⁰
It thereby offers a microcosm of the ‘anarchist dream’ of a free culture. They have existed in the past — during the Paris Commune, in the Ukraine during the Russian Revolution and in Catalunya in the Spanish Civil War — but in the present era when the State is all powerful they offer a tactic for creating free space and time in its cracks and
vacancies. It is ‘an encampment of guerrilla ontologists’ and aims at the ‘structures of control, essentially at ideas’.
³¹
Although they risk violence, the best tactic in most cases is not to be engaged in it but to strike and run away. TAZs need not be isolated experiments; they can link up with others across the globe, both in the physical world and in cyberspace. Constantly changing and ephemeral, they take on the shape of a temporary uprising or insurrection rather than a permanent revolution. Above all, they manifest the pleasure and openness of a carnival, a festival, a rave or even a convivial dinner party.

In his collection of essays
Immediatism
(1994), Bey reveals the influence of Nietszche and post-modernist theorists by asserting that the meaning of life and the true nature of things cannot be predicted with any certainty. At the same time, a dance with ‘Chaos’ can lead to the affirmation of life. Not only can the imagination free us from mental slavery imposed by authority but events and situations can be created to subvert mainstream culture and envisage an alternative reality. In this way, he believes that a new society based on the economy of reciprocity and the gift can be created in the shell of the old. ‘Immediatism’ is meant in both senses of the word — to seek experiences without mediation and to act here and now.

Although highly critical of modern means of surveillance, Bey is by no means a Luddite or neo-primitivist. Indeed, he has argued that cybernetic technology, freed from all political control, could make possible a world of autonomous zones. Rather than abandoning computers, we can use them to expand zones of freedom by creating a non-hierarchical, shadowy network which he calls the ‘Counter-Net’ or ‘Web’ within the mainstream Internet. Indeed, he recognizes that most people could not do without cars, computers and even cell phones. ‘Culture is our Nature,’ he provocatively declares.
³²

Faced with global capital and an all-pervasive State, Bey has argued in
Millennium
(1996) that there is no alternative except to enter the system or oppose it. As multinational corporations undermine its sovereignty, the nation state is becoming increasingly irrelevant as a focus of opposition. Nationalism however can be a force against Capital and the State if it is coupled with regionalism, devolution and organic democracy. The only long-term solution is ‘enlightened anarchy’ in which ‘custom and right’ replace the laws of the State. It is clear that Bey here not only draws on Gandhi but is also inspired by Proudhon’s mutualism. More recently, since revolution now seems tactically impossible, Bey/Wilson recommends dropping out to form small Utopian communities: ‘Success or failure remains unforeseeable — but adventure is something that can be willed.’
³³

Some anarchists have dismissed Bey’s work as a form of poetic hedonism of little use to anyone seriously concerned with remaking society on a
large scale. On the other hand, with its subversive call to embrace Chaos, its exotic recipes for poetic terror and black anarchist magic and its joyful advocacy of a ‘congress of weird religions’, TAZ has become something of a cult underground classic. The idea also has had considerable influence among anti-globalization campaigners, environmental activists and those who have tried to reclaim the streets, occupy disused buildings, organize rave parties, free festivals and carnivals — in short, all those including myself who wish to create enclaves of light, freedom and play in the shadow of the Leviathan.

Many anarchists like Hakim Bey have enthusiastically embraced the Internet and espied its libertarian potential, especially with its borderless and ownerless structure. They plan in cyberspace, creating horizontal and decentralized networks of communication throughout the world. They are involved in alternative organizations like Indymedia, a global, non-hierarchical network of independent journalists and media. They reject censorship and notions of intellectual property and copyright. They practise the gift relationship rather than capitalist exchange, sharing software, music and text. Their credo is that information is free and should be freely available for all. A few engage in criminal activity, hacking into major corporations and government departments in order to hinder their work and reveal their exploitative and coercive nature. But most are active in the free software and open-source movement. Moreover, the anti-capital and anti-globalization movements which they help co-ordinate mirror the organic and decentralized pathways of the Internet.

At the same time, one of the major new strands of ‘second wave’ anarchism, particularly in the most advanced industrial societies, has been the rise of primitivism. Where Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his personal moral reform abandoned the trappings of civilization — in his case the wig, the sword and the watch — the new primitivists turn their back on modern technology and try to adopt a ‘primitive’ lifestyle close to nature. They claim that it is not the use or the kind of technology which is the problem today, but the technology itself. It is not neutral, as Chomsky has argued, but affects our whole way of being. They have mounted a penetrating critique of modern technology and would like to smash television and surveillance screens to escape the Society of the Spectacle, Surveillance and Simulation. They stand in the revolutionary tradition of the Luddites (’No King but King Ludd’) at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Britain who resisted the kind of technology — in their case the new textile machines — which they felt harmful to their community.

For the anarcho-primitivists, it is not the centralized and militarized State which is the principal cause of social, political and ecological crisis, as most anarchists maintain, but Civilization itself. In their view, human society has gone wrong since it abandoned the nomadic way of life around 7,000
BC
and settled down to domesticate animals and to grow crops. This was the true fall of humanity from authenticity. By contrast, in the Palaeolithic period, according to David Watson, the world was ‘affluent because its needs are few, all its desires are easily met. Its tool kit is elegant and light … It is anarchic … a dancing society, a singing society, a celebrating society, a dreaming society.’
³⁴

Like Rousseau, anarcho-primitivists call for a return to nature; like Thoreau, they believe that the salvation of the world lies in wildness; and like Edward Carpenter, they would like to live lightly on the land. With the deep ecologists, they wish to have an unmediated experience of nature, and with Edward Abbey and the members of Earth First! they are prepared to engage in ‘monkey-wrenching’ and eco-sabotage to defend ecosystems and non-human species.

Many of those primitivists critical of civilization in the US, such as Fredy Perlman, John Zerzan and Derrick Jensen, advocate, even if they do not live it, a revival of the way of life of hunter-gatherers of the Palaeolithic era and of indigenous peoples who still live close to the land and sea. They would like to see the dismantling of urban civilization. They wish to go ‘feral’, that is, return to a condition of ‘wildness’.
³⁵
As well as ‘born to be free’, their slogan might be ‘born to be wild’.

If they cannot flee to the woods, deserts and mountains, they prefer to live in the interstices of urban life, reclaiming abandoned buildings and sites, growing their own vegetables and building their own low-impact dwellings. Rejecting the bourgeois life of a steady job, pension and mortgage, they try to become active agents rather than passive subjects and consumers.

Long before primitivism became fashionable among young urban sophisticates, Fredy Perlman, associated with the Detroit-based journal
Fifth Estate
, wrote a fiery roll against Western civilization and its deep-rooted patriarchy in
Against His-story, Against Leviathan!
(1983). This passionate rant traced the emergence of the first State in Mesopotamia during the Bronze Age when a king began to enslave neighbouring tribes. The resulting Leviathan of a State, Perlman argued, developed a ‘hive mind’ which tried to absorb or destroy any egalitarian peoples and cultures it came across. It became deeply authoritarian and repressive: whereas Nature springs from our inner voice and says ‘Thou Canst and Thou Shalt Be’, the Leviathan has ‘closed gates’ and with its laws declares ‘Thou Shall Not’.
³⁶
Wherever the Leviathan emerged — whether in ancient Mesopotamia, India
or China — it saw the beginning of the rule of kings and emperors, the origins of hierarchy and domination and the foundation of State and Empire.

Perlman’s alternative was to create and live in ‘nomadic communes’ in the belly of the Beast in the hope that one day it would be overthrown. This will not be easy, as Perlman more than most was aware of
The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism
(1985). This neo-primitivist prophet died in his early fifties after a life, in the words of his wife, of ‘having little and being much’. While the historical evidence for his thesis is somewhat sketchy, his trenchant critique of the origins of modern civilization has been widely influential.

It is however John Zerzan who has been the most controversial of the anarcho-primitivists, one who is not afraid of quarrelling with his fellow anarchists. Calling himself an ‘anti-leftist’, he has attacked Chomsky for being too conservative and for saying little about women and nature.
³⁷
He is no less dismissive of Murray Bookchin’s social ecology and libertarian municipalism, which in his view are part of the old Left which anarchists should leave behind.

Zerzan makes no bones about it; he is quite simply
Against Civilization
(1999) and all that it stands for: its wars, hierarchy, division of labour, symbolic thought, machines, environmental destruction and mass psychology of misery. As the best form of human society so far, he looks back to the hunter-gatherers who lived lightly on the land and shared goods without a central authority and hierarchy. The ‘wrong turn’ for humanity was therefore the Agricultural Revolution, which was much more fundamental than the Industrial Revolution. Drawing on archaeology and anthropology, he further argues for the superior health and well-being of the hunter-gatherers: ‘life before domestication/agriculture was in fact largely one of leisure, intimacy with nature, sensual wisdom, sexual equality, and health.’
³⁸
The Great Settlement led to social hierarchy, the oppression of the many by the few, the subjugation of women and the exploitation and destruction of the planet. Ever since human beings abandoned their nomadic ways, they have become domesticated, complacent, obedient, violent and alienated. We have been going downhill ever since, except for a few indigenous cultures which have managed to survive on the margins or in the interstices of modern civilization.

Zerzan combines a traditional anarchist analysis with radical ecological thought. As a neo-Luddite, he has long been questioning technology.
³⁹
But like all anarcho-primitivists, he argues that it is not the type of technology
which is the problem but modern technology itself, with its inevitable division of labour and overspecialization and alienating effects. This goes against the flow of many classical anarchists and syndicalists who saw technology as liberating people from drudgery and reducing the working day so that workers could have more leisure to develop their full potential. Zerzan even finds intermediate and alternative technology unacceptable, although some hand-held tools might be tolerated in his brave new world.