A collection of things
A collection of things
I'm trying to clean things up a bit, and make it easier to find things. Here's an article from Bey on the subject of "What is anarchy?" It was posted before with other stuff. Now I'm posting it on it's own
Questions and Answers on Anarchism
Hakim Bey
What is an Anarchist?
The Prophet Mohammed said that anyone who greets you with "Peace!" must be considered a Moslem. Similarly, one may consider all who call themselves "anarchists" to be anarchists (unless they're police spies);--that is, simply, those who desire the abolition of government. For the Sufi, the question, "Who is a Moslem?" holds virtually no interest. They ask, rather, "Who is this Moslem? an ignorant dogmatist? a hairsplitter? a hypocrite? Or is this one who rather strives to experience knowledge, love, and will, as one harmonious whole?"
"What is an anarchist?" is not the right question. The right question is: "Who is this anarchist?" an ignorant dogmatist, hairsplitter, hypocrite? One who claims to have smashed all idols, but who in truth has just erected new mental shrines to fresh spooks and abstractions? Does this one try to live in the spirit of anarchy, of not-being-ruled/not ruling-- or does that one merely use the rhetoric of rebellion as an excuse for unconsciousness, resentment and self-immiseration?"
The petty theological squabbles of the anarchist sects have grown inexcusably boring. Instead of asking for definitions (ideologies), ask: "What do you know?"--"What are your true desires?"--"What will you do now?"--and--as Diaghilev said to the young Cocteau--"Amaze me."
What is Government?
Government may be seen as a structured relation among humans whereby power is unevenly distributed, such that the creative life of some is reduced for the aggrandizement of others. Thus government operates in all relations in which the members are not considered as original partners in a structure of mutuality. Government can be observed therefore in social units as tiny as the nuclear family or "informal" as a chance meeting of several neighbors in the street--whereas government may never even touch certain much larger organizations such as a rioting mob or crowd of hobby enthusiasts, Quaker meetings or free Soviets, banqueters or benevolent societies.
Human relationships which begin with such original partnerships may become, through the process of institutionalization, subject to a decay toward government--a love affair may turn into marriage, a little tyranny of the miserliness of love; or else an intential community, founded freely to make possible some way of life desired by all of its members, finds itself ruling and coercing its children with petty moral rules, empty husks of once glorious ideals.
So the task of anarchy is never done for more that a short time. Everywhere and always human relations will always concretize into institutions and degenerate into governments. Perhaps one might argue that this is "natural?"....But so what?! Its opposite is also "natural". And if it were not, then I still might choose the unnatural, the impossible.
We know, however, that free (non-governed) relations are perfectly possible, because we experience them quite frequantly--and more so when we strive to create them. The anarchist chooses the task (also the art, the jouissance) of maximizing the social conditions for the emergence of such relations. Because this is what we desire, this is what we do.
What about the criminals?
The above considerations may be taken to imply a sort of "ethics", a working a mutable definition of justice in an existential and situationalist context. Anarchists should probably only consider as "criminal" only those who deliberately thwart the realization of free relations. In a hypothetical prisonless society, only those who cannot be dissuaded from such action may be subject to "people's justice," or even vengeance.
At present however we'd do well to realize that our own determination to cerate such relations now, even in imperfect non-utopian modes, will inevitably place us in a position of "criminality" vis-a-vis the State, the legal system, and probably the "unwritten law" of popular prejudice as well. Revolutionary martyrdom has long gone out of fashion--the current goal is to create as much freedom as possible without getting caught.
How does an anarchist society work?
An anarchist society works, whenever two or more people strive mutually, in an organization of original partnership, to achieve shared (or complementary) desires. No government is needed to structure a quilting bee, a dinner party, a black market, a tong (or secret mutual aid society), a mail network or BBS, a love affair, a spontaneous social movment (such as ecosabotage or AIDS activism), a group art project, a commune, a pagan gathering, a neighborhood
protection society, an enthusiasts' club, a nude beach, a Temporary Autonomous Zone. The key, as Fourier would have said is Passion--or, to use a more modern sounding word, desire.
How do we get there from here?
In other words, how do we maximize the potential for such spontaneous relations to arise from beneath the dead weight of a society suffocated by all the varieties of governance? How do we give passion a free rein to re-create the world each day in the original freedom of the "free spirit" and the group of shared desires? The $64 question--and really not worth a great deal more, since the answer can only be science fiction.
Very well then, my sense of strategy leans toward a considered rejection of the remnants of old "New Left" tactics such as the demo, media-performance, protest, petition, Ghandian resistance or adventurist terrorism. This entire strategic complex has long since been recuperated and commodified by the Spectacle (if you'll allow me a burst of Situ-jargon), and is perhaps no longer even worth the trouble of detournment.
Two other and quite different strategic areas seem far more interesting and promising . One is the complex summed up by John Zerzan in Elements of Refusal--that is, the refusual of widespread and largely nonpolitical scale of control mechanisms inherent in such institutions as work, education, consumerism, electoral politics, "family values", etc. Anarchists might well turn their attention towards ways to intensify and give direction to these "elements." Such action might fall in the traditional category of "agitprop" but would aviod the "leftist" tendency to institutionalize or "fetishism" the programs of any self-defined revolutionary elite or avante garde.
Action in the area of "elements of refusal" is negative, even "nihilistic," while the second area concerns itself with postive emergencies of spontaneous organizations capable of providing real alternatives to institutions of Control. Thus the insurrectionary actions of "refusal" is complemented and enhanced by
a proliferation and concatenation of "original partnership" relations. In a sense this is an updated version of the old Wobbly strategy of agitating for a General Strike while simultaneously building the new society within the shell of the old through union organization. The difference, I propose, is that the struggle must
be enlarged beyond the "problem of labor" to include the whole scope of "everyday life" (in the Debordian sense).
[Note: This would be the right place to address question number 9, "What's opur relation to other liberatory struggles?", which seems to be a subset of the question of strategy/tactics. Clearly the answer should be: Support them inasmuch as they're actually liberatory (radical ecotage, sexual minorities, etc.); criticize them constructively if they veer toward institutionalization (radical unionism, peace movment, etc) But also: let's keep our eyes peeled for where the action is. After all, isn't the uprising itself one of our "criminal pleasures?" Always a new horizon and we nomads or vagabonds, unable to resit its lure....]
I've attempted to make much more specific proposals in the title essay of The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Autonomedia, N.Y., 1991); so here I'll confine myself to mentioning my contention that the goal of such action cannot properly be designated by the word "Revolution"--just as the General Strike, for example, was not a "Revolutionary" tactic but rather one of "social violence" (as
Sorel explained). "Revolution has betrayed itself as just another damned commodity, bloddy cataclysm, one more turn of the crank of Control--this is not what we desire, but rather a chance for anarchy to shine.
Is Anarchy the End of History?
If the becoming of anarchy is never "done" the the answer is No--except in the special case of "History" self-defined as the privileged auto-valorization of the institutions and "governments". But history in this sense is probably already dead, already "disappeared" into the Spectacle, or the obscenity of Simulation. Insomuch as anarchy invovles a kind of psychic paleolithism, it has traditionally longed for a post-historic state which would mirror that of prehistory. If the French Theorists are correct, we have already begun to enter such a state. History as story will continue, for humans might almost be defined as animals
who make stories. But HIstory as the one official story for Control has lost its monopoly on discourse. Presumably this should work to our advantage.
How does Anarchy deal with Technology?
If anarchy is a kind of paleolithism, this does not mean we have to bomb ourselves back to the Stone Age. We're interested in the return of the Paleolithic, not a return to it. On this point I believe I disagree with both Zerzan and Fifth Estate, and so with the techno-futuro-libertarians of CaliforniaLand. Or rather, I agree with all of them, I'm both a Luddite and a cyberpunk, hence unacceptable to both parties.
My belief (not knowledge) is that a society which began to approach general anarchy would deal with technology on the basis of passion, that is, desire and pleasure. The technology of alienation would fail to survive such conditions, while the technology of enhancement would probably thrive. Wildness, however, would also necessarily come to play a major role in such a world, since wildness is pleasure. A society based on pleasure would never allow us to techne to interfere with its enjoyment of nature.
If it is true that all techne is a form of meditation, so also is all culture. We do not object to meditation per se (after all, our very senses mediate between the "world" and "brain"), but rather to the tragic distortion of meditation into alienation. If language itself is a form of meditation then we may "purify the language of the tribe";--it's not portry we hate but language as Control.
[Note: On anarchist technology, see Islands in the Net and Green days in Brunei by B. Sterling, near-future SF written as "utopian realism", in which desperately poor overpopulated third world countries make use of appropriate low-tech green and humane solutions to solve problems which already exist. Also see I. Ilyich's Energy and Equity]
Why hasn't Anarchy worked before?
What do you mean "Why hasn't Anarchy worked before?! It has worked thousands, of millions of times. It worked throuhout 90% of human existence, the Old Stone Age. It works in hunter/gatherer tribes even now. It works in all the "free relation" type groups listed above, from quilting bees to tongs. It works every time you invite a few friends out for a picnic. It "worked" even in "failed uprisings" like the Munich and Shanghai Soviets, Baja California 1911, Fiume 1919, Krondstadt 1921, Paris 1968. It's worked in communes, Maroon
enclaves, pirate utopias. It worked in early Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, in Paris 1870, in the Ukraine, Catalonia and Aragon.
The so called future of anarchy is a judgment made percisely by the kind of History we believe to be moribund. True, few of these experiments (except the prehistoric and the tribal) lasted a very "long time"--but this says nothing of any value about the nature of experience, of individuals and groups, who lived through such periods of freedom. Perhaps you can recall some brief but intense love affair, one which even now gives a certain meaning to your whole life, before and after--a "peak experience". History is blind to this portion of teh spectrum, the world of "everyday life" which can also become on occassion the scene of the "irruption of the Marvelous." Every time this happens it's a triumph for anarchy. Imagine then (and this is the sort of history we enjoy) the adventure of major Temporary Autonomous Zones lasting six weeks or even two years, the communal sense of illumination, camaraderie, exhilaration--the individual sense of power, of destiny, of creativity. No one who has ever experienced anything like this can admit for even one moment that danger of risk and failure might out weigh the sheer glory of those brief moments of rising up. As soon doubt the sacredness of that love affair, even if it ended in pain and misery!
Overcome the myth of failure and we will feel at once, like the cool breeze that heralds rain in the desert, the inner certainity of success. To know, to desire, to act--in a sense we cannot desire what we do not aready know. But we have known the success of anarchy for a long time now--in fragments, perhaps, in flashes--but real, real as the monsoon, real as passion. If it were not so, how could we even desire it, much less act to bring about its victory?
Originally entitled:
"The Willimantic/Rensselaer Questions"
Hakim Bey
from:
Anarchy and the End of History
pp. 87-92