Thursday, December 29, 2011

acadian nationalism - film - 1971 - Acadia Acadia?!?

Acadia Acadia?!?
Michel Brault & Pierre Perrault
National Film Board of Canada
1971
75 Minutes

This is the first film that I've watched from the National Film Board of Canada website which has recently made hundreds of its documentaries and animations available for streaming or download.  I intend to gradually go through the NFB website's content and write about any films that I deem appropriate for this blog.  As I'm moving through the NFB content alphabetically, Acadia Acadia?!? is the first such film, although there's a couple more in the A’s about the Oka standoff and the October Crisis of 1970 Quebec.

Acadia Acadia?!? is a black and white documentary that captures the short life of the Ralliement de la Jeunesse Acadienne, the student movement that called for the recognition of Acadian identity by the English political establishment in New Brunswick.  This documentary was mostly shot at the University of Moncton, the first and only French language university in New Brunswich.  The film's directors, Michel Brault and Pierre Perrault, have worked in collaboration on a number of projects for the NFB and many of them focused on aspects of Francophone culture in Canada.  With this film, Brault and Perrault focus on a small student activist movement centered on the campus of a small university in a small Canadian city, but their film opens up a discussion about the status of French Canadians outside of Quebec during the 1960s.

Acadia was once a French Colony that once existed east of New France (modern Quebec) where New Brunswick, mainland Nova Scotia, and eastern Quebec currently is.  The Acadians were expelled from the region in the mid-18th century, settling in places like Louisiana following the French defeat to the English in their Colonial war for Canada.  Many of the Acadians returned to eastern Canada, following their expulsion, and they established French speaking communities throughout their former colony.  At the time of the events Brault and Perrault captured in their film, the city of Moncton was over 30% Francophone.  This %30 was hardly represented in the political and educational institutions of New Brunswick however, and therefore this student movement emerged to fight for language rights by, in part, asserting their Acadian heritage.

The film captured many of the significant events of this movement.  The successful call for a student strike at the Univertity of Moncton opened the documentary, which then segued into scenes of a large march for French language rights at Moncton city hall.  The scenes of the students speaking with city hall council were quintessential of the 1960s zeitgeist, as they featured a condescending group of aging white (and in this context, Anglophone) blowhards, proud of their ignorance, talking down to a group of educated and angry young outsiders.  The activists call for French to be recognized at city hall was rejected, showing how English, as the only recognized language of the political establishment of a city that's over a third Francophone, was a means of providing a barrier to access political power and services in that city.  The activists did not take their rejection well and they left a pig's head on the lawn of the mayor's home.

Brault and Perrault mix scenes of activist action with talking head interviews with the Young Acadians, wherin the student agitators express their opinions on the English power structure of the province, the meaning of Acadia, the state of the University of Moncton, their views on direct action activism and violence, and their wish to express themselves without giving up their identity.  The activists are clearly armed with recent sociological and postcolonial theories that contribute to many of the views they express in these interviews.  There are also some scenes shot at an Acadian village where the activists discuss language and cultural politics with some of the villagers - this scene is the converse of a scene where the activists sat at the meeting of a loyalist organization, where during the recital of the oath to the Queen and when the members of this organization sang 'God Save the Queen', the students held up the clenched fist of activist solidarity.  

The activists occupied the University of Moncton's science building for nine days in the winter of 1969.  The students were raising questions about why their school received zero funding from the provincial government while the University of New Brunswick was heavily subsidized (thus making tuition lower for students, and enabling the institution to provide nicer facilities and better services.)  The occupation ended with students submitting to police requests to move, despite earlier calls for passive non-violent resistance to the authorities, which pretty well caused the movement to dissipate.  Shortly thereafter students returned to classes, and thirty students were expelled, including Michel Blanchard, one of the activist leaders who speaks throughout the documentary.  Furthermore, the university closed its sociology department, the chief source of the social theories the activists operated on.

The English film is 75 minutes long, an abridged translation of the original French version that runs closer to two hours in length.  One feature of the translation is that there is only one female translator voice, which is fine, it works, but I never noticed how other such films make the choice to translate the words of male speakers into a male voice.  Overall, this film is probably one of the few sources of information on this particular movement, as a subaltern, Acadian, nationalism in Canada has mostly been a subject with regards to the First Nations or Quebec contexts.

Beginning in 2009, Michel Blanchard was permitted back onto the University of Moncton campus for the first time since 1970. 

PS:  Here is the link to watch the English version of the film on the National Film Board website.

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

social radicalism - book - 1980 - A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present

A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present
Revised and Updated Edition
Howard Zinn
HarperPerennial
1980 (this edition: 1995)


This will be a short profile of a book that has been discussed heavily in other forums since its publication.  A People’s History of the United States is a major work of history, focusing on political oppression in the United States and the radical social movements that emerged to respond to such oppression.  The book’s author, Howard Zinn, was a social activist, in addition to an academic, and he spent much of his career working at Boston University.  Zinn had been involved with the American Civil Rights movement (and one of his best known books is about the Students Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, an influential Civil Rights organizations which has been discussed previously on this blog in relation to John Lewis’ memoir), and later in the anti-war movement during the 1960s, and other social justice movements throughout his life.  

A People’s History, first published in 1980, was a response to all of the books of American history that focus on the European explorers, founding fathers, and industrialists who made the United States, bit by bit, into a superpower.  Zinn’s book looks at the social consequences of those historical stories that have made up the mythology of the United States, and examines how, historically, common people have been effected by the actions of America’s elites.  Zinn’s story is not just a narrative of social victims, however, as he heavily emphasizes the radical movements that emerged to fight political oppression, and each chapter seems to take a different aspect of this as its focus.  In Chapter 9, for example, Zinn discusses the institution of slavery in the America, but also the abolition movements that fought against slavery, and even discussed the details of several specific slave rebellions.  Labor Unions and Anti-War organizing are also persistent themes.  This book demonstrates that this alternative to the dominant telling of American history has its own heroes.

Some of the movements discussed by Zinn are virtually lost in most tellings of American history.  Chapter 10 is about the vestigial colonial mode of land ownership and management in the north during the 19th century and the Anti-Rent movement that erupted among agricultural workers who basically fought a war against land owners in New York state.  Zinn’s book also details the history of the anti-war movement during the Second World War, which is virtually unheard of in most histories of the period, which generally take up the line that WWII was the good war.  Finally, Zinn’s final chapter in this 1995 edition is about the first half of the Clinton years, with a critical analysis of the then current president’s commitment to progressive values.  Zinn published updates and revisions to this book quite often, and the final edition, published in 2005, contains a more complete chapter on the 1990s (including discussions of the Militia Movement, and Mumia Abu Jamal) as well as an analysis of the early Bush II years.

radical right - book - 1995 - The Party of Fear: The American Far Right from Nativism to the Milita Movement

The Party of Fear: The American Far Right from Nativism to the Militia Movement
David H. Bennett
Vintage Books
1995 (revised from original 1988 edition)
585 pages

Salutations, readers!  I picked up my copy of The Party of Fear: The American Far Right Movement from Nativism to the Militia Movement from Seekers Books in Toronto’s Annex neighborhood.

The Party of Fear is a historical survey of the far right political scene in the United States.  American nativism, the social ideology which persecutes peoples coded as outsiders to the ideal American society, in the various forms it has taken since late 18th century, serves as the axle around which Bennett’s history of right-wing extremism revolves.  Nativist movements are composed of individuals who have constructed identities of what it means to be a true American by establishing who aren’t true Americans and then victimizing them in a variety of ways.  This usually takes the form of anti-immigrant or ethnocentric sentiments.  An illustrative example of nativist is the Party of Native Americans led by Bill the Butcher in Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Herbert Asbury’s book The Gangs of New York.  Bill the Butcher leads his gang, the Party of Native Americans against recent immigrants from Ireland and the gangs they formed in response to such assaults.  And by the way, in Party of Fear Bennett actually discusses the historical Native American Party, and Bill “the butcher” Poole, that was represented in Scorsese’s film.



A More recent example are these recent political ads that identify immigration from Mexico as a major threat to the American way of life:





David H. Bennett is a professor of history at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York.  One of his major research interests is political extremism in the United States, and this book appears to be the culmination of his work on this topic (although he has also published the book, Demagogues in the Depression: American Radicals and the Union Party, 1932-36, in 1969, which I’ll  get around to reading eventually).  This work is a survey of virtually every manifestation of right-wing radicalism in the United States going right back to the revolutionary period.  Nativism was and is a core concept of the extreme right wing, and almost all of the movements featured in Bennett's text are underscored by nativist fears.  Bennett finds a wax and wane to the history of nativism, which he weaves through his overarching history of the American radical-right.   Nativist sentiments may, at one point, be a flag carried primarily by fringe groups to only explode into the mainstream later in an event as celebrated as the McCarthy hearings to root out communists, or the incredibly popular Anti-Catholic ‘Know-Nothing’ party of the 19th century.

At other times, Nativism is represented by fringe movements at the very tip of the political spectrum.  The Ku Klux Klan (discussed at length by Bennett) and its violent paramilitary enforcement of the notion of the true American as white and protestant serves as a recurring example.  Furthermore, my copy of the book, the updated 1995 revision, ends with discussions about the unorganized militia movements that emerged in the United States through the 1980s and 1990s which found national attention after Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building.  Bennett’s book is not just about the pervasive existence of nativist sentiments but about nativist action taken against the perceived intrusion of America’s eternal outsiders, it’s about forming specific social units that identify themselves as American by taking action against that which they identify as non-American, whether its via the judicial and political apparatus ala Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn, or via night raids and other forms of terror a-la the Ku klux Klan.  Bennett discusses all of these movements, as well as the more mainstream forms, including those presidents whose administration were defined by promoting nativist sentiments, such as Calvin Coolidge.  This book is excellent as a historical survey of these social movements, and although it never studies any of these movements in depth, it has a large bibliography that points to books about each individual movement.

This edition was revised to include discussion of the militia movements that emerged in the 1990s.  I hope that Bennett publishes another update soon to include many of the new forms of right-wing extremism that orbit around the nativist ideals since Barack Obama’s 2008 election.  The profound rise of Islamophobia, manifested in the Dove World Outreach Center and its leader (who recieved global attention for his heavily publicized wish to ritualistically burn the Koran), but also discussed at length in this report.  The post-911 prominence of conspiracist Alex Jones, who, for example, issued paranoid proclamations that the film Machete was a call to Mexicans to attack white American’s in a race-war, and the renewed explosion in far-right racist groups as studied by the Southern Poverty Law Centre, and the anti-Obama ‘Birther’ movement that claims that the current president is, in fact, an alien.

Friday, December 23, 2011

wikileaks - book - 2011 - Inside Wikileaks: My Time with Julian Assange At the World's Most Dangerous Website

Inside Wikileaks: My Time With Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website
Daniel Domscheit-Berg
with Tina Klopp
trans. Jefferson Chase
Doubleday Canada
2011
282 pages

Hey there, I picked up my copy of Inside Wikileaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website from Pandemonium bookshop in Toronto’s Junction neighborhood.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a computer security specialist, was, in partnership with Australian computer hacker Julian Assange, instrumental in establishing the notorious Wikileaks website.  In case you haven’t heard, Wikileaks is a website which provides a secure channel for whistleblowers to anonymously submit documents and make them available to a readership.  The website began publishing in December 2006, however it did not truly begin garnering global notoriety until its release of the ‘Collateral Murder’ video in April 2010.  Collateral Murder put the disassociated cruelty of the US war in Iraq on display, and it served to elevate Wikileak’s profile to a global platform.  In late 2010, Domscheit-Berg split with Wikileaks due to a variety of differences with Assange (many of which are detailed in this book).


Inside Wikileaks is Domscheit-Berg’s memoirs of working at Wikileaks, from his first meeting with Assange in 2007 at a Chaos Computer Club conference, to his acrimonious split with Assange in September 2010.  Additionally, Domscheit-Berg discusses his post-Wikileaks project, OpenLeaks, which provides whistleblowers with an anonymous and secure channel for the submission of documents, but also facilitates the passage of those documents to media outlets who can then verify and contextualize their content.  Much of the book describes Domscheit-Berg’s tense relationship with Julian Assange, which began as a genuine friendship and, according to the author’s telling of events, dissolved into authoritarian paranoia and egomaniacal cruelty that flowed in only one direction.... from Assange to Domscheit-Berg.

The tone of the book is a sustained whine.  Domscheit-Berg sounds bitter and maybe a little ashamed that he put up with Assange’s punishment for so long.  Assange would insist on claiming all of the credit for the project, Domscheit-Berg would retort that Assange should have realized he didn’t need to make such claims to him in the first place because he didn’t want any credit anyway!  All Daniel ever wanted was for Julian to be nice to him, and that comes across pretty strongly throughout the book.  This may make the book sound like Domscheit-Berg’s petty revenge rant against Assange, and to a great extent, that IS what this text consists of.  There are some feature’s of Domscheit-Berg’s complaining that are, however, genuinely interesting.

Assange’s public persona is of a well dressed, well spoken man.  Domscheit-Berg paints a different picture of Assange, the pre-media-personality Assange who dressed poorly, had bad personal hygene and diet, was intellectually vain to the point of forming intense jealousies, dismissive of others ideas, and held bizarre attitudes towards women.  This Assange was essentially a hacker stereotype and I know from my own adolescence spent in the hacker scene that there’s enough of real people who match this paradigm to justify its continued endurance.  It is not surprising (considering....) that Assange’s back-stage presentation fits this as it meshes with aspects his front-stage self-presentation.  Assange’s intelligence is often emphasized in media about him, with commentators often stating something to the effect that whatever room Assange is in, he’s likely the most intelligent person in it.  There’s no question that Assange is an intelligent person, but he has yet to prove his sublime genius with an exceptionally intelligent public statement, but this superintelligence is part of his self-mythologizing.

The other interesting revelation of Domscheit-Berg’s Inside Wikileaks is of Assange’s reliance on security through obscurity for Wikileaks.  Wikileaks has claimed that it is run by an international network of dissidents and radical computer programmers, however Domscheit-Berg has stated that for most of his run with the project, it was primarily him and Assange at the controls.  That Wikileaks had an international network of servers was an untruth, that their security was impenetrable was untrue, and so forth.  Much of what Assange said about the Wikileaks organization and technical infrastructure was intended as misleading.  David Leigh, one of the Guardian journalists who was working with the Wikileaks Cablegate documents, published the password Assange had given him to access those materials in a book.  Leigh claimed that Assange had told him that the password was temporary.  The password was, in fact, not temporary, and in response to this revelation Assange had published all of the unredacted CableGate documents at once.  What Domscheit-Berg reveals about Assange’s network security practices, however, lends credibility to Leigh’s assertions about Assange’s file password.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg, ultimately, comes off as a man who loved Assange and is now hurt by how his former friend treated him.  Inside Wikileaks is a look into the website operations, but its also a plea for sympathy.  Domscheit-Berg wants us to understand that Assange was not the only personality behind the project (despite his assurance that he constantly deferred to his friend for the sake of maintaining his monstrous ego), and he wants us to side with him.  He portrays Assange, at times, as one of the greats, and at other times, as an absurd person, an Ubu Roi of radical politics and technological-social transparency.  

What amazes me with Inside Wikileaks, is how deeply encoded the arrogance of the ideology of technological supremacy is in Domscheit-Berg’s own telling of the story.  At one point he’s expressing disbelief and disappointment in the fact that journalists were never interested in the technical operations of Wikileaks, and elsewhere he half-heartedly acknowledges that the fact that Wikileaks system of anonymous submission meant that they couldn’t authenticate documents was an issue to some extent.  A criticism I’ve heard levelled against the website is that whistleblowers need to be reassured that they’re doing the right thing, and they want to see that the risks they have taken have positive effects.  Wikileaks is set up as a cold, technical process, and it cannot provide either of these features.  Hence, CableGate/Collateral Murder leaker Bradley Manning looks to Adrian Lamo (the Roy Cohn of the computer underground) for reassurance and now the latest good news in his life is that the prosecutors of his case will not seek the death penalty.  

Domscheit-Berg's book appears pathetic at moments, particularly when he's showing how awful and mean Assange was.  Beyond the points I highlighted for this profile, however, his book does include numerous other interesting details about the operations of Wikileaks that are relevant to research conducted from a variety of perspectives.








Tuesday, December 20, 2011

transcendentalism - book - 1981 - Transcendentalism as a Social Movement, 1830-1850

Transcendentalism as a Social Movement, 1830-1850
Anne C. Rose
Yale University Press
1981
269 pages


A good day to you.  I purchased Transcendentalism as a Social Movement from Seekers Books in Toronto’s Annex neighborhood.


There are scores of books about the American Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century.  The Transcendentalists were a group of poets and thinkers that orbited around Ralph Waldo Emmerson, the essayist son of a Unitarian minister who combined socialist political ideals with pantheistic spirituality.  The Transcendentalists included Margaret Fuller, a proto-feminist journalist, and Henry David Thoreau, one of the best known American philosophers whose book Walden, the author’s edited journal about the experience of living simply and close to nature, is still cited by all varieties of social drop-outs (it’s mentioned as a favorite book of one of Jennifer Toth’s Mole People, for example) while his essay Civil Disobedience continues to be quoted by political dissidents on all points of the left-right spectrum.  Most of the existing books on the Transcendentalists approach the movement as a literary or philosophical school.  In Transcendentalism as a Social Movement, historian Anne C. Rose takes the much less common approach to the group as a social movement that was intent on developing new ways of living.


Anne C. Rose is currently a distinguished professor at Penn State University (America’s #1 party school according to a 2009 episode of This American Life).  She is a historian of American culture who works in Penn State’s Department of History and Religious studies, and although she has a long and varied publishing record, most of her research has focused on the history of psychiatry or on American religious practice.  Transcendentalism as a Social Movement was Rose’s first book, and according to her preface, it began as her doctoral dissertation.  Rose thus focuses on Transcendentalism as a spiritual and socialist movement in the American context, emerging from a milieu of progressive churches and religious communities operating in and nearby to Boston Massachusetts, during the early-to-mid 19th century.


Rose’s book begins with a discussion of these churches, and in particular the emergence of Unitarianism in Boston during the late 18th century.  Unitarianism is a belief system that became popular in Boston during the early 19th century that considers God to be a single entity, thereby denying the divinity of Jesus.  Christ is an exemplar of moral behavior but is not a divine authority, and individuals may exercise their free will, ideally in emulation of Christ’s model.  Unitarianism also resists the idea that any church may claim authority over interpreting the Bible.  Rose discusses in depth the fluctuations in popularity of the Unitarian Churches in Boston that provided citizens with a greater spiritual freedom than the Protestant churches that dominated the region.


Rose discusses Unitarianism as a means of introducing the cultural climate that Transcendentalism developed in.  While Unitarianism never claimed a majority of worshippers, its popularity did give rise to a number of spiritual debates at the time, plus it demonstrated the possibility for alternatives to the Protestant church.  Transcendentalism developed as the most radical of all the alternatives, as a mixture of Romantic poetry, pantheistic Christianity, and pre-Marxist political socialism vis-a-vis the ideas of Charles Fourier.  Because Rose’s text is focused on the group as a social, rather than literary or spiritual, movement, many of the chapters are about those members who were most socially active (and therefore not Henry David Thoreau).  Rose includes profiles of the most socially significant Transcendentalists, including men like George Ripley, who left little writing but was a unique Unitarian minister whose involvement with the Transcendentalists led him to found Brook Farm (a Transcendentalist farm collective that Rose discussed at length) with his wife Sophia Ripley.  Elizabeth Peabody is another of the Transcendentalists discussed at length by Rose, whose work was primarily focused on new ideas in education and the domestic sphere.  These individuals were engaged with reforming the social sphere in accordance with recently emergent ideas about liberal spirituality.  Much of the book is about the social activism of these figures and their fight against slavery or the subjugation of women.
 

Rose’s book is a comprehensive look at the Transcendentalists on an axis other than the literary.  Rose’s analysis of the cultural milieu that the Transcendentalists grew out of as social activists is fascinating.  The historical analysis of Brook Farm brings the Transcendentalists onto similar spiritual-social ground as the religious groups discussed in The Communistic Societies of the United States by Charles Nordhoff.  Rose’s book also contains appendices which provide tabled details about Unitarian churches in Boston, and about the Brook Farm collective.  Finally, Rose contains a comprehensive bibliography which organizes texts by Transcendentalists according to their activist causes, which is a useful tool for further research on the Transcendentalists or on the activist rhetoric of certain subjects.

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

philip k dick, psychedelia - book - 2000 - What if Our World is Their Heaven?: The Final Conversations of Philip K Dick

What if Our World is Their Heaven?: The Final Conversations of Philip K. Dick
Gwen Lee and Doris Elaine Sauter (eds.)
The Overlook Press
2000
204 pages

Hi. Readers.  I borrowed What if Our World is Their Heaven? from University of Toronto’s Robarts Library.

What if Our World is Their Heaven is a collection of transcribed interviews with science-fiction mystic Philip K Dick.  These interviews are administered by a journalist named Gwen Lee during the final months of the authors life, and it is very apparent from their rapport that they have a close relationship with each-other.  Many of the interviews are, presumably, unedited in their transcription, as they contain tangential musings on popular culture (such as banter about the singer, Meatloaf) and even expressions of self-doubt (from Lee, the interviewer)  who occasionally discussed her uncertain career shifts.  These interviews are fairly casual, but perhaps because Dick was speaking, on record, with a friend, he felt comfortable discussing some of the more critical issues that he was dealing with towards the end of his life.  

These interviews were recorded in the last four months of Dick’s life, during the production period of Blade Runner, the first of several films based on the author’s work.  Dick’s impressions of the film-making process, his encounters with the starring actors of the movie, and his excitement over the promotion materials for the upcoming release make up a sizable component of these transcriptions.  More importantly, though, are Dick’s discussions of the ideas he has for the manuscript he ultimately left unfinished, The Owl In Daylight, and his memories of his mystic encounters with the divine that occurred in February and March 1974.






These interviews reveal why Philip K Dick continues to be a fascinating personality.  In his discussions of his working-class writer lifestyle and his recent success in Hollywood, he appears through his speech as a man crossing between plateaus, as he moves from everyday talking about the things he watched on television and the stress of publishing constraints, to talking about his encounters with god, and his transposition of those experiences into The Owl in Daylight.  These are probably Dick’s most candid revelations of those experiences beyond his private notes on the subject that have been published since his death.  

While Dick had written shards of these experiences into several of his late novels, including A Scanner Darkly, Radio Free Albemuth, and VALIS, his concept for The Owl In Daylight appeared almost prophetic, in that its protagonist was a composer whose work improved dramatically through contact with some form of extraterrestrial intelligence.  This alien intelligence attaches itself to the protagonist and kills him slowly, and the protagonist prefers to die and produce profound works of art than to disengage.  This almost mirrors the last few years of Dick’s life, when his post-1974 writing took a turn from its already philosophically profound idioms, towards the avant-garde - not long before his death.


Tuesday, November 22, 2011

anarchism - book - 1995 - Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm

Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm
Murray Bookchin
1995
AK Press
86 Pages

Heya out there, surfers, I bought my copy of Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism from Willow Books near the corner of Bloor st w. and St. George st. in Toronto.

This is the second book by Murray Bookchin that I have profiled for this blog.  In my post about Remaking Society, I noted how I had come to read (and to appreciate) Bookchin after an adolescent interest in the writings of Bob Black, including Black’s elaborate anti-Bookchin essay, Anarchy after Leftism.  Well, Black’s text (and his more recent anti-Bookchin eBook, Nightmares of Reason) were inspired by Bookchin’s brief attack on the anarchist ideas put forth by Black and a number of the other prominent anarchist voices of the 1980s and 1990s, including Hakim Bey, David Watson (who himself wrote his own Bookchin critique titled Beyond Bookchin) and John Zerzan (whose book Elements of Refusal has been profiled here).  Bookchin terms these thinkers (minus Black, Bookchin actually never mentions his most vocal opponent) the lifestyle anarchists, who he argues bring anarchist praxis into concert with consumer culture via Max Stirner’s egoistic-anarchism.

This book comes in two parts: the first is the admonition of this emerging trend in anarchist thought in that period.  Bookchin was primarily concerned that the quasi-mysticism of Hakim Bey or the return-to-the-primitive calls of John Zerzan sidestepped the need for critique of actual social conditions that have concerned multiple generations of earlier anarchist philosophers.  Bookchin assess these philosophies as taking the view that society is something to be dropped out of, or obliterated completely, rather than reformed according to specific critiques that address specific, material social problems.

The second part of Bookchin’s short book is a brief essay titled “The Left that Was”.  This essay is a look back at what may be considered the “old left” of the pre-1960s, when the first signs of the ideas expressed by the lifestyle anarchists began to creep into leftist thought.  In this essay, Bookchin laments the past activity of organizations such as the Industrial Workers of the World, and the Anarchists of the Spanish Civil War (and early subject in Bookchin’s writing).  While recent writers such as Terrence Kissack note that this is a past that is gone, current trends in activism such as the now global Occupy movement suggest that the social aspect remains a vital part of activism.

The Lifestyle anarchists are charged, by Bookchin, with basing their theories on faulty science and anthropology.  I’ve wondered, when reading the primitivist texts of Zerzan and others, whether or not the anthropological texts he cites were themselves rooted in an ideology partially formed by the era it came out of, and according to Bookchin, they were.  Many of the Primitivist understandings of early man come from the published papers of a specific symposium called 'Man the Hunter' held in 1966 at the University of Chicago, where its participants portrayed man as living in paradise before civilization.  Bookchin disagreed and, more recently, Theodore Kaczynski (The Unabomber) also disagreed based on his own experience of living the lifestyle Zerzan advocates. While the anarcho-primitivists describe pre-civilization life as easy-going, Kaczynski, in his essay 'The Truth About Primitive Life: A Critique of Anarcho-Primitivism' describes the demands such a lifestyle places on labour needs as quite high.   Kaczynski was speaking from personal experience, having lived a mostly hunter-gatherer lifestyle for over twenty years of his life.

Bookchin critiques the 'lifestyle' anarchist theories as not simply being ungrounded but also as operating in accordance with contemporary consumer culture.  The realization of the unique individual, the unlocking of the personality, these are things that the lifestyle anarchists seek, and things that consumer culture offers.  Thomas Frank’s edited anthology Commodify Your Dissent addresses this same issue but from the end of critiquing the advetising that advocates rebellion, and the subcultures they feature.  By now we have had at least thirty years of commercials saying things like “Toothpaste as unique as you are”, and there’s little reason to believe that these sentiments are not mutually exclusive from the ideas of the Lifestyle Anarchists, even if those writers would inevitably deny any commonality with advertising slogans.

This consumer/activist-anarchist dichotomy, however, is not particularly helpful, coming from Bookchin, as it currently provides an incredibly shallow argument to pundit types to discredit activists of many stripes.  That is not to suggest that pundits now discredit activists for using consumer items because they read Bookchin’s attack on Hakim Bey and David Watson, but I am suggesting that just as Bookchin’s found a tense consonance between consumerism and certain strains of anarchist theory, that very line of thought has found its own consoance with current right-wing attitudes towards leftist action.  In particular, the idea that activists are not truly committed to any cause unless they can prove themselves free of all consumer objects.  For example when Occupy Wall Street began, photographs circulated across Internet channels that highlit all of the commercially available objects that appear....







....as though there’s some possibility for an Occupy protester to be using an indie digital camera.  Furthermore, this critique assumes that anyone who owns a piece of consumer electronics is implicitly dedicated to capitalism, acquired all of their possessions at retail, and in fact presumes one of what Bookchin implies as a potential byproducts of lifestyle anarchism, that activism can be merely a series of consumer choices.  That activists are also consumers is almost inevitable in contemporary society, but that activists accept consumerism as a necessary social condition is not inevitable.  That activism can be practiced through ethical consumerism is essentially new, however, and has produced interesting byproducts, such as the phenomena of the hipster whose persona is built upon consuming products that have acquired a subcultural cache.  

Bookchin refers to the difference between these two forms of anarchism as radically divided, so that an individual cannot commit to both.  This argument appears extreme, and it is not explicitly clear why concepts from “lifestyle anarchist” writers cannot be integrated into forms of social anarchism.  This text, however, is relevant for opening up an ongoing debate between two generations of anarchist philosophers.  

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