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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Refusalhas
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’segoistic-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.
