Translated by Nikos Gatzikis

____________

Marxist theorist Mark Fisher (1968–2017) posed a critical question: “Are cultural resources running out in the same way as natural resources are?” (Fisher, 2009). Through an analysis of cultural production over the past fifty years, he argued that the popular culture of Western societies has ‘frozen’ in the 20^thcentury, with the present characterized by timeless repetitions, revivals, and a striking lack of innovation.

According to Fisher, the 20^th century was defined by the parallel development of technological and cultural forms: the emergence of new technologies allowed for formal changes in pop culture, giving it a distinct chronological “signature”(Fisher, 2009). As examples, we can consider how the synthesizer became emblematic of the music of the ’70s and the ’80s or how the ‘rough’ assembly of samplers characterized ’90s rave music.

However, from 2000 onward, this trend disappears, and technological progress becomes disconnected from cultural production: technology continues to advance in leaps, but popular culture remains stagnant, clinging to its old forms. In fact, as Fisher notes, new technologies often serve not to produce new cultural forms, but to more faithfully reproduce old ones.[1] In this way, today, technological innovations “have tended to be parasitic on old [cultural] media” (Fisher, 2009).

If Fisher diagnosed a cultural landscape trapped in an endless loop of the past,Generative AI is not just another instance of this inertia – it is its logical conclusion. I argue that applications for text, image, and sound production—such as ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Soundraw, which utilize data from human activity to generate content—exemplify the tendency Fisher identified.

To make this parallel clearer, we must first examine Fisher’s arguments more closely.

In the texts included in Ghosts Of My Life (Fisher, 2014a),as well as in his blog k-punk, Fisher argues that the Western culture of the 20^thcentury was essentially modernist, rejecting the past and striving to achieve some formal innovation. Moreover, in contrast to the elitist and largely inaccessible modernism of the first half of the 20^thcentury, the period from 1960 to 2000, which shaped Fisher’s aesthetic perception, was marked by the emergence of a “popular modernism” with mass appeal (Fisher, 2014b). The examples Fisher usesare mainly drawn from British music: 1960s psychedelic rock, 1970s punk, 1980s post-punk, and 1990s rave.

In contrast to this era of unprecedented innovation, the popular culture of the 21^st century has abandoned modernism. Cultural forms no longer rebel against the past, but embrace it and repeat it. Thus, the“nostalgia mode” of postmodern capitalism (a term by Fredric Jameson) exhibits a “formal attachment to the techniques and formulas of the past, a consequence of a retreat from the modernist challenge of innovating cultural forms” (Fisher, 2014a, p. 11).

The examples that can be used to support this idea are endless. Fisher points to the disappearance of the ‘retro’ genre in music, a category that has stopped making sense, since, today, everything is somewhat retro and essentially timeless. Thus, Adele and Amy Winehouse—whose “recordings are saturated with a vague but persistent feeling of the past” (Fisher, 2014a, p. 14)—were not considered retro, but entirely contemporary.

Fisher also refers to the inability to identify the distinctive “sound” of the 2000s or 2010s, as well as the sterile appropriation of rave by bands like the Black Eyed Peas (Fisher, 2014a, p. 180) or mod by groups like Blur and Oasis. Rather than genuine tributes, he argues, these repetitions were “confidence tricks which borrowed yesterday’s inventions and half-heartedly passed them off as today’s swagger” (Fisher, 2014b). In the 2020s, one need only look at Hollywood, which increasingly resembles an Ouroboros, endlessly regurgitating its own past through sequel after sequel, spin-offs no one asked for, and countless remakes.

But how can we explain the disappearance of popular modernism in the 21st century? Why has pop culture stopped drawing on the creativity of technological advances? According to Fisher, the main reason is the transition of Western societies from the social democracy of the post-war period (welfare state, relative safety) to the neoliberal era ushered in by Thatcher and Reagan (expansion of the market sphere, dominance of managerial logic). This shift coincided with the transition from Fordist capitalism (stable employment in a specific space with limited hours) to today’s post-Fordist capitalism (precarious work with flexible hours, work that you take home, pervasive anxiety).

This transition brought significant changes to the production and consumption of art, and Fisher argues that these changes are responsible for the stagnation of contemporary pop culture. Regarding production, neoliberal capitalism “has gradually but systematically deprived artists of the resources necessary to produce the new” (Fisher, 2014a, p. 15). With the erosion of the welfare state, free tertiary education, and both private and public spaces (low rents, squats), the “indirect source of funding” that enabled experimentation in 20^thcentury pop culture has disappeared. Today, most artists are pressured “toproduce something that [is] immediately [profitable]”and thus turn to “cultural products that resembl[e] what [is] already successful” (Fisher, 2014a, p. 15).

At the same time, in terms of consumption, the audience of pop culture ends up desiring the reproduction of familiar forms, demanding ‘more of the same.’ The neoliberal condition of general uncertainty compels usto seek security in “established” cultural expressions, while the “besieging of attention” imposed by the technologies of communicative capitalism makes us “demand quick fixes,” such as the “easy promise of a minimal variation on an already familiar satisfaction” (Fisher, 2014a, p. 15). In this way, Fisher argues, neoliberalism is the primary mechanism behind the freezing of pop culture.[2]

I feel that Generative AI represents the culmination of the creative enervationthat Fisher diagnosed. Artificial intelligence is anachronistic by nature, inherently bound to the cultural production of the past. Its function is to metabolize the data of human activity (literature, painting, music) in orderto produce combinations of words, pixels, and sounds that satisfactorily respond to a given prompt.

Indeed, AI is very capable. ChatGPT can write a good paragraph “in the style of Woolf,” Midjourney can generate a good image “in the style of Monet,” So-VITS-SVC can even make songs with Tupac’s voice. But they cannot revolt. They cannot rupture. They cannot escape the weight of the pastand bring something new. Paraphrasing Fisher, we might say that “the law of [AI] is that everything comes back” (Fisher, 2014b), whether it be writing styles, artistic techniques, or even the dead themselves.

Thus, if AI artists are selling images online, if Kanye is releasing AI music videos, if Hollywood is considering using chatbots to write scripts and if inspired dissertations are already being drafted by ChatGPT, the result is utterly void. The only thingAI can do is ingest what has already happened and regurgitate it as formula, as undead forms that refuse to disappear. In this sense, Generative AI is the perfect realization of capital’s necromanticdream: culture that consumes itself endlessly, resurrecting the past while preventing the emergence of the new.

It follows that debates about AI’s “intelligence” or “consciousness” are absurd. The fact that we recognize our own reflectionin AI says more about us than it does about it. The ability of AI-generated self-help books or young adult fiction to selldoes not mean that AI writes ‘like a human’ – it means that, for decades, many humans have been writing, reading, and thinking like machines.

Thus, when we speak of AI’s (present or future, actual or virtual) “consciousness,” this tells us nothing about the algorithm’s“intelligence”, but insteadreveals how much we have mechanized our thinking, how much we have distancedourselves from our own bodies, our own experiences, andour own creative capacities, to the point that we now see our image reflected in binary code.

The moment we disconnect consciousness from the emergence of the new is the moment we surrender to the sterile timelessness of capitalist non-sense.

_____________

Haris Kalaitzidis

References

Fisher, M. (2014a). Ghosts of my life: Writings on depression, hauntology and lost futures. Zer0 Books.

Fisher, M. (2014b, January 5). Going overground. k-punk. https://k-punk.org/going-overground/

Fisher, M. (2009, April 15). Running on empty: The lack of innovation in pop music suggests that we are experiencing an energy crisis in culture. New Statesman. https://www.newstatesman.com/long-reads/2009/04/culture-technology-energy-rave

[1] Fisher cites the example of HD televisions, where “we see the same old things, but brighter and glossier” (Fisher, 2009). In the 21^st century, we might consider how Hollywood uses CGI to make aging actors appear younger (e.g., Robert De Niro) or to resurrect them entirely (e.g., Carrie Fisher).

[2]If Fisher’s analysis has a limitation, this ishis tendency to overwhelmingly focus on neoliberalism without situating it within the broader tendencies of capitalism and the oscillation between the contractual and the authoritarian poles of the state. As a result, and even though Fisher insists that he is not proposing some nostalgic return to social democracy, his work—or, at least, many interpretations of it—struggles to shake the sense that things ‘were better back then’, and that the main problem in today’s world is neoliberalism. I suspect this was one of the reasons that led him to take up one unviablepolitical position after another: engaging with accelerationism and left cybernetics in his youth, becoming enamoured with Syriza, Podemos, and Corbyn later on, and attacking the “neo-anarchist” tendency of horizontalism and rejection of parliamentary politics.

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These panics aren’t new—my generation was accused of abandoning feminism in favor of Girls Gone Wild — but they do take on unique iterations as the political and cultural landscapes shift. And it’s valuable, I think, to keep redefining what we even mean by the term, to suss out where and what the stakes are, and to interrogate to whom we’re looking for answers. 

Too often, I see these questions addressed in silos. Most of the takes I reference above come from culture writers who have a strong handle on policy, or from policy/politics people who have a decent handle on culture. The radical Lefties are tweeting or zine-ing or Signal-ing their ideas, and often get left out of the larger feminist conversation. The academics are doing their obscure thing in journals that less than a dozen people will read. I consider myself to be adept in three of these realms – the academic, the radical, and the cultural, with a begrudgingly decent handle on what’s going on in mainstream politics. And since I teach Feminist Studies, I am thinking about these questions constantly, from a variety of angles. 

I don’t have answers, but I do have thoughts. And the first is that, of course, feminism is not a monolith. Hand-wringing essays about the state of feminism first need to clarify which tendency of feminist thought, movement, or identity they mean. 

When I teach Feminist Studies, we spend 15 weeks with writers who mostly disagree with each other, other than on the fact that sex and gender are positionalities that deserve attention. We go through an overview of the “waves”: the first wave feminism was about Voting Rights for women, and this was parallel to the fight against slavery (some suffragettes were also abolitionists; many were not). Second wave feminism covers a lot of disparate views from roughly the 1960s-1980s, and involved attention to women and work (middle-class white women wanted access to the white-collar workforce, women of color were like, ‘hey we’ve been working in your homes, we have different demands when it comes to work!’). The second wave also coincided with the Black Power, anti-Vietnam War, and gay liberation movements; some feminists overlapped in these circles, many did not. It is in this period, beginning roughly in the late 1970s, when the Sex Wars began—this is the name given to the debates that split feminists on questions of pornography, kink, sex work, and other sexual practices. Third wave feminism also contained many different facets: on one end there was the (largely, though not exclusively white) riot grrrrl movement of radical punks fighting rape culture through zines and sex positivity, as well as more radical ideas surrounding transformative justice emerging from women of color organizing in anti-racist spaces; on the other end there was the beginning seeds of Girl Boss Feminism, and generally attention to “choice” and “empowerment” (e.g. Sex and the City, Ally McBeal, Girls Gone Wild, etc.).

Fourth wave is often described as “third wave, but on the internet,” and also with more attention to intersectionality. We are, arguably, in a fifth wave, which is an extension of the fourth wave, but in a post-Trump, post-#MeToo, post-George Floyd, pandemic world. (Importantly: I always begin my feminist waves lesson by naming that thinking and culture-building around sex and gender existed pre-colonization in more expansive ways, and that the waves are a decidedly Western, academic snapshot of gender and sexual liberation.) 

It is extremely important to reiterate that most versions of feminism that we have today do not have actually radical aims, even if the people involved are discursively critical of systems like capitalism and white supremacy. It is unsurprising to me how quickly and easily feminism has been co-opted because it’s not inherently interested in interrogating the root causes of systems of domination, especially if we continue to place its origin in a voting movement that occurred in the midst of chattel slavery and not long after violent colonial displacement. In addition, a lot of people think feminism is whatever ‘feminist nonprofits’ are up to, and nonprofits are counter-revolutionary forces that inevitably squash structural change. 

Columnist Michelle Goldberg — decidedly a liberal, but also someone informed about radical feminist movement history — names something true: “much of feminism right now fits into two broad categories: discourse and NGOs,” she writes. In an interview with Ezra Klein, she bemoans, to her credit, that if someone asked where they could go to get involved with feminist organizing, she’d tell them to write a check to NARAL. In that same interview, Klein asks her what else, other than reproductive justice, does ‘feminism’ (even if it is only a label) care about? Goldberg goes on to talk about thinking more expansively about reproductive justice — from domestic workers issues to SNAP benefits, and also talks about the relationship between feminism and trans justice. 

But historically and contemporarily there are feminist movements that (or at least feminist thinkers who) are committed to radical liberation. Angela Davis and Elaine Brown insisted on bringing feminist analysis to the Black Power movement; the Combahee River Collective did the same in their socialist organizations. Women, trans and queer people have always been a part of anti-capitalist and anti-state organizing—and women, trans, and queer people (especially of color) have always been harmed by capitalism and the state — and it is their lived experiences that give us a feminism with teeth. The Black, Brown, and Indigenous feminists, anarcha-feminists, and Marxist feminists are still doing feminist work today, but it is often in movement spaces that aren’t seen as explicitly feminist (like Marxist, anarchist, or Indigenous organizations). Or, they are not ‘organizing’ in a coherent way, and are instead practicing survival in a way that Saidiya Hartman describes as “waywardness.”  

So there is the feminism of the NYT and NPR policy analysts who focus on #MeToo, Roe and Dobbs, representational politics in media government, “transgender issues”; there is the feminism of the radical Leftists who are invested, from different angles, in similar things (fighting rape culture, ensuring safe abortions for everyone, abolishing the government and cultivating community skills in people of all genders, fighting for gender liberation beyond the binary, and, I would add: attention to sex work and sexual liberation, though there are very disparate views on what liberated sexuality means). In this more ‘political’ sense of things, there are wins and losses and a lack of clarity on who is doing what for what ends. 

And then there is the terrain of culture, which is what Marxist scholar and organizer Stuart Hall argued was a worthwhile “site of struggle.” Culture—a nebulous concept, but what I’ll limit here to popular culture in the form of movies, TV, internet, and, as Goldberg shorthands, ‘discourse’ — is before and after and in between what happens in the streets, in organizing spaces, and in government meetings. 

And so it is worth considering: what does girl culture have to do with feminism and, for those of us invested in it, with liberation? Should we take ‘girl dinner’ and Barbie as seriously as we take Roe and MeToo? I think, if nothing else, we should consider how they are in conversation, without falling into binary panic/defense modes. 

In one of my favorite responses to the Cristo piece — the one cited above which spends the bulk of its argument on the idea that girly culture signals the desire of women to exist in a time “before feminism”— Claire Fallon and Emma Gray write: 

“While in theory girlhood precedes the adult concerns of feminism, in reality, these concerns often intrude into the lives of girls, many of whom must negotiate sex and sexual identity, enter and navigate the workforce, access abortion care, and deal with misogyny that limits their lives from the moment of their birth. Many of us began to work out our own feminist politics as children, and associate the aesthetics of girlhood strongly with our first forays into questioning the patriarchal structures around us. Girlhood offers certain comfortable, universal markers, but not all girls are the same, even if they’re wearing the same color and going to the same concert. One girl may live in near-total political ignorance; another may develop a sharp socialist feminist critique of the world she is growing up in; yet another may go down a reactionary path.” 

These particularities are key to how we continue to move forward with building movements, political theory, and engaging with the various tangles of the discursive. How do we grapple with cultural forces that may encourage problematic consumption habits while also acknowledging that fashion, music, movies, and other products we engage for pleasure don’t necessarily imply that we are dupes of patriarchy and capitalism? 

Some of the most righteously dedicated anti-capitalist, anti-state activists I know are girly, bimbo-leaning sex workers. A young woman who runs a popular Taylor Swift fan account was imprisoned for refusing to join the Israeli military. Queer femmes have long been wearing floofy dresses to the riot. The idea that “girliness” precludes a commitment to liberation is a view that is not only narrow about gender, but also about justice. A popular feminist writer, for example, called for the stigmatization of glitter (with important evidence that it’s very bad for the planet), saying that the ultimate goal would be federal legislation, and urged us to call our state reps. What limited imagination it shows to anchor our ire in cultural pleasures and to reify that the state—an entity that enacts violence on people at home and abroad everyday— is our best solution. I am not saying we shouldn’t interrogate our consumption habits — we absolutely should, and I was actually convinced to never consider a glitter purchase again — but I am invested in a much more expansive political project than attacking expressions of femininity and bolstering legislative representatives. 

I learned cultural criticism via British Cultural Studies, in which people like Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams turned to media, subculture, and popular culture to wrestle with what it meant for radical change. These folks celebrate the possibility of resistant media— even if it was at risk of cooptation, they argued it was still evidence of counter-hegemony. Which is to say, they believed that consumers had agency — “there are no masses, only ways of seeing masses,” said Williams— who could live with contradiction (feminists reading romance novels was an early articulated example of this) and still be, for example, down for revolution. In contrast, the Frankfurt School, led by theorists like Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, insisted that popular culture was a propagandistic distraction from revolutionary struggle. In short, as Douglas Kellner explains, “British cultural studies would valorize resistant moments in media culture and audience interpretations and use of media artifacts, while the Frankfurt school tended, with some exceptions, to see mass culture as a homogeneous and potent form of ideological domination.” 

I have always been a cheerleader for a BCS approach to culture, probably because I was raised on movies and television, and my love of media has not kept me from spending the last 20 years in anarchist and other radical organizing spaces. Similarly, my relationship to girliness has really only strengthened my commitment to radical politics. I wrote a whole book about how my femme gender is completely intertwined with my working-class upbringing, and so then also my commitment to anti-capitalism. When I giggle at ‘girl dinner’ memes, or feel influenced by bow trends I am, maybe, treading close to the edge of ironic misogyny and toxic consumerism. But I am also having fun. And then I am switching over to the Signal thread to strategize with my comrades about how to ensure we protect our space from nazis. 

So where does this leave us with feminism? I think Cristo is right that “feminism is a bit adrift,” and that, as she notes: 

“It doesn’t help that the major touchstones of the past several years — MeToo, Donald Trump, COVID, Dobbs — are fucking miserable, and the cultural objects that accompanied them have tended to be correspondingly somber or pedantic. We’ve seen an explosion of rape-revenge plots, and cynical, emaciated protagonists dissociating through their lives.” 

Indeed, the cultural tone of ‘feminist’ media has been, for many years, dour— the most buzzy films of the past few years that focused on women’s lives included the dismal Promising Young Woman, Women Talking, She Said, and on television, Euphoria. But for Cristo, the turn to levity and ‘girlishness’ in this year’s buzzy media like Barbie—and I’d add Bottoms, and Poor Things—is a problem. She insists the turn to girlhood is “an opting out.” Instead, it seems, she’s arguing for serious grown-up feminists to stay the course with the miserable, in every facet of our lives. 

Can we unpack the cultural phenomena that, on their surface, appear to be an opting out — from bows to Barbie, from Taylor to tradwives — and discern what is legitimately reactionary, and wrestle with the stakes from there? And rather than determining the stakes from a liberal concern about what it means for the next election, the kind of feminism I care about can be a tool to reflect on what it might mean for more radical visions of the future. 

I don’t know how much value there is in feminism as a coherent movement anymore—not when so many marginalized genders feel isolated from the focus on ‘women’ (see TERFs), not when so much of the thinking is funneled through nonprofits who treat their feminist workers like garbage, not when it remains overwhelmingly white, not when it often does more to harm than help sex workers (see SWERFs), not when it too often colludes with the state rather than envisioning ways of being outside and against it. But we also can’t deny attention to the ways in which capitalism and white supremacy interact uniquely with sex, sexuality, and gender. 

I’d like to turn to another artifact of culture as a potential offering. In Shiva Baby, the debut film from Emma Seligman, the queer Zoomer who went on to bring us Bottoms, Danielle (Rachel Sennott) reminds us, hilariously and perfectly, what feminism really is and ought to be. In a very common ‘what kind of job are you going to get with a feminist studies degree’ conversation, Danielle responds stressfully:

It’s a lens! Patriarchy shapes our lives as foundationally as capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy, but it has been too easy for feminist movements to turn gender into an additive identity rather than an affront to power systems. 

There’s been a lot of pushback against nuance lately, and for important reason: there is no need for nuance in genocide. But that’s not a good blanket strategy for wrestling with the complexity of most of our contemporary ills. Which is not to say taking a clear stance against capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy is in need of nuance, but that addressing the unique particularities of how harm impacts us in distinct ways — based on gender, sexuality, geographic location, and so on — would benefit from an analytical framework. For me, that means looking to theorists—the formal kind and the organic kind— who articulate ways of seeing the world with attention to power and oppression at the intersection (or even more helpfully, the assemblage) of gender, race, class, and so on. I value a feminist lens, but importantly a feminist lens that is also always-already anti-capitalist, anti-state, and anti-white supremacy. And then I consider what that lens can offer to whatever unique situation I’m unpacking in its very particular context. 

My hope for feminism is that it can be a tool like this, a lens we can use to assess harm, and, an aid to the plurality of overlapping revolutionary struggles—as well as a tool for survival and care in everyday life. And a part of this care, this process of reclamation, certainly needs to involve a revisitation and transformation of the period in our lives when we first learned about the deadly reality of patriarchy: girlhood.

_________

Raechel Anne Jolie (she/they) is a writer and educator based in Cleveland, Ohio. She holds a PhD in Critical Media Studies, with a minor in Feminist & Critical Sexuality Studies from the University of Minnestoa. Her writing has appeared in The Baffler, Bitch, Teen Vogue, In These Times, among other publications. Rust Belt Femme is their first memoir and received recognition in NPR’s Favorite Books of 2020, was a finalist in the Heartland Bookseller’s Award, and was the winner of the Independent Publisher Book Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction.

SOURCE: radical love letters

https://raechelannejolie.substack.com/p/girl-culture-panic-and-the-failures

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________________

AK Press (AKP): Let’s start by having you explain the title of the book, Premonitions. You’ve chosen it in relation to the titles of the two classic collections of Walter Benjamin’s essays, Illuminations and Reflections. How do you see your work in relation to Benjamin’s and what analytical premises are implied by “premonitions”?

AK Thompson (AKT): Walter Benjamin’s contributions have always struck me as being a powerful corrective to those Marxisms that were more narrowly focused on political economy. In Capital, Marx showed us how getting below the level of bourgeois commonsense, which takes the market to be self-evident, made it possible to uncover the “hidden abode” of production where capitalism’s truth was revealed. Benjamin went one further by proposing that this “hidden abode” could be found everywhere. He showed that it was possible to describe capitalism by teasing out the tensions that shot through its culture. In this way, he sought to “grasp an economic process as perceptible.”

Early in his intellectual career, Benjamin observed that the German Romantics had viewed criticism less as an act of disavowal than as one of completion. Although our experience of the world was one of discontinuous fragments, it was possible – through reflection – to reveal these fragments’ “absolute” character. The implication is that the work of analysis can start from anywhere. If you know how to look for it, even the “hidden abode” can be found reflected in the culture. Sometimes, however, we encounter events, experiences, and images that are especially revelatory. The shock of recognition prompts us to reevaluate the world and the struggles that define it. In his essay on surrealism (1929), Benjamin described these experiences as ones of “profane illumination.”

Given the central role that illumination and reflection played in his thought, it was felicitous that these concepts were given as titles to the volumes that made Benjamin a familiar name in the English-speaking world. In assembling my own collection, I felt obliged to signal my debt by following suit. Premonitions are similar to illuminations and reflections in that, as forms of extrapolative reasoning, they reveal how a thing or event can be made to alert us to the broader social process from which it derives. The major difference is that, whereas Benjamin’s concepts placed emphasis on the resolution of accumulated tensions, “premonitions” direct our attention toward the future that will obtain should present dynamics be left undisturbed.

Because of his misgivings with “progress,” which he took to be both a central conceit of capitalist culture and an idea that had blunted class hatred among social democrats, Benjamin urged movements to turn their back on the future and focus more on “the image of enslaved ancestors … than that of happy grandchildren.” Even so, his work discloses a strong premonitory orientation. The concluding line to “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century” (1935), for instance, recounts how “in the convulsions of the commodity economy we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.”

This is seductive, but we must resist the temptation to view ruins – even capitalist ruins – as somehow signaling redemption. Premonitory thinking reveals that capitalist ruins point just as logically to barbarism as they do to emancipation. For this reason, premonitions eject us from the continuum of history and deposit us before the moment of decision demanded by politics.

AKP: A crucial premise of the book – building, again, upon Benjamin – is that one can find, through a deep analysis of any particular element of a culture, a microcosm or reflection of (among other things) its social and economic relations. The general contained within the particular. You see one clear antecedent in Marx’s famous examination of the commodity at the beginning of Capital, and also in Henri Lefebvre’s claim that, through an analysis of a small event, one might grasp “the sum total of capitalist society, the nation and its history.” Could you elaborate on how this idea works throughout your book, and maybe give an example?

AKT: For me, revolutionary politics really begins with the realization that everything is about everything. Because we recognize that incremental tinkering will never change the system, we demand a total revolution in all areas of social life; but what does that mean? How do we get a hold of the whole? As an object of analysis, and much more so as one of intervention, “society” is pretty cumbersome. For this reason, it becomes necessary to grasp it through its fragmentary expression. In the end, Benjamin maintained that this method could reveal “in the lifework, the era; and in the era the entire course of history.”

I first began experimenting with this method in Black Bloc, White Riot, where what had seemed like a series of finite debates regarding tactics ended by disclosing a much broader set of concerns regarding the meaning of politics as such. The same idea is at work in Keywords for Radicals, where the dynamics of late capitalism are discovered through the contests over word usage and meaning that arise within radical scenes. In Premonitions, this method is directed primarily toward the cultural artifacts that emerge from radical movements.

This emphasis arose in part from my desire to understand the bond that sometimes develops between activists and particular movement-based artists. I recall, for instance, being struck by the nearly reverential use of images by Eric Drooker in the propaganda of the global justice era. What could this affinity tell us about the struggle? As an object of analysis, the work of art can be grasped more easily than “the movement.” By considering the bases of its resonance, it becomes possible to detect movement dynamics that might otherwise remain invisible.

Let me give you an example. The following image was used by the Direct Action Network to promote actions against the IMF and World Bank in DC on April 16, 2000.

For those with a background in art history, Drooker’s citation of Goya’s Massacre of the Third of May is fairly clear. Overlapping this citation, however, is a more oblique reference to Joshua’s assault on Jericho. The Goya reference is accusatory but foregrounds defeat; the Joshua reference testifies to the power of faith. By collapsing them into a single image, Drooker suggests how the movement, through faith, might triumph over the massacre that seems immanent to the confrontation they’ve initiated. It’s a seductive proposition, and it’s easy to see why it resonated with a political generation rediscovering the promise and perils of direct action.

It’s important to recall, however, that most activists are not art historians. For this reason, the image’s appeal must arise from something other than the conscious recognition of its animating citations. Why did nineteenth-century Romantic motifs resonate so strongly with a movement that took “Another World Is Possible” to be its profession of faith? In the end, my analysis suggested that the movement was stuck in an unconscious repetition of the dynamics that had plagued its predecessor. It reiterated the ambivalence of Romanticism’s anti-capitalism, which tended to function as a kind of loyal opposition within the horizon of bourgeois thought. Assembling this constellation gave me a better grasp on the movement’s shortcomings, and it helped me to envision concrete strategies for moving forward.

AKP: Such an analysis reminds me of another thing I liked about your book. Because you encourage it in your Introduction, I often found myself reading the word “analysis” in its Freudian sense. Throughout the book you use terms like neurosis, drives, wish images, repression, and trauma. It’s as if you put the whole culture on the analyst’s couch. Can you talk a little about how psychoanalysis fits into your framework?

AKT: Benjamin drew on psychoanalytic insights without feeling terribly beholden to the tradition, which was still very much in formation at the time. He was hostile to Jung for his reliance on archetypes, but his thinking often ran parallel to that of Freud who, especially in later works like The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and its Discontents, had become preoccupied with broader social and historical concerns. As an intellectual tradition, psychoanalysis is torn between radical and conservative poles. Freud’s unsparing critique of bourgeois morals coexists with the reality principle’s implicit demand for accommodation. Similarly, one can detect a tension between the tradition’s analytic dimension (which tends to unsettle normative presumptions regarding social dynamics) and its therapeutic one (which emphasizes work at the level of the individual psyche).

My own use of psychoanalytic concepts is largely in keeping with Benjamin’s, and with that of the Frankfurt School more generally. Benjamin’s main contention was that people collectively (and not solely as individuals) are driven by a search for resolution that leads both to wishful thinking and to historical recollection – though the latter most often gets refracted through myth. As with Freud, who thought that dreams arose from our practical inability to obtain a desired object (or even to acknowledge our desire for it), Benjamin perceived material culture to be a kind of ongoing dream work in which the social desire for absolution found expression in distorted form.

The task therefore becomes one of bringing the desires that animate existing forms into consciousness so that the struggle can begin to find its concrete referent. For Marx (and Benjamin was fond of this quote), “our motto must be: reform of consciousness not through dogma, but by analyzing the mystical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself… It will then become clear that the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it only has to be conscious in order to possess it in reality… It is not a question of drawing a great mental dividing line between past and future, but of realizing the thoughts [desires] of the past.”

AKP: How about Romanticism, which is a much more explicit thread that runs through the essays? How does it help us understand where we are politically, or equip us for the struggles ahead?

AKT: Ever since their mutual inception at the end of the eighteenth century, social movements and Romanticism have been difficult to disentangle. Both traditions emerged in relation to the bourgeois revolutions of that time, and both flourished within the public sphere. From its hatred of dark satanic mills to its celebration of the heart that watches and receives, Romanticism generated an impressive catalogue of wish images that continue to resonate today. But Romanticism’s anti-capitalism was always ambivalent. Not only did it tend to fall into the role of loyal opposition by siding with the “ought” of bourgeois idealism, which (despite standing in opposition to the “is” of capitalism’s dominant empiricism) could never attain a synthesis of the kind called for by Marx in his Theses on Feuerbach, it also swung pendulously between the utopian and the imperious. Many scholars have identified a Romantic kernel at the heart of fascism.

Given these dynamics, I think the challenge for anarchists and communists today is to acknowledge Romanticism’s enduring resonance as a mode of anti-capitalist critique while recognizing that (in and of itself) this critique is not enough and that (when left unchecked) the desires it unleashes can be dangerous and unpredictable.

AKP: Having published a number of books on fascism in recent years, I couldn’t help but notice how certain Benjamin-inflected phrases call to mind contemporary definitions of fascism. For instance, you say that Benjamin “proposed that resonant images enabled people to anticipate the future by recalling traces of a mythical past whose promise had yet to be fulfilled” or, to consider a simpler take, “the present dreams the future by way of a detour through the mythic past.” This seems almost perfectly to describe what drives fascism, so how do you respond to its recent resurgence?

AKT: Benjamin was keenly aware of both fascism and its allure. In his famous “work of art” essay (1936), he began by dispensing with notions of genius and creativity, which he claimed led to a “processing of data in the Fascist [and, we might add, Romantic] sense.” Instead, he sought to focus on the contradictions inherent in the developmental tendencies of art as expressed under definite conditions. These tendencies were contradictory, and he took those contradictions and their manifest form in the culture to be reflective of contradictions in the base. For this reason, Benjamin urged us to read his theses not merely as descriptions but as weapons in the struggle against fascism. This struggle, he maintained, would proceed through the politicization of aesthetics, which he contrasted to fascism’s aestheticization of politics and the cult of death to which it gave birth.

But while fascism has actively exploited wish images, they are by no means unique in sensing their allure. Indeed, it is precisely because wish images are so pervasive that fascism is capable of gaining ground. Because a mythic resolution is always easier to attain than a profane, material one, fascism can provide pathways to fulfillment that are for the most part unavailable to communists, anarchists, and those we would seek to recruit. Since this is the case, it might seem prudent to disavow wish images and focus instead on concrete conditions and concrete demands. I’m sympathetic to this conclusion; however, I think it’s dangerous to cede the field.

Wish images give form to the longing for resolution, but they do so in a refracted, mythical way. Following Benjamin (and echoing Marx), I believe our aim must therefore be to make the animating desire clear to itself so that it can be decoupled from the inadequacy of its posited resolution. From there, this same desire might find fulfillment through the profane demands of revolutionary politics. Left to their own devices, wish images are just as likely to fall into fascism’s orbit as they are to yield radical anti-capitalist conclusions. In contrast, when we commit to prying the animating desire from its wish-image cathexis, the effect can be like splitting the atom.

Concretely speaking, I think this means that communists and anarchists need to get better at developing modes of critique that don’t estrange us from the desires that animate mainstream culture. I understand the subcultural reflex, but the solace it affords must be measured against the social disconnect that arises when the critique is understood (correctly, I think) as a repudiation – rather than a suggestion regarding the realization – of the wish. Such repudiations leave people more open to fascism, which tends to affirm ordinary desires (e.g. for security) before binding them to dangerous, mythic resolutions.

I also think we need to get better at describing what a resolution to the historical accumulation of unrealized desires might look like in concrete terms. The challenge is that, while fascists can point to mythic futures and mythic pasts, the only things that communists and anarchists can responsibly point to are the tasks that accumulate whenever a decision is made. Still, people are more likely to assume such responsibilities when the desire that drives them has been affirmed and when the posited resolution seems more compelling than the myth to which it had previously adhered. •

First published on the AK Press website.

The post Premonitions: Fragments of a Culture of Revolt- an interview with AK Thompson appeared first on Void Network.

If the history of British rule in India were to be condensed to a single fact, it is this: there was no increase in India’s per-capita income from 1757 to 1947.[1]

Churchill, explaining why he defended the stockpiling of food within Britain, while millions died of starvation in Bengal, told his private secretary that “the Hindus were a foul race, protected by their mere pullulation from the doom that is their due.”[2]

During its 190 years of looting and pillaging, the Indian Subcontininent as a whole underwent at least two dozen major famines, which collectively killed millions of Indians throughout the length and breadth of the land. How many millions succumbed to the famines cannot be fully ascertained. However, colonial rulers’ official numbers indicate it could be 60 million deaths. In reality, it could be significantly higher.

British colonial analysts cited droughts as the cause of fallen agricultural production that led to these famines, but that is a lie. British rulers, fighting wars in Europe and elsewhere, and colonizing parts of Africa, were exporting grains from India to keep up their colonial conquests—while famines were raging. People in the famineaffected areas, resembling skeletons covered by skin only, were wandering around, huddling in corners and dying by the millions. The Satanic nature of these British rulers cannot be overstated.

A Systematic Depopulation Policy
Although no accurate census figure is available, in the year 1750 India’s population was close to 155 million. At the time British colonial rule ended in 1947, undivided India’s population reached close to 390 million. In other words, during these 190 years of colonial looting and organized famines, India’s population rose by 240 million. Since 1947, during the next 68-year period, Indian Subcontininent’s population, including those of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, has grown to close to 1.6 billion. Thus, despite poverty and economic depravity in the post-independent Indian Subcontininent, during those 68 years population has grown by almost 1.2 billion.

Records show that during the post-independence period, the Subcontininent has undergone drought conditions in parts of the land from time to time, but there was no famine, although thousands still die in the Subcontininent annually due to the lack of adequate amount of food, a poor food distribution system, and lack of sufficient nourishment. It is also to be noted that before the British colonials’ jackboots got firmly planted in India, famines had occurred but with much less frequency—maybe once in a century.

There was indeed no reason for these famines to occur They occurred only because The Empire engineered them, intending to strengthen the Empire by ruthless looting and adoption of an unstated policy to depopulate India. This, they believed would bring down the Empire’s cost of sustaining India.

Take, for instance, the case of Bengal, which is in the eastern part of the Subcontininent where the British East India Company (HEIC, Honorable East India Company, according to Elizabeth I’s charter) had first planted its jackboots in 1757. The rapacious looters, under the leadership of Robert Clive—a degenerate and opium addict, who blew his brains out in 1774 in the London Berkley Square residence he had procured with the benefits of his looting—got control of what is now West Bengal, Bangladesh, Bihar, and Odisha (earlier, Orissa), in 1765. At the time, historical records indicate India represented close to 25% of the world’s GDP, second only to China, while Britain had a paltry 2%. Bengal was the richest of the Indian provinces.

Following his securing control of Bengal by ousting the Nawab in a devious battle at Plassey (Palashi), Clive placed a puppet on the throne, paid him off, and negotiated an agreement with him for the HEIC to become the sole tax collector, while leaving the nominal responsibility for government to his puppet. That arrangement lasted for a century, as more and more Indian states were bankrupted to facilitate future famines. The tax money went into British coffers, while millions were starved to death in Bengal and Bihar.

Clive, who was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1768 and whose statue stands near the British Empire’s evil center, Whitehall, near the Cabinet War Room, had this to say in his defense when the British Parliament, playing “fair,” accused him of looting and other abuses in India:

Consider the situation which the Victory of Plassey had placed on me. A great Prince was dependent upon my pleasure; an opulent city lay at my mercy; its richest bankers bid against each other for my smiles; I walked through vaults which were thrown open to me alone, piled on either hand with gold and jewels! By God, Mr. Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation.

However, Clive was not the only murderous British colonial ruler. The British Empire had sent one butcher after another to India, all of whom engineered looting and its consequent depopulation.

By 1770, when the first great famine occurred in Bengal, the province had been looted to the core. What followed was sheer horror. Here is how John Fiske in his American Philosopher in the Unseen World depicted the Bengal famine:

All through the stifling summer of 1770 the people went on dying. The husbandmen sold their cattle; they sold their implements of agriculture; they devoured their seed-grain; they sold their sons and daughters, till at length no buyer of children could be found; they ate the leaves of trees and the grass of the field. . . . The streets were blocked up with promiscuous heaps of the dying and dead. Interment could not do its work quick enough; even the dogs and jackals, the public scavengers of the East, became unable to accomplish their revolting work, and the multitude of mangled and festering corpses at length threatened the existence of the citizens…. [3]

Was there any reason for the famine to occur? Not if the British had not wanted it. Bengal, then, as now, harvested three crops a year. It is located in the delta of the Gangetic plain where water is more than plentiful. Even if drought occurs, it does not destroy all three crops. Moreover, as was prevalent during the Moghul days, and in earlier time, the surplus grain was stored to tide the population over if there were one or two bad crops.

But the looting of grains carried out by Clive, and his gang of bandits and killers, drained grain from Bengal and resulted in 10 million deaths in the great famine, eliminating one-third of Bengal’s population.

It should be noted that Britain’s much-touted industrial revolution began in 1770, the very same year people were dying all over Bengal. The Boston Tea Party that triggered the American Revolution had taken place in 1773. The Boston Tea Party made the Empire realize that its days in America were numbered, and led Britain to concentrate even more on organizing the looting of India.

Why Famines Became So Prevalent During the British Raj Days
The prime reason why these devastating famines took place at a regular intervals, and were allowed to continue for years, was the British Empire’s policy of depopulating its colonies. If these famines had not occurred, India’s population would have reached a billion people long before the Twentieth Century arrived. That, the British Empire saw as a disaster.

To begin with, a larger Indian population would mean larger consumption by the locals, and deprive the British Raj to a greater amount of loot. The logical way to deal with the problem was to develop India’s agricultural infrastructure. But that would not only force Britain to spend more money to run its colonial and bestial empire; it would also develop a healthy population which could rise up to get rid of the abomination called the British Raj. These massive famines also succeeded in weakening the social structure and backbone of the Indians, making rebellions against the colonial forces less likely. In order to perpetuate famines, and thus depopulate the “heathen” and “dark” Indians, the British imperialists launched a systematic propaganda campaign. They propped up the fraudster Parson Thomas Malthus and promoted his non-scientific gobbledygook, “The Essay on Population.” There he claimed:

This natural inequality of the two powers of population and of production in the earth, and that great law of our nature which must constantly keep their effects equal, form the great difficulty that to me appears insurmountable in the way to the perfectibility of society. All other arguments are of slight and subordinate consideration in comparison of this. I see no way by which man can escape from the weight of this law which pervades all animated nature.

Although Malthus was ordained in the Anglican Church, British Empire made him a paid “economist” of the British East India Company, which, with the charter from Queen Elizabeth I under its belt, monopolized trade in Asia, colonizing vast tracts of the continent using its well-armed militia fighting under the English flag of St. George.

Malthus was picked up at the Haileybury and Imperial Service College, which was also the recruiting ground of some of the worst colonial criminals. This college was where the makers of British Empire’s murderous policies in India were trained. Some prominent alumni of Haileybury include Sir John Lawrence (Viceroy of India from 1864-68) and Sir Richard Temple (Lt. Governor of Bengal and later, Governor of Bombay presidency).

While Parson Malthus was putting forward his sinister “scientific theory” to justify depopulation as a natural and necessary process, The British Empire collected a whole bunch of other “economists” who wrote about the necessity of free trade. Free trade played a major role in pushing through the Empire’s genocidal depopulation of India, through the British Raj’s efforts. In fact, free trade is the other side of the Malthus’ population-control coin.

By the time the great famine of 1876 arrived, Britain had already built some railroads in India. The railroads, which were touted as institutional safeguards against famines, were instead used by merchants to ship grain inventories from outlying drought-stricken districts to central depots for hoarding. In addition, free traders’ opposition to price control ushered in a frenzy of grain speculation. As a result, capital was raised to import grains from drought-stricken areas, and further the calamity. The rise of price of grain was spectacularly rapid, and grain was taken from where it was most needed, to be stored in warehouses until the prices rose even higher.

The British Raj knew or should have known. Even if the British rulers did not openly encourage this process, they were fully aware of it, and they were perfectly comfortable in promoting free trade at the expense of millions of lives. This is how Mike Davis described what happened:

The rise [of prices] was so extraordinary, and the available supply, as compared with well-known requirements, so scanty that merchants and dealers, hopeful of enormous future gains, appeared determined to hold their stocks for some indefinite time and not to part with the article which was becoming of such unwonted value. It was apparent to the Government that facilities for moving grain by the rail were rapidly raising prices everywhere, and that the activity of apparent importation and railway transit, did not indicate any addition to the food stocks of the Presidency . …retail trade up-country was almost at a standstill. Either prices were asked which were beyond the means of the multitude to pay, or shops remained entirely closed.

At the time, Lord Lytton, a favorite poet of Queen Victoria who is known as a “butcher” to many Indians, was the Viceroy. He wholeheartedly opposed all efforts to stockpile grain to feed the famine-stricken population because that would interfere with market forces. In the autumn of 1876, while the monsoon crop was withering in the fields of southern India, Lytton was absorbed in organizing the immense Imperial Assemblage in Delhi to proclaim Victoria Empress of India.

How did Lytton justify this? He was an avowed admirer and follower of Adam Smith. Author Mike Davis writes that Smith

a century earlier in The Wealth of Nations had asserted (vis-à-vis the terrible Bengal droughtfamine of 1770) that famine has never arisen from any other cause but the violence of government attempting, by improper means, to remedy the inconvenience of dearth, Lytton was implementing what Smith had taught him and other believers of free trade. Smith’s injunction against state attempts to regulate the price of grain during the 1770 famine had been taught for years in the East India Company’s famous college at Haileybury.[4]

Lytton issued strict orders that “there is to be no interference of any kind on the part of Government with the object of reducing the price of food,” and “in his letters home to the India Office and to politicians of both parties, he denounced ‘humanitarian hysterics’.” By official diktat, India, like Ireland before it, had become a Utilitarian laboratory where millions of lives were gambled, pursuant to dogmatic faith in omnipotent markets overcoming the “inconvenience of dearth.”[5]

The Great Famines
Depicting the two dozen famines that killed more than 60 million Indians would require a lot of space, so I limit myself here to those that killed more than one million:

The Bengal Famine of 1770: This catastrophicfamine occurred between 1769 and 1773, and affected the lower Gangetic plain of India. The territory, then ruled by the British East India Company, included modern West Bengal, Bangladesh, and parts of Assam, Orissa, Bihar, and Jharkhand. The famine is supposed to have caused the deaths of an estimated 10 million people, approximately one-third of the population at the time.

The Chalisa Famine of 1783-84: The Chalisa famine affected many parts of North India, especially the Delhi territories, present-day Uttar Pradesh, Eastern Punjab, Rajputana (now named, Rajasthan), and Kashmir, then all ruled by different Indian rulers. The Chalisa was preceded by a famine in the previous year, 1782-83, in South India, including Madras City (now named Chennai) and surrounding areas (under British East India Company rule), and in the extended Kingdom of Mysore. Together, these two famines had taken at least 11 million lives, reports indicate.

The Doji Bara Famine (or Skull Famine) of 1791- 92: This famine caused widespread mortality in Hyderabad, Southern Maratha Kingdom, Deccan, Gujarat, and Marwar (also called Jodhpur region in Rajasthan). The British policy of diverting food to Europe, of pricing the remaining grain out of reach of native Indians, and adopting agriculture policy that destroyed food production, was responsible for this one. The British had surplus supplies of grain, which was not distributed to the very people that had grown it. As a result, about 11 million died between 1789-92 of starvation and accompanying epidemics that followed.

The Upper Doab Famine of 1860-61: The 1860-61 famine occurred in the British-controlled Ganga-Yamuna Doab (two waters, or two rivers) area engulfing large parts of Rohilkhand and Ayodhya, and the Delhi and Hissar divisions of the then-Punjab. Eastern part of the princely state of Rajputana. According to “official” British reports, about two million people were killed by this famine.

The Orissa Famine of 1866: Although it affected Orissa the most, this famine affected India’s east coast along the Bay of Bengal stretching down south to Madras, covering a vast area. One million died, according to the British “official” version.

The Rajputana famine of 1869: The Rajputana famine of 1869 affected an area of close to 300,000 square miles which belonged mostly to the princely states and the British territory of Ajmer. This famine, according to “official” British claim, killed 1.5 million.

The Great Famine of 1876-78: This famine killed untold numbers of Indians in the southern part and raged for about four years. It affected Madras, Mysore, Hyderabad and Bombay (now called, Mumbai). The famine also subsequently visited Central Province (now called, Madhya Pradesh) and parts of undivided Punjab. The death toll from this famine was in the range of 5.5 million people. Some other figures indicate the number of deaths could be as high as 11 million.

Indian famine of 1896-97 and 1899-1900: This one affected Madras, Bombay, Deccan, Bengal, United Provinces (now called, Uttar Pradesh), Central Provinces, Northern and eastern Rajputana, parts of Central India, and Hyderabad: six million reportedly died in British territory during these two famines. The number of deaths occurred in the princely states is not known.

The Bengal Famine of 1943-44: This Churchill-orchestrated famine in Bengal in 1943-1944 killed an estimated 3.5 to 5 million people.

Relief Camps, or Concentration camps
There were several policy-arrows which Adolf Hitler might have borrowed from the British quiver to kill millions, but one that he borrowed for certain in setting up his death camps, was how the British ran the camps to provide “relief” to the starving millions. Anyone who entered these relief camps, did not exit alive.

Take the actions of Viceroy Lytton’s deputy, Richard Temple, another Haileybury product imbued with the doctrine of depopulation as the necessary means to keep the Empire strong and vigorous. Temple was under orders from Lytton to make sure there was no “unnecessary” expenditure on relief works.

According to some analysts, Temple’s camps were not very different from Nazi concentration camps. People already half-dead from starvation had to walk hundreds of miles to reach these relief camps. Additionally, he instituted a food ration for starving people working in the camps, which was less than that was given to the inmates of Nazi concentration camps.

The British refused to provide adequate relief for famine victims on the grounds that this would encourage indolence. Sir Richard Temple, who was selected to organize famine relief efforts in 1877, set the food allotment for starving Indians at 16 ounces of rice per day—less than the diet for inmates at the Buchenwald concentration camp for the Jews in Hitler’s Germany. British disinclination to respond with urgency and vigor to food deficits resulted in a succession of about two dozen appalling famines during the British occupation of India. These swept away tens of millions of people. The frequency of famine showed a disconcerting increase in the nineteenth century.[6]

It was deliberate then, and it’s deliberate now.

______________
1. Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World, London, Verso Books, 2001.

2. Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II, New York: Basic Books.

3. Davis, op. cit.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid

6. Bhatia, B.M., Famines in India, A Study in Some Aspects of the Economic History of India, 1860-1945, Asia Publishing House, Bombay, 1963.

Dr Ramtanu Maitra
A specialist on South Asian Affairs who operates out of Washington D.C. Ramtanu Maitra specialises on strategic and infrastructural developmental studies with the focus on South Asia.
He holds a Masters Degree in Structural Engineering and was working as a Senior Project Engineer with the Nuclear Power Services, Secaucus, NJ.
Ramtanu Maitra participated in developing a document, India: An agro-industrial superpower by 2020, in 1981.
He established and published a quarterly journal, Fusion Asia, on science, technology, energy and economics from New Delhi for more than 10 years (1984-1994).
He wrote and published the first feature report on India’s high-energy physics program based in PRL, Ahmedabad. Prepared and published a detailed report on Ganges River Valley Development that was presented at an international conference inaugurated by the late president of India, Shri K.R. Narayanan, then Minister for Planning.
He participated on behalf of Fusion Asia on a feasibility study that also involved the Mitsubishi Research Institute (Tokyo) and the Thai Citizen Forum. Presented papers at a number of international conferences on strategic infrastructures in Bogota, Colombia, Tokyo, Japan, Kolkata, Indore, Madurai, Indore, New Delhi, among other Indian cities.
In 1994, Shri Maitra established New Delhi bureau for Asia Times, a Bangkok-based news daily published simultaneously from Bangkok, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur and New York.
Presently, he conducts research, analysis, writing on international economic and strategic developments for publications internationally, including: Foresight (Japan); Aakrosh, Agni, Indian Defense and Technology (India); Asia Times Online (Hong Kong); and Executive Intelligence Review (USA).
http://www.sasfor.com/about.html Ramtanu Maitra is a regular columnist with the Executive Intelligence Review (EIR), a news weekly published from Washington DC. He writes columns for Asia Times of Hong Kong, Frontier Post of Peshawar and some other newspapers in Asia on South Asian political economy and Asian security. He has written on terrorism in a number of publications in the United States and India.

The post GENOCIDE, THE BRITISH DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT British Colonials Starved to Death 60 million-plus Indians, But, Why? by Ramtanu Maitra appeared first on Void Network.

Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements. So it is a major coup for the ruling elite to have created societal institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance to domination.
Young Americans—even more so than older Americans—appear to have acquiesced to the idea that the corporatocracy can completely screw them and that they are helpless to do anything about it. A 2010 Gallup poll asked Americans “Do you think the Social Security system will be able to pay you a benefit when you retire?” Among 18- to 34-years-olds, 76 percent of them said no. Yet despite their lack of confidence in the availability of Social Security for them, few have demanded it be shored up by more fairly payroll-taxing the wealthy; most appear resigned to having more money deducted from their paychecks for Social Security, even though they don’t believe it will be around to benefit them.
How exactly has American society subdued young Americans?

1. Student-Loan Debt. Large debt—and the fear it creates—is a pacifying force. There was no tuition at the City University of New York when I attended one of its colleges in the 1970s, a time when tuition at many U.S. public universities was so affordable that it was easy to get a B.A. and even a graduate degree without accruing any student-loan debt. While those days are gone in the United States, public universities continue to be free in the Arab world and are either free or with very low fees in many countries throughout the world. The millions of young Iranians who risked getting shot to protest their disputed 2009 presidential election, the millions of young Egyptians who risked their lives earlier this year to eliminate Mubarak, and the millions of young Americans who demonstrated against the Vietnam War all had in common the absence of pacifying huge student-loan debt.
Today in the United States, two-thirds of graduating seniors at four-year colleges have student-loan debt, including over 62 percent of public university graduates. While average undergraduate debt is close to $25,000, I increasingly talk to college graduates with closer to $100,000 in student-loan debt. During the time in one’s life when it should be easiest to resist authority because one does not yet have family responsibilities, many young people worry about the cost of bucking authority, losing their job, and being unable to pay an ever-increasing debt. In a vicious cycle, student debt has a subduing effect on activism, and political passivity makes it more likely that students will accept such debt as a natural part of life.

2. Psychopathologizing and Medicating Noncompliance. In 1955, Erich Fromm, the then widely respected anti-authoritarian leftist psychoanalyst, wrote, “Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man.” Fromm died in 1980, the same year that an increasingly authoritarian America elected Ronald Reagan president, and an increasingly authoritarian American Psychiatric Association added to their diagnostic bible (then the DSM-III) disruptive mental disorders for children and teenagers such as the increasingly popular “oppositional defiant disorder” (ODD). The official symptoms of ODD include “often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules,” “often argues with adults,” and “often deliberately does things to annoy other people.”
Many of America’s greatest activists including Saul Alinsky (1909–1972), the legendary organizer and author of Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals, would today certainly be diagnosed with ODD and other disruptive disorders. Recalling his childhood, Alinsky said, “I never thought of walking on the grass until I saw a sign saying ‘Keep off the grass.’ Then I would stomp all over it.” Heavily tranquilizing antipsychotic drugs (e.g. Zyprexa and Risperdal) are now the highest grossing class of medication in the United States ($16 billion in 2010); a major reason for this, according to theJournal of the American Medical Association in 2010, is that many children receiving antipsychotic drugs have nonpsychotic diagnoses such as ODD or some other disruptive disorder (this especially true of Medicaid-covered pediatric patients).

3. Schools That Educate for Compliance and Not for Democracy. Upon accepting the New York City Teacher of the Year Award on January 31, 1990, John Taylor Gatto upset many in attendance by stating: “The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions.” A generation ago, the problem of compulsory schooling as a vehicle for an authoritarian society was widely discussed, but as this problem has gotten worse, it is seldom discussed.
The nature of most classrooms, regardless of the subject matter, socializes students to be passive and directed by others, to follow orders, to take seriously the rewards and punishments of authorities, to pretend to care about things they don’t care about, and that they are impotent to affect their situation. A teacher can lecture about democracy, but schools are essentially undemocratic places, and so democracy is not what is instilled in students. Jonathan Kozol in The Night Is Dark and I Am Far from Home focused on how school breaks us from courageous actions. Kozol explains how our schools teach us a kind of “inert concern” in which “caring”—in and of itself and without risking the consequences of actual action—is considered “ethical.” School teaches us that we are “moral and mature” if we politely assert our concerns, but the essence of school—its demand for compliance—teaches us not to act in a friction-causing manner.

4. “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top.” The corporatocracy has figured out a way to make our already authoritarian schools even more authoritarian. Democrat-Republican bipartisanship has resulted in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, NAFTA, the PATRIOT Act, the War on Drugs, the Wall Street bailout, and educational policies such as “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top.” These policies are essentially standardized-testing tyranny that creates fear, which is antithetical to education for a democratic society. Fear forces students and teachers to constantly focus on the demands of test creators; it crushes curiosity, critical thinking, questioning authority, and challenging and resisting illegitimate authority. In a more democratic and less authoritarian society, one would evaluate the effectiveness of a teacher not by corporatocracy-sanctioned standardized tests but by asking students, parents, and a community if a teacher is inspiring students to be more curious, to read more, to learn independently, to enjoy thinking critically, to question authorities, and to challenge illegitimate authorities.

5. Shaming Young People Who Take Education—But Not Their Schooling—Seriously. In a 2006 survey in the United States, it was found that 40 percent of children between first and third grade read every day, but by fourth grade, that rate declined to 29 percent. Despite the anti-educational impact of standard schools, children and their parents are increasingly propagandized to believe that disliking school means disliking learning. That was not always the case in the United States. Mark Twain famously said, “I never let my schooling get in the way of my education.” Toward the end of Twain’s life in 1900, only 6 percent of Americans graduated high school. Today, approximately 85 percent of Americans graduate high school, but this is good enough for Barack Obama who told us in 2009, “And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It’s not just quitting on yourself, it’s quitting on your country.”
The more schooling Americans get, however, the more politically ignorant they are of America’s ongoing class war, and the more incapable they are of challenging the ruling class. In the 1880s and 1890s, American farmers with little or no schooling created a Populist movement that organized America’s largest-scale working people’s cooperative, formed a People’s Party that received 8 percent of the vote in 1892 presidential election, designed a “subtreasury” plan (that had it been implemented would have allowed easier credit for farmers and broke the power of large banks) and sent 40,000 lecturers across America to articulate it, and evidenced all kinds of sophisticated political ideas, strategies and tactics absent today from America’s well-schooled population. Today, Americans who lack college degrees are increasingly shamed as “losers”; however, Gore Vidal and George Carlin, two of America’s most astute and articulate critics of the corporatocracy, never went to college, and Carlin dropped out of school in the ninth grade.

6. The Normalization of Surveillance. The fear of being surveilled makes a population easier to control. While the National Security Agency (NSA) has received publicity for monitoring American citizen’s email and phone conversations, and while employer surveillance has become increasingly common in the United States, young Americans have become increasingly acquiescent to corporatocracy surveillance because, beginning at a young age, surveillance is routine in their lives. Parents routinely check Web sites for their kid’s latest test grades and completed assignments, and just like employers, are monitoring their children’s computers and Facebook pages. Some parents use the GPS in their children’s cell phones to track their whereabouts, and other parents have video cameras in their homes. Increasingly, I talk with young people who lack the confidence that they can even pull off a party when their parents are out of town, and so how much confidence are they going to have about pulling off a democratic movement below the radar of authorities?

7. Television. In 2009, the Nielsen Company reported that TV viewing in the United States is at an all-time high if one includes the following “three screens”: a television set, a laptop/personal computer, and a cell phone. American children average eight hours a day on TV, video games, movies, the Internet, cell phones, iPods, and other technologies (not including school-related use). Many progressives are concerned about the concentrated control of content by the corporate media, but the mere act of watching TV—regardless of the programming—is the primary pacifying agent (private-enterprise prisons have recognized that providing inmates with cable television can be a more economical method to keep them quiet and subdued than it would be to hire more guards).
Television is a dream come true for an authoritarian society: those with the most money own most of what people see; fear-based television programming makes people more afraid and distrustful of one another, which is good for the ruling elite who depend on a “divide and conquer” strategy; TV isolates people so they are not joining together to create resistance to authorities; and regardless of the programming, TV viewers’ brainwaves slow down, transforming them closer to a hypnotic state that makes it difficult to think critically. While playing a video games is not as zombifying as passively viewing TV, such games have become for many boys and young men their only experience of potency, and this “virtual potency” is certainly no threat to the ruling elite.

8. Fundamentalist Religion and Fundamentalist Consumerism. American culture offers young Americans the “choices” of fundamentalist religion and fundamentalist consumerism. All varieties of fundamentalism narrow one’s focus and inhibit critical thinking. While some progressives are fond of calling fundamentalist religion the “opiate of the masses,” they too often neglect the pacifying nature of America’s other major fundamentalism. Fundamentalist consumerism pacifies young Americans in a variety of ways. Fundamentalist consumerism destroys self-reliance, creating people who feel completely dependent on others and who are thus more likely to turn over decision-making power to authorities, the precise mind-set that the ruling elite loves to see. A fundamentalist consumer culture legitimizes advertising, propaganda, and all kinds of manipulations, including lies; and when a society gives legitimacy to lies and manipulativeness, it destroys the capacity of people to trust one another and form democratic movements. Fundamentalist consumerism also promotes self-absorption, which makes it difficult for the solidarity necessary for democratic movements.
These are not the only aspects of our culture that are subduing young Americans and crushing their resistance to domination. The food-industrial complex has helped create an epidemic of childhood obesity, depression, and passivity. The prison-industrial complex keeps young anti-authoritarians “in line” (now by the fear that they may come before judges such as the two Pennsylvania ones who took $2.6 million from private-industry prisons to ensure that juveniles were incarcerated). As Ralph Waldo Emerson observed: “All our things are right and wrong together. The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.”

Bruce E. Levine is a clinical psychologist and author of Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite  (Chelsea Green, 2011). His Web site is www.brucelevine.net

The post 8 Reasons Young Americans Don’t Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance appeared first on Void Network.

The anarchist tradition has been sharply divided in its relationship to religion, spirituality and nature. On the one hand, the mainstream of Western anarchism has in general been atheist, anti-religious and anti-clerical, and has looked upon religion as a supernaturalist negation of the natural world. On the other hand, there is a long history of anarchistic thought and practice having strong spiritual or religious dimensions, and very often these have taken the form of nature spirituality. The following discussion will examine first the more familiar anti-religious perspective of modern Western anarchism, then various anarchist tendencies across history that have held a spiritual view of reality, and finally, some contemporary anarchist views that exhibit both standpoints.

Almost all the major European classical anarchist theorists opposed religion and defended a secularist, scientific and sometimes positivistic view of nature against what they saw as religious obscurantism and other-worldliness. Max Stirner (1806–1856), the major individualist anarchist theorist, dismissed religion as a belief in illusory “spooks” that undermined the individuality and self-determination of the individual. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865), the first important social anarchist theorist, stated that the concept of God was contradictory to rational thought and to human freedom, and that social progress is proportional to the degree to which the concept is eliminated. The anarchist anti-religious viewpoint is perhaps most widely associated with political theorist and revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin (1813–1876), who proclaimed, “I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that, if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him” (Bakunin 1970: 79–80).
For Bakunin, religion denigrates human nature and the world, and is a means of oppressing humanity. In his view, it is a negation of nature, since it exalts a supernatural and transcendent reality and devalues the material and natural. He claims that there is an objective naturalistic basis for religion: it arises essentially out of the human being’s feeling of absolute dependence on an eternal and omnipotent nature and out of primitive fear of its awe-inspiring powers. He contends that it begins with the attribution of this power to fetishes and ends with its concentration in an all-powerful God, which he sees as the reversal and magnification of the human image itself. Religion is thus essentially a misunderstanding of nature. The system of social domination makes use of this confusion to keep people in a state of subjection and submissiveness through the alliance between the coercive power of the state and the ideological power of the Church.

The large anarchist movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in general shared the atheism and anti-clericalism of its theoretical founders. The Bakuninists of the First International (International Working Men’s Association, 1864–1876) fought to make the workers’ movement officially anti-religious, and the large anarcho-syndicalist movements in southern Europe and Latin America defined themselves in part through their strong opposition to a generally reactionary and hierarchical Church and clergy. The Spanish Revolution (1936–1939), the most important event in the history of the anarchist movement, was marked by fierce opposition to the Church, to the extent of the desecration and burning of churches and harsh treatment of clergy. The Spanish anarchists largely shared Bakunin’s view that religion was based on a denial of the natural world. Yet a kind of nature spirituality emerged even within their milieu. This tendency was expressed in a cult of the natural, the romanticizing of nature, and practices such as health-consciousness, nudism and vegetarianism. In this regard, the movement was influenced by the anarchist philosopher-geographer Elisιe Reclus (1830–1905), who developed a non-theistic but holistic and spiritual view of nature, advocated animal rights, and wrote of the sublime and inspirational qualities of the natural world.

When one turns to the positive relationship between anarchism and spirituality, one finds a wealth of evidence in many cultures of the world. Some have found one of the earliest anarchist philosophies of nature and human nature in the ancient Chinese classic, the Tao te Ching of Lao Tzu (ca. fourth century B.C.E). Daoism is the philosophy of the tao, or way, a term that refers both to the source of all being, and to the path of self-realization of all beings when they are allowed to act freely and spontaneously according to their nature. Lao Tzu presents a vision of nature and human society as an organic unity-in-diversity in which the uniqueness and creative activity of each part of the whole are valued. The natural world is seen as a dynamic balance (symbolized through the complementary polarities of yin and yang) that produces order and harmony when not disrupted by human aggression and domination. Lao Tzu describes this natural harmony in poetic terms: “Heaven and Earth unite to drip sweet dew. Without the command of men, it drips evenly over all” (Lao Tzu 1963: 156). Coercive and authoritarian social institutions are shown to destroy natural balance and the generosity of nature and produce disaster not only for the surrounding natural world, but also within human society itself. The ideal society is depicted as a decentralized, egalitarian community in which all value the “Three Treasures” of compassion, simplicity, and humility. Lao Tzu was a harsh critic of the violent, hierarchical society of his own day, and laments the injustices and inequities that are created in human society by the pursuit of political and economic power. He declares that “[t]he Way of Heaven reduces whatever is excessive and supplements whatever is insufficient. The Way of Man is different. It reduces the insufficient to offer to the excessive” (Lao Tzu 1963: 174). For Lao Tzu, the pursuit of wealth, power and egoistic gratification must be rejected in favor of a way of life based on “non-action” or “actionless action” (wu-wei), by which is meant activity that is in accord with one’s own Tao or way, but which respects the ways of all others.

Despite these apparently anarchistic or libertarian tendencies in Lao Tzu’s thought, some have interpreted him as a defender of the traditional system of rule and even as an advocate of manipulation of the people for authoritarian purposes. For example, the eminent Chinese scholar D.C. Lau interprets the Tao te Ching as a rather eclectic collection of writings that has a primarily ethical rather than mystical or philosophical import, and which does not question the concept of political rule. In his view, passages concerning the sage or ruler apply to any follower of the Tao, but are also specific references to an enlightened and skillful “ruler,” in a quite literal sense. Social ecologists Murray Bookchin and Janet Biehl have contended that ancient Daoism is merely a form of regressive mysticism. They attacked the idea that the Tao te Ching has any anarchistic implications and contend that all references to rulership should be interpreted in an entirely literal sense.

The second great ancient Taoist philosopher, Chuang Tzu, has sometimes been seen as even more radically anarchistic than Lao Tzu and equally ecological in outlook. Chuang Tzu warned against the impulse to eliminate chaos and impose order on the world, which in his view leads ultimately to great destruction. He took a perspectivist position on knowledge and truth, and emphasized, often through humorous or ironic anecdotes, the fact that each being has its own good and perceives reality from its own ultimately incomparable point of view. He rejected human-centered views of reality and the tendency to project human meanings and values onto the natural world. Though the specifically political implications of Chuang Tzu’s thought are far from clear, his Daoism has been interpreted as one of the most consistently anarchistic critiques of the domination of humanity and nature and of the egocentric and anthropocentric mentality that underlies domination.
Some have also found a deeply anarchistic dimension in both ancient Buddhism and also in various schools in later Buddhist history. Original Buddhism as established by the founder Shakyamuni Buddha (ca. 563–463 B.C.E.) came out of a questioning of both the social order (the caste system) and the ideological basis (the authority of the Vedic scriptures) of ancient India. It also rejected the idea that any authority, whether a person or written document, could lead one to truth, and that it must instead be reached through direct personal experience. The central Buddhist idea of non-attachment can be given an anarchistic interpretation. Although historical Buddhism has been to varying degrees influenced by inegalitarian social institutions, its goal of non-attachment can be seen as an attack on the foundation of political, economic and patriarchal domination in the desire to aggrandize an illusory ego-self. According to such an interpretation, the ideal of the sangha or spiritual community is seen as an anarchistic concept of association based on compassion and recognition of true need, rather than on economic and political power and coercive force. Similarly, Buddhist mindfulness, an awakened awareness of present experience, is seen as implying a sensitivity to the realities of nature and human experience, as opposed to appropriating and objectifying forms of consciousness. The Buddhist tradition is vast, and has been developed in many directions, but it is not difficult to discover in the Buddhist concepts of awakened mind, non-attachment, and compassion an implicit critique of material consumption and accumulation, coercive laws, and bureaucratic and technocratic forms of social organization.

Nagarjuna (ca. second century) is often considered the most important Buddhist philosopher since Shakyamuni Buddha. Indeed, he can plausibly be interpreted as the most theoretically anarchistic thinker in the history of philosophy. His radically destructive or deconstructive dialectic reveals the contradictions in any formulation of truth or attribution of substantiality to any being. The only “truth” for Nagarjuna consists not in ideas or propositions, all of which lead to contradiction, but rather in the practice of universal compassion and non-attachment. His rejection of the imposition of dualistic and objectifying categories on an internally related and “dependently arising” reality can be seen as an affirmation of the non-objectifiable wholeness and self-creativity of being and nature.

The anarchist tendencies in Buddhism were developed furthest and synthesized with certain aspects of Daoism in the Chinese Ch’an (meditation) School of Buddhism and in its Japanese version, Zen. Zen questions all authorities, including political, intellectual and spiritual ones, and insists on the absolute priority of direct personal experience. Lin-Chi (Rinzai) (d. 866) the founder of Ch’an, is known for his shocking admonition, “Whether you’re facing inward or facing outward, whatever you meet up with, just kill it! If you meet a Buddha, kill the Buddha. If you meet a patriarch, kill the patriarch!” This iconoclastic maxim is a classic Zen statement of the radically anarchistic view that none of our concepts of substantial realities (including even our most exalted concepts) can capture the nature of an ever-changing reality that constantly surpasses all categories and preconceptions. Inherent in this outlook is a deep respect for the integrity of nature and a desire to allow nature to express itself without human domination. Zen painting and poetry (much in the tradition of Daoist art) are noted for their focus on nature and on the numinous power of things themselves.

Anarchistic forms of spirituality have not been limited to Asian traditions, but have also emerged periodically through the history of Western religion. The Joachimite tendency in medieval Christianity is perhaps the most striking example. Joachim of Fiore spoke of the “Third Age” of world history, the Age of the Holy Spirit, which would supersede the rule of law and authority and usher in the reign of universal freedom and love. The Movement of the Free Spirit, which emerged out of the Joachimite and millenarian traditions, is often considered the most anarchistic tendency within medieval and early modern Christianity. The movement originated in the thirteenth century and spread widely across central and Western Europe during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Its most radical tendencies rejected the established Church, the state, law, private property and marriage. Its social outlook was at times a rather curious combination of a radically anarchistic quest for freedom and an elitism that justified an instrumental view of non-members and of things in nature, and a ruthless destructiveness toward all who stood in its way. Nevertheless, it often strongly affirmed nature and the natural. The Adamite tendency in particular saw believers as existing in a “natural,” pre-fallen condition, and others spoke of exercising “natural freedom” and following “natural desires.” They practiced nudism and free love, held property in common, and waged relentless war against their surrounding enemies. The anarchistic interpretation of the Free Spirit is best known from Norman Cohn’s classic work, The Pursuit of the Millennium. The Free Spirit also plays an important role in anarchist theorist Fredy Perlman’s critique of civilization, Against History, and Situationist Raoul Vaneigem devoted an entire book to the movement.

A more recent expression of an anarchistic spirituality within the Christian tradition is the radical religious vision of Romantic poet William Blake (1757–1827). Blake stressed the sacredness of nature, its organic qualities, and the need for humane treatment of other beings. He was one of the most important early rebels against the mechanistic, objectivist, reductionist worldview that came out of Newtonian science. His rejection of the dominant mechanistic worldview is encapsulated in his well-known plea, “may God us keep / From Single vision and Newton’s sleep!” (Blake 1988: 722). His attack on the patriarchal authoritarian God and a spiritually degraded world, and his creation of a new radically utopian mythology can be interpreted as an anarchistic critique of the state, early capitalism, and any ideology or social imaginary based on hierarchy, domination, and the repression of desire, the body, and nature.

Although nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European anarchism was generally anti-religious, even there one finds a more overt religious tendency, primarily under the influence of the famous novelist and pacifist anarchist Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910). Tolstoy’s conception of God was not the naively anthropomorphic image that other anarchists attacked, but referred rather to the whole of reality and truth. Furthermore, he believed that the true essence of Christianity is found not in a transcendent Supreme Being or an afterlife with rewards and punishments, but rather in Jesus’ teaching of universal love. For Tolstoy, an acceptance of this teaching satisfies the human longing for meaning in purpose in life, and has far-reaching implications for one’s relationship to both society and nature. First, it results in a dedication to complete nonviolence in society, including an absolute anarchistic rejection of participation in the state, which Tolstoy saw as the most monstrous form of organized violence and coercion. Furthermore, it requires a nonviolent stance toward the whole of nature, a refusal to inflict suffering on sentient beings, and a practice of ethical vegetarianism.

Another important nineteenth-century literary figure in whose work anarchist themes intersect with a spirituality of nature is Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862). In his essay “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau proclaimed the priority of individual conscience over political authority, asserting his view that “that government is best which governs least” and consequently “that government is best which governs not at all.” He refused to pay his taxes to the state on the anarchist secessionist principle that he could not recognize as his own government one that was also the slave’s government. Although Thoreau’s philosophical and religious perspective is usually associated with American “Transcendentalism,” it can also be seen as an anarchistic spirituality with affinities to aspects of Daoist, Buddhist and indigenous traditions. Thoreau is best known for his eloquent expression in Walden of such themes as the love of and communion with nature, the affirmation of life, compassion for all living beings, and the ills of a materialistic society that is alienated from the natural world and enslaved by its own possessions. His spirituality is perhaps best expressed in the essay on “Walking,” which contains his famous statement that “in Wildness is the preservation of the world.” Thoreau links wildness, freedom, sacredness, and “the gospel according to this moment,” an idea much in the spirit of Buddhist mindfulness. His concern for and celebration of the particularities of place link him to later bioregional thought, and contain an implicit critique of political and economis-tic conceptions of reality.

The renowned anarchist geographer Peter Kropotkin has often been looked to as the major source of ecological ideas among the classical anarchist theorists. His concepts of the importance of mutual aid, spontaneity and diversity in both the natural world and in human society have been important in introducing ecological concepts into social thought. However, Kropotkin was in many ways carrying on the work of his predecessor, the nineteenth-century French geographer and revolutionary Elisιe Reclus, who had already developed a profoundly ecological philosophy and social theory. Reclus is one of the most important figures in the development of an anarchistic ecological philosophy and spirituality.

Reclus came out of a tradition of radical Protestant religious dissent, his father having been a minister of a so-called “free church” that broke with the Reformed Church. Though he rejected theism, his anarchism can in some ways be seen as a continuation of his religious tradition. Central to his philosophy was a belief in universal love, which in his view must be extended to all human beings, to other sentient beings, and to nature as a whole. His deep respect for the natural world sometimes reaches a level of awe that verges on a kind of nature mysticism. For Reclus, social organization must be based on this love and solidarity, expressed through a voluntary commitment to the good of the community and the Earth itself. In such a system, each individual would be guided to the greatest degree possible by a free conscience rather than by coercion or centralized authority.

Reclus’ outlook toward nature is at once scientific, moral, aesthetic, and spiritual. In his monumental 16,000-page New Universal Geography, and his magnum opus of social theory, Man and the Earth, he offers a holistic, evolutionary vision of humanity and nature. Like later ecological thinkers, Reclus finds a harmony and balance in nature, in addition to a tendency toward discord and imbalance. His investigation of the intimate relationship between humanity and the Earth’s regional and local particularities anticipates later bioregional thought. He emphasizes the moral and spiritual aspects of humanity’s relationship to nature, condemns the growing devastation produced by industry and economic exploitation, and argues that whenever humanity degrades the natural world, it degrades itself. A vehement advocate of the humane treatment of animals and of ethical vegetarianism, Reclus wrote several widely reprinted pamphlets on these topics.

An important though relatively neglected figure in early twentieth-century anarchist spirituality is the German political theorist and non-violent revolutionary Gustav Landauer (1870–1919). Landauer is best known as a martyr killed for his leadership in the Munich Council Republic of 1919 and as the mentor of the Jewish libertarian and communitarian religious philosopher Martin Buber (1878–1965). Landauer’s philosophy is rooted in German Romanticist thought and is often described as having mystical and pantheistic tendencies. His major concepts are Spirit (Geist), People (Volk), and Nation (Nation), and his central focus is on the place of the individual in the larger human community, in nature, and in a greater spiritual reality. Landauer associates Spirit with the search for wholeness and universality, and interprets it as an immanent, living reality, the underlying unity of all beings that encompasses both humanity and nature. For Landauer, the great conflict in history is between Spirit and the state. In his famous formulation, the state is above all a relationship between human beings and it can be replaced by creating new relationships based on cooperation rather than domination. Socialism, which is what he called the free, cooperative society, is not a utopian ideal in the future, but rather something that is already present in all cooperative, loving human relationships and which can expand to encompass the whole of society as more non-coercive, non-exploitative relationships are established. Landauer believed that the cooperative society would be achieved when people left the increasingly dominant corrupt and alienated urban society and returned to the land. The new society was to be based on village communities rooted in their natural regions, in which fair exchange would replace economic exploitation, and in which agriculture and industry would be integrated.

Undoubtedly, one of the most important influences on modern anarchist spirituality throughout the world is Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948), who is widely known for his principles of nonviolence, cooperation, decentralization, and local self-sufficiency. Gandhi summarized his religious outlook as the belief that God is Truth, or more accurately, that Truth is God, and that the way to this Truth is through love. He also states that God is “the sum-total of all life” (Gandhi 1963: 316). At the roots of Gandhian spirituality is the concept of ahimsa, which is often translated as “nonviolence” (paralleling the original Sanskrit), but is actually for Gandhi a more positive conception of replacing force and coercion with love and cooperation. Similarly, he is sometimes called an advocate of “civil disobedience,” but he defined his approach, satyagraha, as a more positive conception of “nonviolent resistance” to evil, including the injustices of the state.

Although Gandhi did not absolutely reject all participation in the existing state, he rejected the state as a legitimate form of social organization, advocated its eventual elimination, and strongly opposed its increasing power. He warned against looking to the state to reduce exploitation, arguing that its concentrated power and vast coercive force necessarily does great harm and destroys individuality. In place of the centralized state, he proposed village autonomy or self-government, community self-reliance, and local production based on human-scale technologies, ideas that have been enormously influential on twentieth-century eco-anarchism. Gandhi was also a critic of Western medicine, which he saw as dependent on concentrated wealth and sophisticated technologies, and advocated instead “nature cure” in which the cheapest, simplest and most accessible treatments are used.
For Gandhi, the principle of ahimsa was to be extended throughout the natural world. Humans should make an effort to avoid inflicting physical or mental injury to any living being to the greatest possible degree. Accordingly, Gandhi advocated ethical vegetarianism and had a deeply held belief that the Indian tradition of cow protection was of great moral and spiritual value. One of his most often-quoted statements is that the greatness and moral progress of a nation can be judged by its treatment of animals. Although his concern was often expressed in terms of the welfare of individual beings, he sometimes expressed more strongly ecological concepts, as when he warned of the dangers of human abuse of nature using the image of nature’s ledger book in which the debits and credits must always be equal.

After Gandhi’s death, Sarvodaya, a movement based on his spiritual, ethical and political principles emerged. Vinoba Bhave (1895–1982), the leading figure in the movement for many years, taught absolute nonviolence, social organization based on universal love, decision making by consensus, the replacement of coercion by the recognition of moral authority, and the minimization and eventual abolition of state power. Vinoba’s social philosophy was fundamentally anarchist and communitarian. In pursuit of the movement’s goals he pursued a policy of asking landowners to donate land to the poor (Bhoodan, or “gift of land”) and of establishing village cooperative agriculture (Gramdan or “village gift”). Over a decade, Vinoba walked 25,000 miles across India and accepted eight million acres of Bhoodan land. The history of the Sarvodaya movement is recounted in Geoffrey Ostergaard and Melville Currell’s study, The Gentle Anarchists.

Among contemporary thinkers, the celebrated poet and essayist Gary Snyder has probably had the greatest influence in linking anarchism, spirituality and nature. He has also been a major influence on the contemporary ecology movement in showing the ecological implications of Buddhist, Daoist and indigenous traditions. Snyder has connected the concepts of “the wild,” “wild nature” and “wilderness” with the Tao of ancient Chinese philosophy and the dharma of Buddhism. For Snyder, the concept of “the wild” implies a freedom and spontaneity that are found not only in undomesticated nature, but also in the imagination of the poet and in the mind of the spiritually attuned person. He expresses the anarchic nature of the Zen mind in his statement: “the power of no-power; this is in the practice of Zen” (Snyder 1980: 4).
For Snyder, such concepts have farreaching political implications. By the early 1970s he had already outlined a bioregional anarchist position that would replace the state and its artificial political boundaries with a regionalism based on lived experience and a knowledge of the particularities of place. Snyder links the spirituality of place with “reinhabitation,” the development of an intimate acquaintance with one’s locality and region, and the achievement of a larger sense of community that incorporates other life forms. Snyder finds the roots of such a social vision in the Neolithic community, with its emphasis on productive work, the sharing of goods, and the self-determination of local village communities. From the standpoint of such decentralized, egalitarian communities, the state, social hierarchy, and centralized power are not only illegitimate and oppressive, but also a source of disorder and destruction in both society and the natural world.

The wisdom of traditional societies has been a widespread theme in contemporary anarchist thought. This is exemplified by a significant “neo-primitivist” current in ecological anarchism that has identified very strongly with many of the values and institutions of tribal societies. Its proponents argue that for 99 percent of human history human beings lived in stateless societies in which nature spirituality was central to their culture. The non-hierarchical, cooperative, symbiotic and ecological spiritualities of these societies have been taken as an inspiration for a future post-civilized anarchist society.

A strong influence on this current is anarchist theorist Fredy Perlman (1934–1985), who in his influential work Against His-story, Against Leviathan depicts (in a kind of radicalized version of the “Myth of the Machine” of social critic Lewis Mumford [1895–1990]) the millennia-long history of the assault of the technological megamachine on humanity and the Earth. Perlman describes early tribal spirituality as a celebration of human existence and nature, and depicts the rise of the ancient despotism that destroyed these societies and replaced their spirituality with a repressive, patriarchal and authoritarian monotheism. He interprets the emergence of such spiritual movements as ancient Daoism, Buddhism and Zoroastrianism as a rebellion against social hierarchy and the domination of nature, and describes the processes through which these spiritualities of freedom were transformed in religions of domination. He also outlines the history of anarchistic spiritual movements, including such striking examples as the Taoist Yellow Turbans, a revolutionary, egalitarian movement of the second century.

Similar themes are developed by David Watson, a leading contemporary critic of the technological mega-machine. Watson contends in Against the Megamachine that in modern societies an aura of sacredness is concentrated in the ego, in the system of technology, and in economic and political power, whereas primal societies have seen the sacred as pervading the self, the community and the world of nature. Primal spirituality was, he argues, an integral part of a system of egalitarian, libertarian and ecological social values. Furthermore, the participating consciousness of primal peoples conceives of humans as inseparable from larger natural and transhuman realities. Thus, primal peoples have had an anarchistic, non-hierarchical view of both society and nature that constitutes a powerful critique of modern industrial society and offers inspiration for future non-dominating ecological communities.
Ideas similar to those of Perlman and Watson inspire a rather large, vigorous and growing anarcho-primitivist or anti-civilization movement. The best-known theoretical spokesperson for this movement is John Zerzan, who presents a withering critique of civilization, industrialism, technology, the state, and even language and community. Anarcho-primitivist ideas often appear in such publications as Green Anarchy, Live Free or Die, Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed and The Fifth Estate. Anarcho-primitivism plays an important role in the Earth Liberation Front, which practices sabotage in defense of nature, and in the much larger Earth First!, which is the most important direct action environmental organization. It is also a significant undercurrent in the anti-globalization movement.

Anarcho-primitivists see an inextricable relationship between civilization and the domination of humanity and nature. One of their central themes is the inevitability of the collapse of industrial society, an event that is often looked forward to with anticipation. Primitivists value all that remains free from the domination of civilization, including remaining wilderness areas and autonomous, spontaneous human activity. They look to tribal traditions and hunter-gatherer economies for examples of an ecological sensibility, a balanced relationship to nature, and an ethos of sharing and generosity. However, they do not in general propose a simple reversion to such previous social formations, which are sometimes criticized for alienated social practices. Many primitivists find inspiration in various nature-affirming spiritual traditions as an alternative to the narrow technical rationality of civilization. These include the spirituality of tribal people, various forms of nature mysticism, a general reverence for life and nature, pantheism, and neo-paganism.

Indeed, one finds a continuous and strong anarchist current in neo-paganism in general in both Britain and the United States in recent decades. In Britain there are important anarchist and neo-pagan tendencies within the large marginal subculture that centers around the anti-roads movement and defends sites that are of natural, cultural and spiritual significance. Both anti-roads activists and neo-pagans often form decentralized, non-hierarchical organizations practicing such anarchist principles as direct action and consensus decision making. Starhawk, one of the best-known neo-pagan theorists and writers, and an important figure in ecofeminism, has emphasized the connection between the nonviolent, egalitarian, cooperative, anti-patriarchal, anti-hierarchical, and nature-affirming values of anarchism and the pagan worldview and sensibility. The pioneering ecofeminist writer Susan Griffin has inspired thinking about these interconnections since her wide-ranging landmark work Woman and Nature, published in 1978. Even earlier, the well-known short-story writer and poet Grace Paley had incorporated feminist, anarchist and ecological themes in her works, which also expresses a deep but subtle spirituality of everyday life.

Hakim Bey, one of the most widely read contemporary anarchist writers, has developed an “ontological anarchism” that finds inspiration in esoteric spiritual traditions of many cultures, including Islamic mysticism, sorcery, shamanism, alchemy, and primordial myths of chaos. Bey’s anarchic sensibility and spirituality encompass everything related to joy, eros, creativity, play, and “the marvelous.” His concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ) as a sphere in which such realities can be experienced is one of the most influential ideas in contemporary anarchism and has stimulated interest in heretical, dissident and exotic anarchistic spiritualities.

There has also been considerable theoretical discussion of anarchism, nature and spirituality in the context of debates within social ecology. Such well-known exponents of social ecology as Murray Bookchin and Janet Biehl have attacked spiritual ecologies as forms of irrational mysticism that often produce social passivity and sometimes are linked to reactionary or fascist politics. On the other hand, proponents of the value of spiritual ecologies (such as David Watson, John Clark and Peter Marshall) have argued for the importance to an anarchist social ecology of spiritual values that are ecological, holistic, communitarian and socially emancipatory. It has been argued that some social ecologists have uncritically adopted a modernist, Promethean, and naively rationalistic view of the self and its relationship to the world, and that spiritual ecologies derived from Asian philosophies and indigenous worldviews, among other sources, can contribute to a more critical, dialectical, and implicitly anarchistic view of selfhood and the place of humanity in nature.
This brief survey is far from comprehensive, and a fuller account would encompass such topics as Quakerism and other forms of radical Protestantism, the Catholic Worker movement and other tendencies within the Catholic Left, the spirituality of anarchist intentional communities, and the many literary and artistic figures (including such notable examples as poet Allen Ginsberg and novelist Ursula LeGuin) who have had important insights relating to anarchism, spirituality and nature. However, from the examples discussed, it should be clear that anarchist thought and practice have encompassed a wide diversity of approaches to religion, spirituality, and nature. This multiplicity and divergence continues today. Many contemporary anarchists (especially in Europe and in organizations in the anarcho-syndicalist and anarcho-communist traditions) carry on the atheist, anti-religious, anti-clerical outlook of the classical anarchist movement. Others, including many of the young people who have been drawn to contemporary anarchism through direct action movements, have neither great interest in nor particular antipathy to religion and spirituality. However, an increasing number of political and cultural anarchists are developing an interest in spirituality, and many others have been drawn to anarchist political movements and social tendencies through an initial interest in anarchistic spirituality. Consequently, spirituality, and more particularly the nature-affirming spiritualities of Daoism, Buddhism, neo-Paganism, indigenous traditions, and various radical undercurrents within Western religion, play a significant role in anarchism today and can be expected to do so in the future. 

Further Reading

Bakunin, Michael. God and the State. New York: Dover, 1970.
Blake, William. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. David V. Erdman, ed. New York: Doubleday, 1988.
Chuang Tzu. Inner Chapters. New York: Vintage Books, 1974.
Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990 (1961).
Clark, John and Camille Martin. Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: The Radical Social Thought of Elisιe Reclus. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004.
Gandhi, Mohandas. The Essential Gandhi. Louis Fischer, ed. New York: Random House, 1963. Landauer, Gustav. For Socialism. St. Louis: Telos Press, 1978. Lao Tzu, “The Lao Tzu (Tao te Ching).” In Wing-Tsit Chan, ed. A Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963, 139–76.
Lau, D.C. “Introduction” to Tao te Ching. Harmondsworth, UK and New York: Penguin Books, 1963, 7–52.
Lin-Chi. The Zen Teachings of Master Lin-Chi. Boston and London: Shambhala, 1993.
Marshall, Peter. Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism. London: HarperCollins, 1992.
Ostergaard, Geoffrey and Melville Currell. The Gentle Anarchists: A Study of the Leaders of the Sarvodaya Movement For Non-Violent Revolution in India. Oxford: Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1973.
Perlman, Fredy. Against His-story, Against Leviathan. Detroit: Black & Red, 1983.
Purchase, Graham. Evolution and Revolution: An Introduction to the Life and Thought of Peter Kropotkin. Petersham, Australia: Jura Books, 1996.
Snyder, Gary. The Real Work: Interviews & Talks 1964– 1979. New York: New Dimensions, 1980.
Starhawk. Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority and Mystery. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988.
Vaneigem, Raoul. The Movement of the Free Spirit: General Considerations and Firsthand Testimony Concerning Some Brief Flowerings of Life in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and, Incidentally, Our Own Time. New York: Zone Books, 1994.
Watson, David. Against the Megamachine: Essays on Empire & Its Enemies. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1998.
See also: Bioregionalism; Bioregionalism and the North American Bioregional Congress; Blake, William; Buddhism; Daoism; Earth First! and the Earth Liberation Front; Ellul, Jacques; Gandhi, Mohandas; Griffin, Susan; Kropotkin, Peter; Left Biocentrism; Le Guin, Ursula; Radical Environmentalism; Reclus, Elisιe; Snyder, Gary — and the Invention of Bioregional Spirituality and Politics; Social Ecology; Starhawk; Thoreau, Henry David.

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