I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: PETE SEEGER-Greatest Hits (2002).

Like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger has been singing for the common man since forever.  Unlike Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger is alive and well and still kicking up a fuss.

This collection of his songs is fascinating in that it shows a certain aspect of Pete’s music: his songs are designed for “folks.”  His songs almost demand audience participation.  And so, he has albums for kids (that are weird but wonderful) and other, grown up songs that kids also know, which people have been singing for generations.

And so this disc features more than “studio tracks.”  It opens with “Little Boxes” a wonderful song which features some awesome lyrics including this verse:

And the people in the houses
All went to the university,
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same,
And there’s doctors and lawyers,
And business executives,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

But in addition, you get some classic tracks that define rebellious folk: “Which Side Are You On?” “We Shall Overcome” and “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy.”   It also has songs like “Wimoweh (The Lion Sleeps Tonight)” and “Abiyoyo.”

And of course, it features, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” and “Turn Turn Turn” songs which I’ve known since I was a little kid, but whose lyrics never meant anything to me until I became an adult.  There’s even “If I Had a Hammer” with the final verse:

It’s the hammer of justice;
It’s the bell of freedom;
It’s the song about love between my brothers and my sisters;
All over this land

For a really comprehensive collection of his “studio work” the ideal disc is If I Had a Hammer: Songs of Hope and Struggle (where he sets the tune of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” to a song called “Solidarity Forever” (Solidarity forever, Solidarity forever, Solidarity forever, For the union makes us strong.)

Pete Seeger is indeed a national treasure, and a man who fights in his own way for each of us.

[READ: August 23, 2010] Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm

After reading Letters of Insurgents, I felt the need for a palate cleanser.  Melissa suggested this title.  And it really did wonders for me.

All along while I was reading Insurgents, I felt like everyone in the book was misguided about their role in society and, frankly about their ability to undermine the world.  I never understood the idea that people were “making” them work.  They didn’t have to work.  They could have lived off the grid somewhere and eaten berries.  What else is the point of a strike than to improve working conditions, not to abolish work altogether (that whole apart about the plants’ foreign offices plugging along despite their big lockdown was particularly hilariously naive).

In many ways I felt like their opinions were on par with what I thought anarchism was, and yet their opinions were nothing I wanted to be a part of.  Bookchin argues that their attitudes are examples of Lifestyle Anarchism (this article does not address the book at all, but you can see the characters in what he’s describing.)

Bookchin mentions “William Godwin’s distinctly individualistic declaration: ‘There is but one power to which I can yield a heartfelt obedience, the decision of my own understanding, the dictates of my own conscience” as being compelling and having gained adherence in the United States from the libertarian factions.  (He says they should really be called proprietarian).

He  counters with this basic principle from Michael Bakunin who “prioritized the social over the individual. Society, he writes, ‘antedates and at the same time survives every human individual, being in this respect like Nature itself. It is eternal like Nature, or rather, having been born upon our earth, it will last as long as the earth. A radical revolt against society would therefore be just as impossible for man as a revolt against Nature, human society being nothing else but the last great manifestation or creation of Nature upon this earth. And an individual who would want to rebel against society . . . would place himself beyond the pale of real existence.'”

Bookchin walks, step by step through different aspects of this argument, that without society, the premise of freedom is not really possible.  This quote actually even seems to be addressing the characters in Insurgents:

When lifestyle anarchists call for autonomy rather than freedom, they thereby forfeit the rich social connotations of freedom. Indeed, today’s steady anarchist drumbeat for autonomy rather than social freedom cannot be dismissed as accidental, particularly in Anglo-American varieties of libertarian thought, where the notion of autonomy more closely corresponds to personal liberty. Its roots lie in the Roman imperial tradition of libertas, wherein the untrammeled ego is ‘free’ to own his personal property — and to gratify his personal lusts.

He argues that freedom is not an escape from a society but a completeness of it:

In ‘freedom,’ individual selfhood does not stand opposed to or apart from the collective but is significantly formed — and in a rational society, would be realized — by his or her own social existence. Freedom thus does not subsume the individual’s liberty but denotes its actualization.

In the most compelling paragraph he argues against solitariness, saying that it is antithetical to a strong mind  This argument seems to have been advances by Yarostan regarding solitary confinement.  And yet, somehow lifestyle anarchists conflate the two:

Left to his or her own self, the individual loses the indispensable social moorings that make for what an anarchist might be expected to prize in individuality: reflective powers, which derive in great part from discourse; the emotional equipment that nourishes rage against unfreedom; the sociality that motivates the desire for radical change; and the sense of responsibility that engenders social action.

Bookchin criticizes a number of authors for falsely conflating ideas: L. Susan Brown’s The Politics of Individualism he says champions Lifestyle anarchism.  And yet:

These trendy posturings, nearly all of which follow current yuppie fashions, are individualistic in the important sense that they are antithetical to the development of serious organizations, a radical politics, a committed social movement, theoretical coherence, and programmatic relevance.

What’s worse, he argues, is that this inwardly directed selfishness is seen as a kind of politics.  But he saves his harshest criticism for Hakim Bey’s (aka Peter Lamborn Wilson’s) T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone.  From its misconstruction of the past to its own internal absurdities, he has no tolerance for this (apparently popular) title:

Proclaiming that ‘Anarchy knows no dogmas’ (TAZ, p. 52), the Bey nonetheless immerses his readers in a harsh dogma if there ever was one: ‘Anarchism ultimately implies anarchy — & anarchy is chaos’ (TAZ, p. 64).

I also enjoyed Bookchin’s deflation of Bez’ maxim:

‘There is no becoming,’ the Bey tells us, ‘no revolution, no struggle, no path; [if] already you’re the monarch of your own skin — your inviolable freedom awaits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky’ — words that could be inscribed on the New York Stock Exchange as a credo for egotism and social indifference (TAZ, p. 4).

For as it turns out this lifestyle anarchism is really only for those who can afford it: Bookchin writes, “No one has ever floated out of the earthly realm of misery on ‘a politics of dreams’ except the privileged petty bourgeois, who may find the Bey’s manifestoes amenable particularly in moments of boredom.”

While this quote plays nicely with some complaints I had about the kids in Insurgents:

Given the evanescent quality of a TAZ, the Bey’s disciples can enjoy the fleeting privilege of living a ‘nomadic existence,’ for ‘homelessness can in a sense be a virtue, an adventure’ (TAZ, p. 130). Alas, homelessness can be an ‘adventure’ when one has a comfortable home to return to, while nomadism is the distinct luxury of those who can afford to live without earning their livelihood.

Sophia constantly argues that she had nowhere to go, when in point of fact she could have always gone to live with her mother, ego be damned.

This next argument seems like the logical extreme of Sophia’s (and everyone else’s) anti-academics arguments:

Nor can I ignore another ‘insurrection’ that the Bey advances: notably, ‘voluntary illiteracy’ (TAZ, p. 129). Although he advances this as a revolt against the educational system, its more desirable effect might be to render the Bey’s various ex cathedra injunctions inaccessible to his readers.

Sabina was awfully smart to have rebelled against education so vehemently.  (Even if she claims she learned on her own, her teacher had been through the educational mill, and Alberts was certainly not opposed to education).

Then the article deals with technology, a major sore point for me in Insurgents.  All along I felt that Sabina, working with technology was doing good.  Researching, creating, advancing, using her mind.  And yet, by the end of the book she also feel that technology is evil.  Even Bookchin admits that some technology is bad, but technology of itself isn’t:

Which is not to deny that many technologies are inherently domineering and ecologically dangerous, or to assert that civilization has been an unmitigated blessing. Nuclear reactors, huge dams, highly centralized industrial complexes, the factory system, and the arms industry — like bureaucracy, urban blight, and contemporary media — have been pernicious almost from their inception. But the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not require the steam engine, mass manufacture, or, for that matter, giant cities and far-reaching bureaucracies, to deforest huge areas of North America and virtually obliterate its aboriginal peoples, or erode the soil of entire regions. To the contrary, even before railroads reached out to all parts of the land, much of this devastation had already been wrought using simple axes, black-powder muskets, horse-driven wagons, and moldboard plows.

Then Bookchin offers a lengthy section about the adoration of the primitive and people who claim that primitive cultures didn’t use technology and were much more in tune with their environment .  Insurgents goes someway to distance itself from this argument when it mercilessly mocks Lem in his garden of shite.  And yet someone like  John Zerzan, who in Future Primitive argues that people were much happier and under far less stress back then:

‘It strikes me as very plausible,’ Zerzan brightly conjectures, ‘that intelligence, informed by the success and satisfaction of a gatherer-hunter existence, is the very reason for the pronounced absence of ‘progress.’ Division of labor, domestication, symbolic culture — these were evidently [!] refused until very recently.’ The Homo species ‘long chose nature over culture,’

The thing that really won me over to Bookchin though was comments like this (about Zerzan): “There is a certain splendor in this claptrap that is truly arresting.”  But he does have more substance to back up his claims:

But that ‘primal’ or prehistoric peoples ‘revered’ nonhuman nature is at best specious and at worst completely disingenuous. In the absence of ‘nonnatural’ environments such as villages, towns, and cities, the very notion of ‘Nature’ as distinguished from habitat had yet to be conceptualized

While not everyone in Insurgents reflected this attitude (no one had a TV, but they all listened to the radio, or at the very least, used cars), I rather enjoyed this mockery of the supposed attacks against technology:

As John Zerzan so memorably put it to a puzzled interviewer who asked about the television set in the home of this foe of technology: ‘Like all other people, I have to be narcotized.’

Summing up, he defines what he supports:

Social anarchism, in my view, is made of fundamentally different stuff, heir to the Enlightenment tradition, with due regard to that tradition’s limits and incompleteness. Depending upon how it defines reason, social anarchism celebrates the thinking human mind without in any way denying passion, ecstasy, imagination, play, and art. Yet rather than reify them into hazy categories, it tries to incorporate them into everyday life.

I also found this quote (taken from Max Horkheimer) to be especially relevant to society today; especially about “libertarians” who argue against government resources:

‘individuality is impaired when each man decides to fend for himself. . . . The absolutely isolated individual has always been an illusion. The most esteemed personal qualities, such as independence, will to freedom, sympathy, and the sense of justice, are social as well as individual virtues. The fully developed individual is the consummation of a fully developed society.’

This final quote seems to address Sophia and her ilk to a T (to a lesser extent Mirna, who has less of democracy to work with it seems):

By denying institutions and democracy, lifestyle anarchism insulates itself from social reality, so that it can fume all the more with futile rage, thereby remaining a subcultural caper for gullible youth and bored consumers of black garments and ecstasy posters.

Sophia and her group tried to forms social collectives but they were based on the flimsiest arguments and the most specious connections.  And, since Yarostan’s men were always arguing against unions, against collective working, well, again, I ask, how i a group of people going to move forward if they are not allowed to have someone pointing them in the right direction?

It was comforting to know that I wasn’t on my own in thinking that the arguments the characters put forth weren’t just a little crazy.  So thank you Melissa, for showing me this,

The book is available from AK Press, but (what I assume is) the whole text is available here.