Vote Capitalist!

I would like to say that it seems unnecessary to set out an anarchist position on voting, as the standard arguments are well rehearsed, but it often happens that the excitement of the spectacle overtakes even those who have taken care to maintain a position of thorough integrity. In spite of my own deep cynicism, I awoke this morning with a visceral feeling of excitement. I wasn't sure at first what it was, then I remembered the great national spectacle that was to take place today. The frantic atmosphere of ritual participation had affected me at a physiological level. Fortunately I have developed at least a rudimentary awareness of the connection between my bodily sensations and thoughts, so I did not become unreflectively involved in the thought-complex that could have been generated from the intrusive feeling in my abdomen.

Participation in the voting spectacle is one of the great shibboleths of bourgeois conformity. It involves a wilful vacuity and a vicious pigheaded bloodymindedness that remind me of the state of mind of people who make a point of giving to charity or voice their support for, or equivocation over, the latest imperial war in the name of universal values. I have found that expressing my refusal to participate often results in a look of shocked and hurt betrayal from electoral enthusiasts. It reminds me of the period of hypnotised mania leading up to the election of Obama. Someone asked me what I thought of him and I said I thought he was a politician. The response was a great onslaught of whining naivety in which I was accused of taking away her hope. I can only reflect that I was right, and that disillusionment from hope in politicians can only be beneficial.

It pleases me to believe that what the electoral spectacle enthusiasts call apathy is actually a healthy cynicism and a quite correct realisation that the whole thing is totally illusory. It's a filthy business and I will not disturb my mental balance by getting involved with the corrupt way of thinking that it entails - wouldn't it be just a little bit better if...? The act of voting is an acceptance of the entire pre-formed mindstate of the war machine. Conscious withdrawal of oneself from it, like withdrawal from the mental poisons of the television and newspapers, is a great step towards a self-sufficient engagement with reality and a step away from sacrificing one's independence of thought to the illusory and deadly security of the mass.

Minority Rights for Meat-eaters!

I believe it is time for the oppressed minority of meat-eaters to stand up for ourselves. Already in the forward-thinking USA, known worldwide for its protection of minorities (look what they've done for the Negroes and Indians), it is illegal to criticise the meat industry. Meat-eaters, as neither an ethnic nor a religious minority, find it difficult to gain recognition as the dietary minority that we are.

Being in perhaps a 1% minority in this country, the chances are that on average 99% of people a meat-eater meets will be raving, shouting, bomb-wielding vegans who snatch burgers out of their hands, hold them down and force-feed them organic beansprouts and curly kale. The overwhelming vegan majority, on the other hand, can largely take their lifestyle for granted as nearly everyone else is doing the same thing. To be a meat-eater in this country is to be forced to continually justify our way of life to nearly everyone we talk to.

Walking down any high street, the meat-eater is constantly bombarded by advertisements for the vegan lifestyle. Nearly every bus stop has a poster for Kentucky Fried Chickpeas or McTofu, while an endless series of pubs and restaurants parade their discriminatingly meat- and dairy-free menus. In this world where every high street has two or three independent wholefood shops selling organic fruit, veg, grains, beans, nuts and seeds, the meat-eater has to painstakingly seek out specialist supermarket suppliers to obtain a juicy piece of reconstituted factory-farmed carcass byproducts bound with synthetic fillers, laced with antibiotics, and sterilised with ammonia. The vegan lobby has overwhelming political power: the tempeh industry alone is worth hundreds of pounds a week, and contributed ten pounds last year to the Vegan Society.

We demand that meat-eaters be recognised as a dietary minority, and that acts of non-consumption of animal products, or incitement to non-consumption of animal products, should be recognised as hate crimes against us.

John Zerzan at the Cowley

Last Sunday I attended a talk and discussion with the well-known anarcho-primitivist theorist, John Zerzan, at the Cowley Club. The event had been much talked about before and was well attended. I was expecting an interesting debate as he has many fans in the anarchist scene but there are also others who are strongly critical of anarcho-primitivism.

I ended up sitting with John over lunch before the talk. I had the impression of a relaxed, friendly, open-minded and down to earth character. Much of the table conversation was taken up by an episode of a long-running debate between me and another Brighton anarcho character who like many others is strangely defensive of the absolute superiority of corporate medicine, in the patronising scoffing manner that often accompanies naive materialist beliefs. During this exchange, which was enthusiastic, John seemed to observe us with amused interest.

The first part of the talk was somewhat rambling. There didn't seem to be much of a theme to it. John didn't really get going until the questions started. I found it admirable that in general he did not give the impression of defending a stereotyped position, which allowed him to disarm some of the questioners who were doing that. Some points he answered with anthropological or political arguments; at other times he answered, "Yes, that's a good point," or just, "I don't know." However, after the talk I still had a similar feeling about anarcho-primitivism to before: that there is much strength in its critique, but that it is weaker as a positive theoretical position - indeed I sometimes feel that way about anarchism in general. In his essays and in this talk, John is very clear and quite plausible in tracing the roots of oppression and hierarchy to very early specialisation of labour, and crucially agriculture, but when expressing a positive position he tends to resort to slogans like, "Get rid of the lot."

I found it wryly amusing to observe people asking questions from their entrenched positions, especially the leftist ones and the anarcho-primitivists who were more attached to John's position than he was, and being effectively disarmed by his more open, questioning attitude. But there was some ambivalence about this, perhaps because of his need to maintain a political stance against the risk of degenerating from an activist to an intellectual: it seems inconsistent to express a flexible, exploratory position at one moment and then to define oneself as anarcho-primitivist, taking on the whole baggage of dogmas and sub-sub-cultural shibboleths. He seems to be caught between these two conflicting postures.

I was struck by the question of the value of taking up theoretical positions in general. What exactly does it mean to give one's assent to a particular theoretical proposition, especially when with these theoretical questions we are taking a certain critical perspective on discursive thought? To me, it's a bit like ticking an imaginary box in front of some sentence or other. From a certain perspective there is a self-contained circularity to discursive thought and the formation of theoretical positions, and some people do seem to get over-excited about it, as we saw at this event. Unfortunately in political activist culture there is a certain taboo around discussion - or, more importantly, around realisation - of mental faculties other than discursive thought, perhaps due to an assumed historical association of discursive thought with liberation from religious dogma. I suspect that the aggressive and surprising defence of corporate medicine I mentioned above is also in part connected with this questionable historical accident, and the equally questionable exclusive equation of corporate science with reason.

While I'm here, I might as well record something that struck me after that pre-lecture argument. Medical knowledge based on statistics (ignoring for now the essential corruption of the system that produces the knowledge) treats the body-mind relationship as a black box. What's going on inside the box is taboo. Subjectivity is regarded as meaningless. The variety of medicine that I practice, on the other hand, requires one to look inside the box. And what one finds inside the box is the truth of one's own subjective being. Facing one's own subjective reality may be a daunting experience - we see all our faults, our weakness and falsehood. It's not surprising that some people will go to almost any effort to avoid looking inside the box, even denying their own self-consciousness. Perseverance, however, yields a type of certainty which cannot be proved or disproved or explained intersubjectively but to which the piecemeal adolescent sneering of corporate statistical knowledge is pathetically illusory. There's no point in trying to argue about what's in the box with someone who refuses to look inside, but it does little harm to state my case here. The corporate medicine hardliners can sneer as much as they like.

Sledging on the Town Moor

There is a curious feature in the middle of Newcastle - a very large, open, rough field of about 3x3km called the Town Moor. I believe that it has been protected from development because the Freemen of the City have the right to graze cattle on it. Nelson Mandela, incidentally, is an honorary Freeman of Newcastle, though I'm not sure that he grazes any cattle on the Moor. The Town Moor hosts the famous annual gathering of travelling fairs called the Hoppings. It is augmented with some trees planted in the 1970s and a couple of artificial hills made from colliery spoil. The hills give reasonable views over the city, which is otherwise fairly flat. Satellite map.


Throughout my years in the city, I often used the Moor as a running and cycle track and as a pleasant and direct route to visit friends in Fenham. The most exciting activity was in snowy winters, when the larger of the two hills makes a long, fast sledging run. The view below is the gentle side slope, not the steeper face used for sledging:



This is a good view, from the Chronicle:



Sledging on the Moor is a vigorously enjoyable and quite unique experience. The run is exciting enough to attract a contingent of adults as well as children and their families. There's always a fun and friendly atmosphere at this spontaneous gathering, with accents from all parts of the city and beyond, and vehicles ranging from plastic bags to traditional wooden sleds. After the first day's use, the snow tends to be well packed down and frozen over, making it very fast. At night the hill is sufficiently lit from the city's lights for the fun to continue. I recommend sledging belly-down, head-first, steering with the hands, on the second night of freezing. Using the feet for steering creates too much friction and, if going feet-first, a blinding spray of snow. It's quite a thrill skimming down at high speed, steering with subtle hand pressure, marginally avoiding the trail of people who inexplicably walk right up the middle of the fastest sledge run. You need intense concentration to steer around them, and to stop before the rocks and fence at the bottom. Despite all the hazards and the usual trail of wrecked sledges, I have only heard of one serious injury, a broken leg many years ago.


Newcastle Council information.
Interesting pictures of the Hoppings, 1938.

Fash on show: Manchester EDL Rally and Counter-Demo

A disturbing and confusing day, the first time I have seen a fascist rally. This lot take political irrationalism to its utmost - it's not so much believing an irrational ideology as having no ideology at all. The theoretical basis of the English Defence League is barely sufficient to produce a few pathetic slogans - "Engerland, Engerland, Engerland," "EDL! EDL!" and once, "We want our country back!", a little surreal in the middle of an ordinary shopping day in the centre of Manchester. Looking at their website it is immediately clear that their ideology is so flimsy and preposterous that no-one could possibly believe it after a moment's thought.

This leads me to suspect that the whole thing is a cleverly constructed media campaign by a few fairly intelligent, though not very wise, leaders. The aim seems to be to create a discourse in the media of a confrontation between Muslims and white supremacists, by a series of carefully manipulated media stunts in various cities. I presume the leaders hope that by doing this, the media constructed discourse will become a nightmarish reality in which they will have the chance to take power. The strategy closely follows that of Hitler and Goebbels in the early days in Berlin - a small bunch of despised cranks creating publicity for themselves by causing confrontation on the streets.

The mainstream media functions by creating pseudo-concepts within its own discourse and repeating them until they become established as background facts, upon which further discourse can then be constructed. The pseudo-concept of Islamic fundamentalism or extremism is one of the clearest examples. A totally meaningless phrase, not least because any belief system is fundamental and extreme when seen from a certain perspective, it has been repeated daily for the past few years until everyone seems to tacitly agree that it exists, which then allows endless discussion on what to do about it, from the liberals who carefully make a distinction between nice Muslims and naughty Muslims, to the likes of the EDL, who use the pseudo-concept as a pretext to try and create racial tension on the streets. The point is that whatever position someone takes within the discourse, they still implicity reinforce the pseudo-concept. So the aim of the EDL leadership appears to be to create another pseudo-concept within the discourse - a concept of escalating racial confrontation.

The fascists on the streets of Manchester - a disturbingly large number of them teenagers - didn't seem to know what they were trying to do or what they believed in. A friend told me that one of them said he was marching against women being raped. Very few seemed to be aware of the existence of left-wing political organisations - the 'Reds' of traditional fascist demonology. In the fluid and confusing situations of the day, I frequently had the strange experience of rubbing shoulders with small groups of swaggering skinheads. Rather than immediately jumping on me or even insulting me as one of the 'Reds', there was a strange ambiguous stand-off, a kind of awkward politeness. Even when I jumped a railing to avoid some over-excited riot police and found myself alone in front of a large crowd of EDL supporters, all that happened was a couple of those nearest to me half-heartedly shouted 'Scum!' as I made a dignified exit. Earlier, a small group of EDL youths were being forcibly de-masked by mounted police. Remonstrating with the police, they seemed to look at me in appeal against the unfairness of it. Far from recognising me as a deadly enemy in front of whom they were being humiliated, they apparently had not the slightest idea of what I was doing there.

It was unfortunate that the police interfered with the anti-fascists' ethical duty to physically prevent the fascists from marching. Because of the police, what would have been an overwhelming anti-fascist victory was turned into a frustrating stand-off where the main bulk of both sides was contained in police cordons in Piccadilly Gardens, leaving small mobile groups wandering around aimlessly. At one point a large group of fascists rampaged pointlessly up and down the street for a bit until they were dispersed. Anti-fascist groups outside the cordons were too small to be effective. However, at some point fairly early in the afternoon, there was a confusing incident that appeared to be, possibly, a half-hearted attempt by the EDL to have a march. The police had to use vans and dogs to move the surrounded EDL supporters through the jeering anti-fascist crowd, bringing them a couple of hundred yards down the main street and then back to Piccadilly Gardens. It wasn't at all clear whether the police or the EDL knew what they were trying to do.

Although it was not possible to physically block the fascist march, there was a certain satisfaction in seeing them surrounded by hundreds of people expressing their contempt in no uncertain terms. The hardened NF veterans may easily dismiss it as the expected behaviour of the Reds, but maybe some of the new recruits will have to wonder why everyone hates them so much wherever they go; though having seen the intellectual quality of the far Right's new generation it's difficult to imagine them thinking at all.

It did make me idly wonder where the cynical grizzled recruiting-sergeants find their baton fodder. Perhaps a little feverish after little sleep and seven hours on the streets, I imagined them wandering Britain's urban wastelands with large nets, searching for bands of swaggering dysfunctional feral teenagers, herding them into vans and driving to various cities where they open the van doors and stand well back, possibly after a bit of drilling on the way - "Engerland, Engerland... Enger... um... how does it go?"

Kingley Vale

Kingley Vale, north of Chichester, has been one of my favourite places since I moved to Brighton. I have spent the night up there several times, one summer solstice keeping vigil with the movements of the moon and stars. Recently I went for the first time in a couple of years.

I took the train to Chichester, which has shockingly increased to £10 each way. There is a bus, but it takes several hours. I arrived mid afternoon and walked up the Centurion Way cycle track from the centre of Chichester. The beginning of the track is slightly difficult to find and would benefit from some more signage, but once on it I was safely away from traffic and supplied with plentiful juicy blackberries. I had a pleasant conversation with a local chap on his walk home from work. From the top of the cycle track I took a slightly different route from usual, taking the bridleway along the east edge of the beginning of the Kingley Vale environs, rather than walking along the road to the car park at West Stoke. There is little to choose between the two routes and the entire area smelt strongly of anaerobically fermenting slurry.

Crossing the boundary into the Kingley Vale nature reserve, there seemed to be a subtle but palpable change in the air quality and the nature of the landscape. I felt a sense of relief, nourished by the healthy greenery, and remembered just how beautiful this little enclave is. The sun was descending as I made my way through the woodland paths into the start of the ancient yew tree grove. I had a quick break for one of my home-made energy bars before the difficult climb through the woods to the hilltop at Devil's Humps.

The Devil seems to have been particularly active in Sussex, leaving humps, jumps and dykes all over the landscape. The Humps are a set of three tumuli on the high South Downs at Kingley Vale, disappointingly not laid out on the pattern of Orion's belt. They are fairly large and collapsed at the top, presumably where they have been raided at some point in the past. I am informed that round barrows like these are Bronze Age in origin, while long barrows, also appearing at Kingly Vale, are Neolithic. That's about the limit of my historical knowledge on the matter. The view from the top of the tumuli extends spectacularly in three directions, over Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight to the South, and across to the North Downs in the North. The woods behind the tumulus in the above photo are where I rough camped that night among the ancient yew trees.



I went to bed early but got up later to look at the stars, reading my star chart by the light of my mobile phone as my head torch had failed. I took my camping mat and lay on my back in the dip at the top of a tumulus. I am beginning to try and learn my way around the constellations. The stars in almost half the sky were not visible due to the light of the moon, so I could not find Ursa Major, which was the starting point for the first beginners' star chart in my book. I recognised Orion, and a very bright object I guessed was Venus. Even without knowing the constellations, it was fascinating to look at the celestial objects. I probably spent about an hour there.

I got up early, after a night of the strange deep dreams I often experience in the yew forest. I had planned to walk down to the coast but vacillated about my route when I realised the one I had chosen was too long for me to enjoyably walk with a full pack. I spent a slightly frustrating day walking through second-rate scenery, frequently changing my mind about where I was going. I soon realised that Kingley Vale was by far the prettiest place in the area and I wouldn't find anywhere better. My mood was improved by frequent foraged meals of plums, blackberries and yew berries (yes, just spit out the seeds). Finally I headed towards the coast, attracted by a National Trust area marked on the map at Bosham Quay. The tidal areas were quite interesting, including a great crop of marsh samphire which I joyfully sampled. However the coastal track to Bosham Quay was closed by the tide. I decided to head back to Chichester via the Roman palace at Fishbourne, which I did not actually visit as it turned out you have to pay to see it. Next time I think I'll just spend the day at Kingley Vale.

Zeitgeist 2: Technocratic utopianism

In a slightly desperate search for a new perspective on things, I recently watched Zeitgeist 2: Addendum. I had little objection to the first half of the film, mainly devoted to a further explanation of the fractional reserve banking system and its far-reaching implications. However it might have been useful to set this in the context of the longer term history of capitalism and imperialism in general. From the anarchist point of view that I hold, power is more important than money and has preceded it historically. So, while I agree that the mathematical instruments of financial speculation are a basic mechanism of power today, it would be useful to see the current speculative economy in historical perspective against other forms of power and oppression. There were occasional dark hints about 'the bankers' and their long-term plans, reminding us that we are on the territory of conspiracy culture. Not that I have any definite opinion on whether there is a great millenia-old conspiracy or not - how would I know? - but perhaps it should have been made clear what exactly the narrator was talking about. It was gratifying to see a film coming from conspiracy territory talk about the workings of the IMF, World Bank and 'economic hitmen' - topics that are often too tediously mundane for serious conspiracy heads in comparison to the intergalactic drama of Sirius, Draco et al.

At about the halfway point, the narrator states that the mechanism of fractional reserve banking is only a symptom of a deeper problem. My ears pricked up at this, but the diagnosis of the deeper problem seemed to be a slightly facile statement that stupid forms of religion are stupid. Amongst the quantity of Krishnamurti footage, I did not see a clear distinction made between the naive propositional beliefs supposedly required from followers of mass organised religions (a stereotyping of religious 'believers' questionable in itself) and a genuine spirituality in which the higher faculties of human consciousness are developed and explored. This argument seemed to be a form of crude rationalism in which the only way to understand the world is to question one's conception of it in a discursive way. Of course rational questioning of received beliefs is necessary, but this must include questioning the received belief in materialist rationalism, and in my opinion the recovery of the human faculty for non-discursive spiritual knowledge is one of the most essential tasks in building a sane and compassionate society that can live in at least relative harmony with nature. I understand that the dogmas, repressions and persecutions inflicted by the Catholic Church and other such political organisations have given a bad name to any mention of non-discursive knowledge, but that is no reason to replace them with rationalist dogmas which are arguably even more harmful in their effects, not least because rationalist dogmas are presented as anti-dogmas.

This leads me to my main point, which is that the second half of the film consists almost entirely of an advert for a naive technocratic utopian future. The argument, very similar to that of Marx, is that technology is essentially or potentially liberating but has been used as a tool of enslavement through the creation of artificial scarcity, and so in a high-tech society free from the profit motive, technology could finally free human beings from earning our bread with the sweat of our brows (or someone else's brows). A series of sci-fi animations are shown of space-age cities with efficient rapid transit systems and other impressive looking devices.

There are many obvious problems with this vision of the future apart from its crass, wide-eyed naivety. Firstly, if we look at the history of technology, especially industrial technology, we can see that in fact it has almost invariably been used to enslave people under the claim of liberating us. It seems highly dubious to claim that a phenomenon, in this case high technology, is essentially or potentially different from what it has actually been in almost all cases. E.P. Thompson provides documentary evidence in The Making of the English Working Class that the introduction of weaving machines - a crucial first step in the early development of industrial capitalism - was done for conscious and explicit reasons of social control. The introduction of machines allowed capitalists to bind the previously relatively independent hand-loom weavers into a regular factory timetable, to reduce wages and striking power by reducing the level of skill required, and to bring in lower-paid children and women. The number of hours worked by weavers increased, their earnings decreased, and the imposed discipline of the factory system allowed the factory-owning class greater control over the workers' culture. Far from being irrationally obstinate or Romantic stick-in-the-muds, the heroic direct-action revolutionaries of the Luddite uprising understood all of this, which explains both why they enjoyed such strong support from their own communities, and why machine-breaking was punishable by death. Now it seems odd to theorise a difference between what these weaving machines meant in actual historical fact, and what they could have meant in their ahistorical essence. This is not an odd example but an absolutely fundamental historical step in the development of capitalism. Nowadays, some critical thinkers celebrate the function of the Internet in spreading their ideas. This is to miss the fact that the enormous majority of electronic communication is within corporations. Whatever power it gives to us, it gives exponentially greater power to our enemies. We might also reflect on the sad circumstance that we can communicate electronically with someone hundreds of miles away, but are often unable to talk face-to-face with our own neighbours.

Secondly, all current high technology is dependent on the exploitation of natural resources through violence against ecosystems and indigenous people. Perhaps it is true, as the narrator claims, that technocrats have the know-how to make intercontinental maglev trains run at 400 mph, or to produce all the energy we need from solar power. Impressive and convenient as such marvels would be, they are all dependent on supplies of minerals torn from the Earth at the expense of the unfortunate people who live in mineral-rich but economically powerless parts of the world. Versions of high-tech devices that do not depend on rare mineral inputs are pure fantasy. What will the post-capitalist technocrats do if indigenous people object to their ecosystems being destroyed to mine rare minerals for the hyper-gadgets this film claims are so important for human freedom? How do people who live in low-tech societies in relative harmony with nature fit into the utopian vision? Will they have to be strongly persuaded of the benefits of the global technocracy, as they are now being persuaded of the benefits of global capitalism?

The focus on heroic high-tech solutions to our problems also obscures the many problems that cannot be solved by technology. The narrator speculates that robots will be able to carry out surgery. Perhaps. But heroic technological interventions are far from the only aspect of health and illness. Drugs and surgery may be able to save people from critical illness in certain cases; they cannot make us healthy. Only low-tech or no-tech approaches such as wholefoods, mental relaxation, exercise and holistic disciplines like the internal martial arts can lead to vibrant health. The heroic high-tech approach also seems to downgrade the crucially important art of food production. Will food in the techno-utopia be produced by machines? This is demonstrably inefficient and ecologically destructive. The high-tech standardisation, mechanisation, processing and transportation of food has been disastrous in many ways, and not just because of the profit motive. The only way to produce fresh, nutritious food in relative harmony with nature is by hand on a small local scale, using crop varieties locally adapted for micro-variations in conditions, saving seed, and growing mostly for consumption not exchange. Or will an army of small organic food growing serfs be left in the shadows at the fringes of space-age megacities as the spinning flying disks and supersonic maglev trains zoom over them?

Finally, high-tech inevitably means centralisation. Mind-boggling hyper-gadgets cannot be made without enormous investment - whether of money or of time, effort and organisation - in materials, equipment and specialist skills. The large scale and complication of the infrastructure needed to produce such items would be beyond the reach of any community small enough to make decisions at the face-to-face level. In a technocratic world, it is inevitable that some people will have more knowledge and therefore more control over the technology than others. It is inconceivable that everyone can be an engineer, metallurgist, materials scientist, and so on, all at the same time. A technocratic elite would inevitably have more power because they would control the technology. Even the most exciting and inclusive space-age domed megacities would have to be planned and that means telling people where they must live. Who's doing the telling? What if the people don't want to move? In my opinion, political freedom requires economic self-sufficiency. I and my friends cannot build a maglev train but we can grow food on an allotment or build a house from locally available low-tech materials, given the necessary skills, which are relatively simple. The skills of self-sufficiency at the community level provide independence from centralised economic structures, whether those structures involve money or not. A striking life experience for me was staying in a beautiful 250-year old house in Southern France that was built by a peasant family from the natural materials to hand - rocks, earth, rough-finished timber, straw and hay. To me, those are the kinds of skills and values that will allow humanity to build a future in which we no longer destroy ourselves by destroying nature, and they would not be promoted by submitting ourselves to the expertise of a technocratic elite on whom we would depend for our survival. To me, an ecological future must be low-tech, decentralised, largely self-sufficient at the community level, and based on a recovery of non-discursive spiritual knowledge - what we might call the technology of consciousness.