What kinds exist? In what environments do they thrive? Where did the bizarre notion of the “corporation” come from anyway?
6) A THEORY OF POLITICAL HAPPINESS
Rather than just a theory of why most contempo- rary people never experience it. That would be easy. not so far away as they like to imagine—a man with
a big stick, trained in exactly how hard to hit people with it, would rapidly appear to eject them.
In fact the threat of that man with the stick permeates our world at every moment; most of us have given up even thinking of crossing the innu- merable lines and barriers he creates, just so we don’t have to remind ourselves of his existence. If you see a hungry woman standing several yards away from a huge pile of food—a daily occurrence for most of us who live in cities—there is a reason you can’t just take some and give it to her. A man with a big stick will come and very likely hit you. Anarchists, in contrast, have always delighted in reminding us of him. Residents of the squatter community of Christiana, Denmark, for example, have a Christmastide ritual where they dress in Santa suits, take toys from department stores and distribute them to children on the street, partly just so everyone can relish the images of the cops beating down Santa and snatching the toys back from crying children.
Such a theoretical emphasis opens the way to a theory of the relation of power not with knowl- edge, but with ignorance and stupidity. Because violence, particularly structural violence, where all the power is on one side, creates ignorance. If you have the power to hit people over the head when- ever you want, you don’t have to trouble yourself too much figuring out what they think is going on, and therefore, generally speaking, you don’t. Hence the sure-fire way to simplify social arrangements, to ignore the incredibly complex play of perspectives, passions, insights, desires, and mutual understand- ings that human life is really made of, is to make a
pleasure. If one wishes to emphasize commonality, the easiest way is to point out that they also feel pain.
9) ONE OR SEVERAL THEORIES OF ALIENATION
This is the ultimate prize: what, precisely, are the possible dimensions of non-alienated experience? How might its modalities be catalogued, or consid- ered? Any anarchist anthropology worth its salt would have to pay particular attention to this ques- tion because this is precisely what all those punks, hippies, and activists of every stripe most look to anthropology to learn. It’s the anthropologists, so terrified of being accused of romanticizing the societies they study that they refuse to even suggest there might be an answer, who leave them no recourse but to fall into the arms of the real romanticizers. Primitivists like John Zerzan, who in trying to whittle away what seems to divide us from pure, unmediated experience, end up whit- tling away absolutely everything. Zerzan’s increas- ingly popular works end up condemning the very existence of language, math, time keeping, music, and all forms of art and representation. They are all written off as forms of alienation, leaving us with a kind of impossible evolutionary ideal: the only truly non-alienated human being was not even quite human, but more a kind of perfect ape, in some kind of currently-unimaginable telepathic connection with its fellows, at one with wild nature, living maybe about a hundred thousand years ago. True revolution could only mean somehow returning to that. How it is that affi- cionados of this sort of thing still manage to
7) HIERARCHY
A theory of how structures of hierarchy, by their own logic, necessarily create their own counter- image or negation. They do, you know.
8) SUFFERING AND PLEASURE: ON THE PRIVATIZATION OF DESIRE
It is common wisdom among anarchists, autono- mists, Situationists, and other new revolutionaries that the old breed of grim, determined, self-sacri- ficing revolutionary, who sees the world only in terms of suffering will ultimately only produce more suffering himself. Certainly that’s what has tended to happen in the past. Hence the emphasis on pleasure, carnival, on creating “temporary autonomous zones” where one can live as if one is already free. The ideal of the “festival of resistance” with its crazy music and giant puppets is, quite consciously, to return to the late medieval world of huge wickerwork giants and dragons, maypoles and morris dancing; the very world the Puritan
pioneers of the “capitalist spirit” hated so much and ultimately managed to destroy. The history of capi- talism moves from attacks on collective, festive consumption to the promulgation of highly personal, private, even furtive forms (after all, once they had all those people dedicating all their time to producing stuff instead of partying, they did have to figure out a way to sell it all); a process of the privitization of desire. The theoretical question: how to reconcile all this with the disturbing theo- retical insight of people like Slavoj Zizek: that if one wishes to inspire ethnic hatred, the easiest way to do so is to concentrate on the bizarre, perverse ways in which the other group is assumed to pursue
Q:How many voters does it take to change a light bulb?
A:None. Because voters can’t change anything. There is of course no single anarchist program—nor could there really be—but it might be helpful to end by giving the reader some idea about current direc- tions of thought and organizing.