Critique of Green Anarchy
by Dave Contradiction

In this essay I aim to critique certain green anarchist perspectives, using the “What is Green Anarchy”(1) essay from Green Anarchy(#17) magazine as a starting point. It is clear from the beginning of the essay that there are many ways to describe what green anarchists are against: “domestication, patriarchy, division of labor, technology, production, representation, alienation, objectification, control, the destruction of life, etc.” And certainly I can look at this list and get a good image in my head of something menacing, something nightmarish. And I would argue that this is exactly what is intended. If these are the hallmarks of civilization, shouldn’t we all agree that civilization is certainly out there, is certainly rather dull and dreary, and may even want to kill us? Wouldn’t you oppose a “death-culture” that is “destructive of life”? If I was a green anarchist I could undoubtedly feel a sense of moral outrage against this “death-culture,” against civilization. But “morality” too should undoubtedly go on that laundry list. Green anarchists are not interested in morality. It is only their approach that is moral. Civilization is bad because it is out to destroy life. But what is civilization? “Green anarchists tend to view civilization as the logic, institutions, and physical apparatus of domestication, control, and domination.” More bad words! Green anarchists want to “destroy all the institutions and physical manifestations of this nightmare.” Civilization is a spectre that haunts the minds of those who oppose it, a “death-culture” manifesting itself in the world of the living. In the essay, civilization appears as a “logic,” a “notion,” and a “world-view” for a reason. Green Anarchy endows this “logic” with incredible powers, not because it is trying to be poetic, but because their critique of ideology, itself a spectre of a critique, flies right back in their faces.

Ideology as Coherence

“Anarchism,” we are told, “has become too systematic, fixed, and ideological – everything anarchy is not.” So anarchism is to be rejected in the name of “anarchy,” which is “a formless, fluid, organic, experience embracing multifaceted visions of liberation, both personal and collective, and always open.” If I replace my fixed ideal with a formless ideal or the ideal of formlessness, have I exorcized the beast of ideology? Anarchism is an ideology, but primitivism is “simply an anthropological, intellectual, and experiential examination of the origins of civilization and the circumstances that led to this nightmare we currently inhabit.” Anarchism is fixed and ideological, primitivism “simply . . . an examination.” Why? Because it sounds better. If, perhaps like many in the green anarchist milieu, you have read some Derrick Jensen but John Zerzan is far too academic in tone to bother with, you might find it easy to equate primitivism with a critique of civilization that is rather formless yet informative, “simply an anthropological, intellectual, and experiential examination.” Anarchy and primitivism are not theories detached from reality; they are an “experience” and “experiential.” Anarchy is an experience that embraces things! If you want to embrace and experience things, steer clear of the anarchism of the old white men and their western ideas! For green anarchists, “ideology” and “the left” are merely ideas that we “need to get beyond.” How or why these things are produced by the current social order is not of interest to them. An approach rooted in opposition to the social relations imposed by capital and state may not “get beyond” ideology, but such an approach can at least make a coherent and practical critique of it. Green Anarchystarts from the logics and worldviews of the civilized vs. the uncivilized, and proceeds from there to reject the idea of ideology. It only follows that if we free ourselves from our civilized urges and inhibitions, we can become feral beings and bring down civilization.

Technology as Monster(2)

Most green anarchists “reject technology completely.” Technology “is not neutral.” Most green anarchists “reject science as a method of understanding the world.” “Science is not neutral.” Now, of course these things are not neutral if we are talking about specific technologies and scientific practices, but does this imply that science or technology as a whole is either good or bad? Green anarchists are hoping that it does. And they have many arguments to use against those who say that science and technology are good. “The values and goals of those who produce and control technology are always embedded within it,” states the essay. This is an interesting idea, but I am wondering what I am supposed to be learning from it, in accordance with “the values and goals of those” that produced this essay. Is it that the use of certain techniques may imply certain values or goals, or is it that technology literally has values and goals, now that we have embedded them in it (original sin)? Green Anarchy writes that the technological system “seems to have an existence independent from the humans who created it.” So perhaps I have underestimated them. Perhaps it only seems this way. But then at the end of the same paragraph, we learn that “the ideal for which the technological system strives is the mechanization of everything it encounters.” How does the technological system strive for this if it only seems to have an independent existence? Now perhaps I am being unfair. We often imbue abstractions with human qualities without actually meaning that they literally have these qualities. But I am not even claiming that green anarchists think that the technological system strives for things, only that this is the only way that they can describe it. The contradiction is that if they described technology as any less than a monster, they would open the gates for a critical appraisal of technology that is not a simple and complete rejection. Thus, technology is defined as “a complex system involving division of labor, resource extraction, and exploitation for the benefit of those who implement its process.” A fittingly monstrousdefinition.

Green Anarchy describes class domination as “a tool of the industrial system.” For some reason I have trouble envisioning class domination itself as a tool. Even if I thought of “tool” as a bad word, I don’t think I would see class domination as a tool just because I dislike it. Green anarchists must see civilization as something that is always present, always behind everything (“it is a mechanistic worldview that is behind industrialism”). We know it only through its tools. Is it any wonder that “organization” and “the left” do not need to be critiqued as they exist in capitalist society? These things are “coercive,” “manipulative,” and “controlling” tools. They are obviously a product of civilization. “Domestication is the process that civilization uses to indoctrinate and control life according to its logic,” states the essay. It was the “notion of ownership” that “laid the foundation for social hierarchy as property and power emerged.” I think I have given enough examples of the sort of language that Green Anarchy is using. It is a language that gives agency to ideas and divorces the problems of the world (a section of the essay is titled “the problem of technology”) from human action. Civilized ideas are the basis of technology, which determines the organization of society. Humanity, therefore, cannot consciously shape human society. We cannot change life. At best we can attack the machine. And here is the great contradiction. Ideas are powerful enough to be behind this whole mess, but our ideas and desires are powerless compared to technology and therefore we cannot consciously organize society(3). The only way green anarchists get out of this contradiction (albeit only apparently) is by saying that only by realizing that civilization is behind all of this, can we stop civilization from imposing its logic on us. It is, after all, a matter of ideology, of having the correct ideas.

Concluding Thoughts

At a time when the green anarchist milieu seems to be drifting more and more toward pure spirituality, re-wilding as lifestyle, and romanticization of “collapse,” I think it is important to look at the theory produced within this milieu, and without just laughing or complaining about John Zerzan’s most recent insults, critique the theoretical approach that leads to seeing revolution simply as a “life-way” and “re-wilding” as anarchist practice. This approach does not fail to influence the content of publications like Green Anarchy, which is so often dominated by articles that constantly use the words “feral” and “wild” in an embarrassing mix of banal poetry and platitude. If green anarchy is merely a personal life-way and experience, this does not exempt it from critique as an anarchist theory. For example, how can Green Anarchy possibly subscribe to biocentrism and dismiss anarchism as ideology in the same essay? What is the relation between the reliance on distinctions such as civilized/uncivilized and domesticated/wild and the revolutionary life-way of becoming uncivilized? Are these not used as moral distinctions within a particular subculture? These distinctions, at least as green anarchists use them, are simply most serviceable in that context. I don’t see any revolutionary potential in the spiritualistic direction that the green anarchist milieu is moving in, or in the tendency to see industrial collapse as a good thing in and of itself. Our ability to be critical and “put everything into question” is not synonymous with our ability to abstractly reject aspects of material reality or even to materially reject abstractions.

1. http://www.greenanarchy.org/index.php?action=viewwritingdetail&writingId=283&returnto=about
Everything that I quote comes from this essay.
2. See Gilles Dauve’s “For a World Without Moral Order.” Dauve writes that class society produces fascinating monsters, representing evil and inhumanity. http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/3909/moral/moral.html
3. While some anarchists (but I doubt many anti-state communists) will have a bit of trouble getting behind the idea of consciously organizing society, I think what I am saying makes sense even with a very loose conception of what this might mean

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