Decolonising anarchism, according to Jesse Cohn, amounts to freeing it from its modernist assumptions: that culture is opposed to nature, that human culture progresses by an expanding autonomy from the heteronomy of nature, a progress grounded in the technological dominion over the natural world (and the human worlds closest to nature, e.g., those of the “indigenous” of the americas) and the freedom of human thought and life from the illusion of its dependency on transcendent sources (e.g., religion). To the extent that anarchism is imbued with or assumes such ideas, it is modernist and colonialist, susceptible to all of the hierarchies and forms of oppression that it has claimed to contest in its brief modern history.
It is for this reason that Cohn speaks of decolonising anarchism as a demodernisation of anarchism, something which then implies re-thinking and possibly repudiating notions of autonomy if conceived in opposition to nature (with this last equally in need of re-conceptualisation), that is, endeavouring to imagine freedom rooted in a nature no longer perceived as inanimate matter or as living, but “unthinking and unfree”. Technologies would also have to be evaluated on the grounds of their contribution to communities of conviviality rather than to a blind instrumental efficacy that threatens to engender new forms of ever greater and more intensive control. And equally significant, a non-modern anarchism could then, and should, re-evaluate its impetuous dismissal of religion or spirituality, if thesecan be thought of and illustrated historically by immanent and non-alienating forms (e.g., animism).
Liberated then from their modernist garb, anarchists and the historical tradition of anarchism may more fruitfully engage with and learn from, as well as contribute to, other ways of being in the world that fail or refuse to assume a place in the developmental narrative of enlightenment and capitalist progressivism.
Cohn’s essay is an important contribution to what will continue to be an ongoing theoretical reflection on and practical experimentation with other ways of living anarchy. It calls to mind the earlier work of the recently deceased anarchist, Peter Lamborn Wilson/Hakim Bey on “spiritual anarchism”, or older “anti-modernist” and/or Christian anarchists.
Difficult questions however remain, it seems to us, for any effort to spiritualise anarchism. Contrary to what Cohn seems to suggest, there is not one modernism or a single story of modernity. European modernity was always a changing confluence of multiple intellectual tributaries, far too unstable to be reduced to the nature-culture divide, or to this divide being interpreted without ambiguity.
The invitation to explore the indigenous worlds of the “new world” and their “philosophies”, their “ontologies” and “ethics”, is of enormous significance, but if merely placed in opposition to a european modernity, it suggests two doubtful simplifications: european modernity versus indigenous “holism”. Europe’s modernity however was never homogeneous or completely totalising (however “genocidal” it could be, to speak with Pier Paolo Pasolini), as the indigenous worlds have never been a single cultural monolith from which could be read a single, ethically good way to be (as Cohn himself suggests when he cites Eduardo Galeano: “I believe in the legacies that multiply human freedom, and not in those that cage it . . .. I am not proposing a return to the sacrificial rites that offered up human hearts to the gods, nor am I praising the despotism of the Inca or Aztec monarchs.”).
Without wishing by any means to dismiss the idea of demodernising and spiritualising anarchism, it is by no means obvious that these later must or even can involve some form of animism, at least beyond the worlds where such forms no longer exist. But even if it were possible, and desirable, would this radically or completely eliminate the nature-culture divide if this latter is interpreted as a simplified conceptual reflection of something much deeper, namely, that distance that all reflexive thought must assume in relation to what is thought, as a condition for its very possibility. This is not to divorce thought, the mind, culture, from nature, but rather to point to the disharmony and dissonance that can always exist between these dimensions of human existence and which are the experiential sources of what we designate by the word “autonomy”. One could imagine these different dimensions, and others, as modes of a singular reality (echoing Spinoza), in which case they would not be fated to produce the violent dualisms inherent in modern, colonial european thought and practice, but rather could serve as the basis for a critical ontology of that same modernism.
One can also ask whether or not anarchists really need to lose any time with these questions when what is at stake are matters of justice and that it is upon common issues of justice that more general political struggles can emerge. The anarchist theorist has to give way to the anarchist militant, and it will be in struggle that ideas will emerge, as has always been the case with anarchism.
In sum, the paths towards a decolonisation and demodernistation of anarchism are potentially many, and it is not even clear that these are the most appropriate terms for what is called for, or that if they are, they must be employed with considerable caution and care.
Jesse Cohn does just that and our questions are meant only to push along the debate.
Once again, by way of Lundi Matin (#341, 30/05/2022), we share below the third episode of Diamant Palace, with Alain Damasio et Vinciane Despret, from Le Biais Vert (available with english language subtitles). For the first episode, click here.
“A robot may not injure a human being” is the first law of robotics formulated by science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. At what moment can it be stated that a technical development can hurt us, do us harm? Is it still synonymous with human, ecological and social progress? What is the worldview of the handful of people who control the tech industries? Is the machine still seen as a tool for human use or does it now develop itself for itself, according to its own logic? Will technologies save us from the climate disaster? On the 1310th day of occupation of the Diamant Palace, the pirate radio questions the place of technologies in our contemporary societies and projects itself into the future. Meanwhile, in the techno-chapel, spied on by the portraits of the new great tech gurus, Alain and Vinciane are building a Kapla tower.
It’s been almost two years since the 2020 protests in Belarus. The anarchist movement, just like the rest of activists and jounalists, has faced the biggest crackdown ever. Many activists had to leave the country, others got behind bars. ABC-Belarus continues its activity and needs support more than ever. At the moment, there are about 30 imprisoned anarchists and antifascists in Belarus and the number keeps growing.
We are in the middle of a big trial with 10 defendants that would probably last for the whole summer. Read more about the case here. Every week just this case alone costs us 3000 euros. Without your help, we won’t be able to provide support in this trial for long, meaning that the activists will lose their opportunity to get legal aid. Other comrades need lawyer’s visits, food parcels, appeals – all this requires more money than we are able to gather.
Any donations are more than welcome! Please share this call with your comrades and groups, organize fundraising events for us and spread the word about Belarusian imprisoned anarchists.
We share, once again, an excellent video interview with Peter Lamborn Wilson/Hakim Bey dedicated to communities of resistance; a rich summary of Wilson’s work, keeping alive a non-ideological, open anarchism.
… the TAZ is in some sense a tactic of disappearance.
Hakim Bey
Peter Lamborn Wilson or Hakim Bey coined the phrase “Temporary Autonomous Zone” to refer to autonomous communities of conviviality, of freedom and equality, creating thereby a different time, breaking away from the time of technological and capitalist “progress”.
TAZs happen as expressions of rooted and bodily sharing, of mutuality and joy. Wilson did not invent the TAZ, as a human reality, but endeavoured to conceptualise and theorise it in such a way as to bring it to consciousness and to have it serve as the ground for deepening anarchism and anarchist politics.
Peter Lamborn Wilson died this last May 22. In memory and celebration of Wilson’s work, of his lucidity and eloquence, of his engagement with what can perhaps be called an “anarchist ethics”, we share below the second chapter of his essay “The Temporary Autonomous Zone”, entitled “Waiting for the Revolution”, along with an interview that he did for The Brooklyn Rail Newspaper (07-08/2004), a video recorded interview, a brief video of a “visit” to Wilson and a video interpretation of his text, “Poetic Terrorism”.
The philosophy of anarchism is included in the word “Liberty,” yet it is comprehensive enough to include all things else that are conducive to progress. No barriers whatever to human progression, to thought, or investigation are placed by anarchism; nothing is considered so true or so certain, that future discoveries may not prove it false; therefore, it has but one infallible, unchangeable motto, “Freedom”: Freedom to discover any truth, freedom to develop, to live naturally and fully. Other schools of thought are composed of crystallized ideas—principles that are caught and impaled between the planks of long platforms, and considered too sacred to be disturbed by a close investigation. In all other “issues” there is always a limit; some imaginary boundary line beyond which the searching mind dare not penetrate, lest some pet idea melt into a myth.
Lucy Parsons, The Principles of Anarchism
Without pretending to exhaust the extensive writings, or the extraordinary life, of Lucy Gonzales Parsons (1853-1942), we share below a brief selection of a body of work whose passion defies the passing of time.
Russell Maroon Shoatz, activist and writer, was a founding member of the revolutionary group Black Unity Council in 1969, as well as a member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army. In 1972, he would be convicted for a 1970 killing of a Philadelphia police officer. He would spend 49 years in prison (22 of which in solitary confinement), being released in October of 2021 on grounds of compassion, only to die in December of the same year. (“Former Black Panther Russell “Maroon” Shoatz Freed From Prison After 49 Years”, Truthout 26/10/2021)
While not describing himself as an anarchist, Shoatz’s history of decentralised slave and indigenous rebellions in the americas looks “a whole lot like anarchism”. For Shoatz, it was in the diffused, archipelago like resistance of autonomous maroon communities, that colonialism and plantation slavery would find its greatest opposition, to which the colonial would be forced to respond.
Against the “Dragon” of colonial authority, Shoatz celebrates the “Hydra” tradition of a black-indigenous “anarchism” that did not bear this name, but from which anarchists, and others, must learn.
We share below two essays by Russell Maroon Shoatz, to celebrate his legacy and as reflections on what may be called “black anarchism”.
At the present time, the world is at an impasse. This can only mean one thing: not that there is no way out, but that the time has come to abandon all the old ways, which have led to fraud, tyranny, and murder.
Aimé Césaire
I’m not here to explain Black anarchism, because Black anarchism explains itself. The times we’re living in speak to its relevance. Politics that can conceive liberation only through the nation-state apparatus cannot truly serve people who always fall outside of its considerations.
As we continue to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s birthday, we share Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last interview, on the eve of his murder …
The very few people who made history are those who said no, not the courtesans and the cardinals’ assistants. Therefore, an act of refusal must be total and not partial, in a nutshell it must not focus on this or that, nor must it be dictated by wisdom.
Pier Paolo Pasolini
“We are all in danger”
Pier Paolo Pasolini Interviewed by Furio Colombo
L’Unità, 1st November 1975
We are publishing the text of an interview to Pier Paolo Pasolini by Furio Colombo that appeared on the “Tuttolibri” supplement of the daily La Stampa on 8th November 1975. This interview took place on 1st November 1975, between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m., a few hours before Pasolini was killed. The title of the interview was provided by Pasolini himself. At the end of this conversation that found us on different positions and with diverging points of view, as it often happened us in other cases as well, I asked him if he wanted to choose the title for this article. He thought about it for a little while, then said it didn’t matter and changed subject. But something else brought us back on the main topic that continuously appears in the following answers. “This is the very essence, the final meaning of everything – he said – You do not even know who, in this very moment, is thinking about killing you. If you want, give this title to the feature: Why we are all in danger”.
The military coup d’état of October–November 2021 in sudan seems to have brought an end to the country’s revolution, begun in the protests of December 2019. But external observations and evaluations of revolts are never certain or final, because such “events are marked by an implosive logic, in which people are thrown back upon their imagination. Something has been let loose, something has been left floating, the words are running, the signs are sinister; we never see a revolt, but its effect is felt in the dislocation it installs in us.” (Rodrigo Karmy Bolton, The Anarchy of Beginnings) And the stories of the revolt continue to be told …
In Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, an anonymous protester dressed as Spider-Man joins the hundreds of thousands of protesters desperate to protect their fragile civilian government after the military coup in October 2021. ‘Spidey’ has become well known on social media for leaping from billboards and scaling the tops of buildings while dodging teargas. However, it’s his work with some of the poorest children in Khartoum that has shown him to be a positive focus for the resistance, helping a new generation to know their worth and take pride in their country’s rich heritage.
Jesse Cohn: Demodernizing Anarchism
Decolonising anarchism, according to Jesse Cohn, amounts to freeing it from its modernist assumptions: that culture is opposed to nature, that human culture progresses by an expanding autonomy from the heteronomy of nature, a progress grounded in the technological dominion over the natural world (and the human worlds closest to nature, e.g., those of the “indigenous” of the americas) and the freedom of human thought and life from the illusion of its dependency on transcendent sources (e.g., religion). To the extent that anarchism is imbued with or assumes such ideas, it is modernist and colonialist, susceptible to all of the hierarchies and forms of oppression that it has claimed to contest in its brief modern history.
It is for this reason that Cohn speaks of decolonising anarchism as a demodernisation of anarchism, something which then implies re-thinking and possibly repudiating notions of autonomy if conceived in opposition to nature (with this last equally in need of re-conceptualisation), that is, endeavouring to imagine freedom rooted in a nature no longer perceived as inanimate matter or as living, but “unthinking and unfree”. Technologies would also have to be evaluated on the grounds of their contribution to communities of conviviality rather than to a blind instrumental efficacy that threatens to engender new forms of ever greater and more intensive control. And equally significant, a non-modern anarchism could then, and should, re-evaluate its impetuous dismissal of religion or spirituality, if thesecan be thought of and illustrated historically by immanent and non-alienating forms (e.g., animism).
Liberated then from their modernist garb, anarchists and the historical tradition of anarchism may more fruitfully engage with and learn from, as well as contribute to, other ways of being in the world that fail or refuse to assume a place in the developmental narrative of enlightenment and capitalist progressivism.
Cohn’s essay is an important contribution to what will continue to be an ongoing theoretical reflection on and practical experimentation with other ways of living anarchy. It calls to mind the earlier work of the recently deceased anarchist, Peter Lamborn Wilson/Hakim Bey on “spiritual anarchism”, or older “anti-modernist” and/or Christian anarchists.
Difficult questions however remain, it seems to us, for any effort to spiritualise anarchism. Contrary to what Cohn seems to suggest, there is not one modernism or a single story of modernity. European modernity was always a changing confluence of multiple intellectual tributaries, far too unstable to be reduced to the nature-culture divide, or to this divide being interpreted without ambiguity.
The invitation to explore the indigenous worlds of the “new world” and their “philosophies”, their “ontologies” and “ethics”, is of enormous significance, but if merely placed in opposition to a european modernity, it suggests two doubtful simplifications: european modernity versus indigenous “holism”. Europe’s modernity however was never homogeneous or completely totalising (however “genocidal” it could be, to speak with Pier Paolo Pasolini), as the indigenous worlds have never been a single cultural monolith from which could be read a single, ethically good way to be (as Cohn himself suggests when he cites Eduardo Galeano: “I believe in the legacies that multiply human freedom, and not in those that cage it . . .. I am not proposing a return to the sacrificial rites that offered up human hearts to the gods, nor am I praising the despotism of the Inca or Aztec monarchs.”).
Without wishing by any means to dismiss the idea of demodernising and spiritualising anarchism, it is by no means obvious that these later must or even can involve some form of animism, at least beyond the worlds where such forms no longer exist. But even if it were possible, and desirable, would this radically or completely eliminate the nature-culture divide if this latter is interpreted as a simplified conceptual reflection of something much deeper, namely, that distance that all reflexive thought must assume in relation to what is thought, as a condition for its very possibility. This is not to divorce thought, the mind, culture, from nature, but rather to point to the disharmony and dissonance that can always exist between these dimensions of human existence and which are the experiential sources of what we designate by the word “autonomy”. One could imagine these different dimensions, and others, as modes of a singular reality (echoing Spinoza), in which case they would not be fated to produce the violent dualisms inherent in modern, colonial european thought and practice, but rather could serve as the basis for a critical ontology of that same modernism.
One can also ask whether or not anarchists really need to lose any time with these questions when what is at stake are matters of justice and that it is upon common issues of justice that more general political struggles can emerge. The anarchist theorist has to give way to the anarchist militant, and it will be in struggle that ideas will emerge, as has always been the case with anarchism.
In sum, the paths towards a decolonisation and demodernistation of anarchism are potentially many, and it is not even clear that these are the most appropriate terms for what is called for, or that if they are, they must be employed with considerable caution and care.
Jesse Cohn does just that and our questions are meant only to push along the debate.
___
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