Anarchive

A dog called Marx

In a letter to an old schoolmate (1 January 1938), Eileen wrote that they had called their little dog ‘Marx’ ‘to remind us that we had never read Marx, and now we have read a little and take so strong a personal dislike to the man that we can’t look the dog in the face when we speak to him’.

Simon Leys, ‘The Intimate Orwell’ (Review of George Orwells’s Letters and Diaries, ed. Davison) in The Hall of Uselesness.

Anarchism without adjectives

‘Let me imagine myself for a moment living in a free society. I should certainly have different occupations, manual and mental, requiring strength or skill. It would be very monotonous if the three or four groups with whom I would work (for I hope there will be no Syndicates then!) would be organized on exactly the same lines; I rather think that different degrees or forms of Communism will prevail in them. But might I not become tired of this, and wish for a spell of relative isolation, of Individualism? So I might turn to one of the many possible forms of “equal exchange” Individualism. Perhaps people will do one thing when they are young and another thing when they grow older. Those who are but indifferent workers may continue with their groups; those who are efficient will lose patience at always working with beginners and will go ahead by themselves, unless a very altruist disposition makes it a pleasure to them to act as teachers or advisers to younger people. I also think that at the beginning I should adopt Communism with friends and Individualism with strangers, and shape my future life according to experience. Thus, a free and easy change from one variety of Communism to another, thence to any variety of Individualism, and so on, would be the most obvious and elementary thing in a really free society; and if any group of people tried to check this, to make one system predominant, they would be as bitterly fought as revolutionists fight the present system.’

Max Nettlau, ‘Anarchism: Communist or Individualist? Both’ (1914).
Anarchism without adjectives (Wikipedia).

Fear of freedom

The lingering prejudice can possibly be explained by the disturbance that is created in the minds of the insecure by any doctrine of logical extremity. The anarchists attack the principle of authority which is central to contemporary social forms, and in so doing they arouse a guilty kind of repugnance in ordinary people. They are rather like Ivan Karamazov crying out in the court-room, ‘Who does not desire his father’s death?’.

The very ambivalence of the average man’s attitude to authority makes him distrust those who speak openly the resentments he feels in secret, and thus it is in the psychological condition which Erich Fromm has named ‘the fear of freedom’ that we may find the reason why – against the evidence of history – so many people still identify anarchism with unmitigated destruction and nihilism and political terror.

What anarchism really is we shall now begin to consider…

George Woodcock, Anarchism.

Fragments of an anarchist anthropology

To David Graeber, it was a matter of plain fact that things did not have to be the way they were. Graeber was an anthropologist, which meant it was his job to study other ways of living. “I’m interested in anthropology because I’m interested in human possibilities,” he once explained. Graeber was also an anarchist, “and in a way,” he went on, “there’s always been an affinity between anthropology and anarchism, simply because anthropologists know that a society without a state is possible. There’s been plenty of them.” A better world was not assured, but it was possible — and anyway, as Graeber put it in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, “since one cannot know a radically better world is not possible, are we not betraying everyone by insisting on continuing to justify and reproduce the mess we have today?”

David Graeber’s Possible Worlds. 9 November 2021, New York magazine.

Growing up absurd

‘I rely heavily on the following method of argument’, he noted in his journals as he worked on Growing Up Absurd: ‘I make a list of unaccomplished or lost causes and accumulate them as a programme for action…’

‘I am an anarchist and a patriot’ he wrote in his journal in 1958, ‘A curious kind of thing’.

The contempt late 1960s students displayed for liberal learning, so different from the spirit of the early teach-ins and Free Speech Movement, left him sick at heart. ‘There was no knowledge’ for such students, he concluded, ‘only the sociology of knowledge’. […] ‘The young are honourable and see the problems, Goodman wrote in 1968, ‘but they don’t know anything because we have not taught them anything’.

Horror of politics

‘As a result, he finally acquired a language and a vision of his own. He developed an art culminating in the erasure of its own trace—the “window-pane aesthetic” whose very perfection lies in making one forget its existence. Such success comes at a price: pushed past a threshold, the desire for clarity can become a refusal of mystery, and may ultimately limit the field of perception. / Orwell’s style is to literature what contour drawing is to painting: one admires its rigour, smoothness, and precision, but sometimes feels it lacks one dimension. E.M. Forster described his language as “forceful and flat”, accusing it of lacking “reverberation”.’ […]

’Alexander Nekrich merely summarised a consensus when he wrote: “George Orwell was perhaps the only Western author to have understood the profound nature of the Soviet world” — and one could cite countless similar testimonies from the East. On the other hand, when Alexander Zinoviev pointed out that reading Kafka is not necessarily more relevant for a Soviet than for a Westerner, only the ignorant and the naive were surprised. Living in a totalitarian regime is an Orwellian experience; living is simply a Kafkaesque experience.’

Simon Leys, Orwell: The Horror of Politics, trans. Myrto Petsota.

Just a perfect day

‘For better or worse, the utopian visionary sets out to remake the world by reordering life’s most basic features. The base unit of utopian thinking is not the individual or even the community; it is the day. One of the most consistent features of utopian literature is the description of the typical citizen’s typical day…’

Chris Jennings, Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism (2016).

Kafkanarchy

Kafka was a frequent attender of anarcho-syndicalist meetings; and that these were of peculiar personal significance to him can be proved by the astonishing negative fact that Brod knew nothing of them until after his friend’s death. He attended, said nothing, sat, ‘a colossus of silence’, with ‘great gray shining eyes’.

Paul Goodman, Kafka’s Prayer (1947).

Luckily they can’t

How many a time have I stood watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who would stop me enjoying this if they could. But luckily they can’t…The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.

George Orwell, ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’ (1946).

New Harmony

‘Some of the married women had prettier children than others — and this was a source of inequality,’ read one satirical report. ‘Some were without children at all, and sorely envied their more happy next door neighbours, whose pretty little curly-pated machines were playing themselves into perfectibility on the lawn before their doors…[Owen] had serious thoughts of cutting off all the women’s noses, to bring them to a level.’

In Gilbert Seldes, The Stammering Century (1928).

No saint

This attitude is perhaps a noble one, but, in the sense which — I think — most people would give to the word, it is inhuman. The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.

George Orwell, ‘Reflections on Gandhi’ (1949).

Spaghetti factories

In his table talk, discreetly recorded by party officials under the direction of Martin Bormann, Hitler enjoyed planning the colonization of the Ukraine that would follow the conquest of Russia by German armies:

‘The Crimea will give us its citrus fruits, cotton and rubber…The Black Sea will be for us a sea whose wealth our fishermen will never exhaust. Thanks to the cultivation of the Soya bean, we’ll increase our livestock. We’ll win from that soil several times as much as the Ukrainian peasant is winning at present…We shall get between ten and twelve million tons of grain annually. I think we ought to build spaghetti factories on the spot; all the prerequisites are there…’

John Carey, The Faber Book of Utopias (1999).

Tales of prison life

When I was asleep in the Ignorance, I came to a place of meditation full of holy men and I found their company wearisome and the place a prison; when I awoke, God took me to a prison and turned it into a place of meditation and His trysting-ground 

Sri Aurobindo, Thoughts and Aphorisms.
Tales of Prison Life.