This is not my favorite translation, I prefer Paul Schmidt’s, but oh well….

The Parisian Orgy

O cowards, there she is! Pile out into the stations! The sun with its fiery lungs blew clear  The boulevards that one evening the Barbarians filled. Here is the holy City, seated in the West!    Come! we’ll stave off the return of the fires, Here are the quays, here are the boulevards, here Are the houses against the pale, Radiant blue-starred, one evening, by the red flashes of bombs!  Hide the dead palaces with forests of planks! Affrighted, the dying daylight freshens your looks. Look at the red-headed troop of the wrigglers of hips: Be mad, you’ll be comical, being haggard!  Pack of bitches on heat, eating poultices, The cry from the houses of gold calls you. Plunder! Eat! See the night of joy and deep twitchings Coming down on the street. O desolate drinkers,  Drink! When the light comes, intense and crazed, To ransack round you the rustling luxuries, You’re not going to dribble into your glasses, Without motion or sound, with your eyes lost in white distances?  Knock it back, to the Queen whose buttocks cascade in folds! Listen to the working of stupid tearing hiccups! Listen to them leaping in the fiery night The panting idiots, the aged, the nonentities, the lackeys!  O hearts of filth, appalling mouths, Work harder, mouths of foul stenches! Wine for these ignoble torpors, at these tables… Your bellies are melting with shame, O Conquerors!  Open your nostrils to these superb nauseas! Steep the tendons of your necks in strong poisons! Laying his crossed hands on the napes of your childish necks The Poet says to you: “O cowards! be mad!  Because you are ransacking the guts of Woman, You fear another convulsion from her, Crying out, and stifling your infamous perching On her breast with a horrible pressure.  Syphilitics, madmen, kings, puppets, ventriloquists, What can you matter to Paris the whore, Your souls or your bodies, your poisons or your rags? She’ll shake you off, you pox-rotten snarlers!  And when you are down, whimpering on your bellies, Your sides wrung, clamouring for your money back, distracted, The red harlot with her breasts swelling with battles Will clench her hard fists, far removed from your stupor!  When your feet, Paris, danced so hard in anger! When you had so many knife wounds; When you lay helpless, still retaining in your clear eyes A little of the goodness of the tawny spring,  O city in pain, O city almost dead, With your face and your two breasts pointing towards the Future Which opens to your pallor its thousand million gates, City whom the dark Past could bless:  Body galvanized back to life to suffer tremendous pains, You are drinking in dreadful life once more! You feel The ghastly pale worms flooding back in your veins, And the icy fingers prowling on your unclouded love!  And it does you no harm. The worms, the pale worms, Will obstruct your breath of Progress no more Than the Stryx could extinguish the eyes of the Caryatides From whose blue sills fell tears of sidereal gold.”  although it is frightful to see you again covered in this fashion; although no city was ever made into a more foul-smelling Ulcer on the face of green Nature, The Poet says to you:”Your Beauty is Marvellous!”  The tempest sealed you in supreme poetry; The huge stirring of strength comes to your aid; Your work comes to the boil, death groans, O chosen City! Hoard in your heart the stridors of the ominous trumpet.  The Poet will take the sobs of the Infamous, The hate of the Galley slaves, the clamour of the Damned; And the beams of his love will scourge Womankind. His verses will leap out: There’s for you! There! Villains!  - Society, and everything, is restored: – the orgies Are weeping with dry sobs in the old brothels: And on the reddened walls, the gaslights in frenzy, Flare balefully upwards to the wan blue skies!  May 1871

For a Radical Ethics of Equality* (in English)

For a Radical Ethics of Equality*

June, 22 2007 

By Ezequiel Adamovsky 

What does it mean today to be Anticapitalist? Today, left identity is an identity in crisis. Reconstructing a movement for radical emancipation is therefore going to require a critical examination of our legacy. This task quickly reveals that one of the biggest shortcomings of the left tradition is to be found in the lack of an ethical dimension to political action. The following essay attempts to analyse the reasons behind this inherited ethical vacuum and its impact on left practices. It goes over some key moments in the history of the relationship between moral thinking and emancipatory politics, including the Marxist tradition’s rejection of moral thinking and some later attempts to recover it. Furthermore, it argues the absolute necessity of anchoring all militant will to radical egalitarian ethics, capable of guiding our actions in a clearly emancipatory direction.

The radical lefts, be they Marxist, Communist, Guevarist, Socialist, Anarchist, Autonomist, Trotskyist, Maoist, Leninist, etc., beyond doctrinal differences, spring from a shared basic thrust: the desire to live in common, in a society of equals free from oppression and exploitation. This is the perennial historical truth of the left.

However, these ideas have been, and continue to be, put to uses that deviate from that fundamental thrust, which at times may even contradict it. An examination of the implicit motives behind left-wing discourses throughout history quickly reveals examples of a clearly ideological use. “Ideological” in the Marxist sense of the expression: Leftist discourses whose function is to mask or channel wills to power that are not or cannot be openly expressed. This implicit function consciously or unconsciously subverts the primary emancipatory vocation that originally gave rise to the ideas of the left.

Let us look at some historical examples. The ideas of Socialism, Communism or Marxism, for example, were used on a number of occasions during the 19th and 20th centuries for their capacity to demolish liberal individualism. The critique of the atomisation of society and the empire of selfishness generated by liberal capitalism has found extremely powerful weapons in the arsenal of leftist thought. However, these weapons have not always been used to further an emancipatory project. They have also been used to justify the forcible homogenisation of society under a political banner. As individualism erodes the collective, these projects have sought to restore a national collective (with or without private property or the market). Various examples of this use of leftist ideas can be cited: Mussolini’s fascism began among the same ranks as Italian revolutionary socialism. The course taken by the Duce is by no means unique: it is similar to that of other Socialists such asSorel and to dozens of referential thinkers across the world. The old Communist party of the USSR is nowadays a nationalist, anti-liberal, anti-Semitic group that nevertheless preserves its communist thinking in more than just the name. In all these cases, only those elements that are “convenient” are taken from leftist ideas, such as the culture of a strong State, the subordination of the individual to the needs of the collective, the critique of liberal democracy, etc. The more clearly emancipatory ideas – equality, self-determination, cooperation, solidarity, and liberty – are left by the wayside.

Alongside this ideological use of leftist ideas, Marxism can sometimes be found being used as an “ideology of modernisation”. Lenin himself argued that Socialism is “soviet power plus electrification”. This use has fed the self-justifying discourse of several dictatorships, from the Chinese elites who headed the restoration of Capitalism, to theoreticians of “African Socialism” such as Julius Nyerere or tyrants of “scientific Socialism” such as the Somali Siyad Barre. Once again, from the wide range Marxist ideas, only those of strong State planning (supported by compulsory unanimity from below), the imperative of developing productive forces, and the critique of the bourgeoisie and of liberalism in the name of an equality (restricted to the purely economic sphere) are taken up.

There is another ideological use of leftist ideas, also related to the ideal of “modernisation”, that has existed in variable proportions in socialist movements all over the world. The “anti-capitalism of the professional and managerial classes” described by Barbara and John Ehrenreich, which, rather than aiming for the emancipation of the workers, looked to a world “scientifically” directed by an elite of “people who possess the knowledge”. By using Marxism, private property is made the object of criticism, but the implicit ideal is one of techno-bureaucratic social management. Once again, self-determination, liberty, and the autonomy of a socially cooperative whole are left by the wayside.

Finally, there are “inverted” uses of left wing ideas. Instead of using them to justify the homogeneity of society, the scientific dominion of a bureaucratic vanguard, or a strong State, they are used to mask the most radical individualism. Many people or small groups of “anarchists” and “autonomists” (or however you want to call them) take the leftist tradition of rejecting oppression, the State, and authority in general, but only to claim their own personal rights to act according to their own will, being accountable to nothing and nobody. In this case, leftism acts as an “aesthetic” varnish and a “lifestyle” to justify an attitude that is as selfish as that of bourgeoisie, and which is often much more elitist in its disdain for “ordinary” people.

 Some historical effects of leftist ideas put into practice can be added to this analysis: the crimes of Pol Pot and Sendero Luminoso; the GULAG and the massacre at Tiananmen; the repression of left wing companions in the name of Socialism wherever a (single) party has taken power; the “vanguardist” manipulation of others and those countless everyday examples of mutual petty hostility and “internal totalitarianism” that anyone who has been involved in a left wing party or group is familiar with. All this in the name of left wing ideas.

 How is it that such sublime ideas coexist with such contradictory uses and effects? How is it that the ideas of the left so often become a path to the practices of the right? 

Ideas without ethics

 If the implicit humanism of the ideas of the left has so often been absent in its practices, it is because the left tradition, or at least its hegemonic currents, lacks an ethical dimension. Indeed, any concern for the ethical evaluation of actions has been actively eradicated from its politics.

Reduced to the simplest formula, the problem of ethics consists in establishing the criteria that help us to define which behaviours or actions are good, and which ones are bad (and should therefore be avoided). Ethics normally includes, explicitly or implicitly, the notion of responsibility for actions, that is to say, to whom or what should I be morally accountable for what I do or fail to do. It usually also includes  - often implicitly- some “situational” provision, which determines the specific contexts in which the general code can be legitimately broken. Taking Christianity as an example: the ethics, explicitly formulated in the Ten Commandments and in the doctrine of sin, emanate directly from the divine; the laws are eternal and go beyond the fickle opinions of men. Breakers of this code answer directly to God (beyond the fact that the Church or temporal power can, in the meanwhile, punish or forgive actions). The pastoral presence of God, whose gaze reaches into the darkest corner of every soul, acts as guardian and guarantor of ethical behaviour in the herd. As with all ethics, in practice, Christian ethics include ad hoc provisions that makes it more flexible in extreme situations. Despite the commandments, it is not a mortal sin to kill someone in self-defence, nor to steal an apple rather than starve to death.

How does the left orient its political decisions, from the broad strategic lines of a party, to the day-to-day actions of a militant? What code of legitimate behaviour do we use, and to whom do we respond for the things that we do or do not do?

The visceral rejection of ethics by many people on the left never ceases to surprise me. I have seen countless companions become jumpy when, for one reason or another, they hear someone else use vocabulary referring to the universe of moral. If forced to discuss failings in someone’s behaviour they always clarify that “it is not a question of morals”, as if it was not proper for someone on the left to talk about things being “good” or “bad”. Although many people on the left are among the most altruistic, kind and charitable people to be found in this world, most would doubtless be uncomfortable with being considered “good” or “kind” (an adjective that, in the cultural universe of the left, evokes a sense of “weakness”).

This strange contradiction in militant culture came about because the left has rejected the question of moral evaluation of behaviour, reducing ethics, to a mere “logic”. Thus conducts and actions are not guided by what could be considered “good” or “bad”, but by what is “correct” or “incorrect”. The measure of “correctness” is defined not by ethics, but by its correspondence to a given political truth: a correct action is one that follows the correct political line. A political line is established as being “correct”, not through an exercise of ethical evaluation, but based on the knowledge of a truth (for example, the direction in which “Historical Laws” point, the assumed dictates of “revolutionary conscience”, the postulates expressed in this or that canonical text by Marx, Bakunin, etc.) An action that pushes in the correct historical direction – for example, inciting a group of young people to join a direct action, deliberately keeping from them information about its possible consequences – can be considered “correct” independent of whether it is ethically reprehensible. The important thing is not that the action is correct because it is “good”, but because it could be “effective”.

The eviction of ethics

Ethics and leftism are not mutually exclusive. In fact, traces of serious consideration of the ethical dimension can be found in the (misnamed) “Utopian Socialism” of the 19th century and in a number of minor currents within Socialist and Anarchist traditions. For Kropotkin’s anarchism, for example, an ethics of a new type, one that was different from religious and metaphysical precepts, was fundamental to “give men an ideal” and to “guide them in action”. Worried by the amorality of the time, derived from liberalism, Darwinism or the ideas of Nietzsche, Kropotkin worked intensively from 1904 until his death in 1921 to write a treatise on ethics. He argued for an ethics of solidarity and sought to demonstrate that it was universal, emanating from the naturally sociable nature of mankind (and animals) and the impulse to “mutual aid”. Similar concerns can be found in Tolstoy’s “Christian Socialism”, which had become a genuine mass movement by the beginning of the 20th century. From the teachings of a Christ stripped of his divine status, Tolstoy derived general ethical mandates (unconnected with any religiosity) that should not only guide political action, but should also prefigure the world we are aiming for: love thy neighbour, humility, forgiveness, etc.

However, the Marxist tradition fiercely opposed any ethical discourse. Marx himself dismissed such concerns as irrelevant: in the Communist Manifesto he considers them a distraction that interferes with understanding of the material basis of poverty and social ills, and in The German Ideology he went so far as to argue that “communists do not preach any moral at all”. Students of Marx have recently suggested that his rejection of ethics was simply the result of a “tactical” necessity to mark a difference between his ideas and other debates current at the time, and that Marxism is, in fact, a form of humanism that contains a strong implicit ethics. Nevertheless, even these authors recognise that Marx’s attitude profoundly marked the Marxist tradition, which from that point on maintained hostility towards any ethical discourse (with the exception of a marginal variant of “ethical Marxism”, represented by authors such as Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Henri Lefebvre, or Mihailo Markovic). Karl Kautsky, the principal Marxist theorist of the Second International, dedicated his bookEthics and the materialist concept of History (1906) to arguing that historical progress obeys laws that have very little to do with moral ideas. Therefore, he argued, Socialists should look to science for guidance in their actions, because “science is always above ethics”. In his article  “Tactics and Ethics” (1919) Lukács agreed with Kautsky in that decisions about political tactics should answer only to the tribunal of history: if they are in accordance with “the sense of world history”, then they are “correct”, and therefore, by necessity “ethical”.Many other examples can be found. What is important for our purposes is that this type of reduction of the ethical dimension to a mere problem of “logic” or of understanding what is correct or incorrect in terms of some Laws of historical necessity, was translated in practice – not only among Marxists but also among people on the left in general – into an eradication of all sense of personal responsibility, and the typical principle according to which “the end sanctifies the means”.

Within the Marxist tradition itself, there were early reactions against this alliance between politics and “science” that left no room for ethics. In Religion and Socialism, a noteworthy book written in 1907 and now all but forgotten, Anatoli Lunacharski – who would soon form part of the first Bolshevik government – proposed complementing Marxism’s “austere, modest and arid philosophy”, with aesthetics and ethics, a “science of values” of the sort that is lacking today. Essentially, Marx and Engels occupied themselves with “knowing” the world; but the “the complete relationship between man and the world is only attained when the processes are not only known, but also valued”; action “emerges only from knowledge and evaluation”. Science does not occupy itself with questions of the heart: it responds to “how?” and “why?”, but it is not concerned with questions of “good?” or “bad?”. Religion, on the other hand, responds to these questions and reaches a practical conclusion: “it proves the presence of evil in the world” and “attempt to defeat it”. It is taking this function of ethical and aesthetic evaluation into account that Lunacharski argues that Socialism should “imitate” religion (needless to say, forgetting its theological and dogmatic elements) and become a genuine cosmology.

The relationship that Lunacharski traces between the ethical element and the problem of hegemony is very interesting. It is clear that Socialism is the cause of the proletariat; but is it also good for all humanity from a moral point of view? Lunacharski complains that orthodox Marxists reject that question, because for them it is enough that it be correct for the proletariat alone (they say that Socialism is not a faith that looks to win converts outside the working class). Nevertheless – our author goes on to say-, this is a limited conception: the proletariat needs to achieve “ideological hegemony” if it wants to reach power (something they would not be able to do alone, against everyone else). If it is to conquer the support of the non-workers, he concludes, it is necessary for Socialism to present itself as a high ideal for everyone who is not corrupted by his or her class interest.

Lunacharski’s position was rejected by practically all of his contemporaries, and Marxism remained an “arid philosophy” without any ethical dimension. And yet, although not explicitly expressed in its doctrines and theories, the left tradition has not lacked an implicit ”militant culture”, that values some things above others. Less present in its books than in its practices, some of these implicit values of the left derive from its alliance with science and the ensuing rejection of ethics. For example, few political traditions have valued intelligence, study, canonical authors, and theory as a guide to action so much. Few have so highly awarded the “virtues” of intransigence, orthodoxy, firmness or unconditionally sticking to an organisation, philosophy or programme. On the other hand, there is a notable “punishment” within left cultures of other conditions that, from an alternative point of view, could be considered “virtues”: kindness, flexibility, capacity for negotiation, disposition to dialogue and consensus, respect for others, doubt. Although rejected in theory, an implicit moral world nevertheless exists in the practices of the left, which clearly distinguishes between the “righteous” and “sinners”. 

The type of “virtues” stimulated by the alliance between socialism and science are precisely those that create most problems for cooperation between equals.  By guiding its actions in accordance with the mandates of a transcendental Truth (extracted from science, knowledge of supposed historical Laws, or some canonical text), the left makes itself impenetrable to others in two ways. On the one hand, it shuts its ears to the simple “opinions” of the uninitiated (that is to say, those who have not demonstrated a grasp of the Truth), which leads to a conspicuous unwillingness to reach agreements with them; on the other hand, it implicitly rejects any responsibility towards its fellows. Protected by the Truth, the left remains untouchable to the judgements of others. By retiring themselves from the world of equals in this way, leftists often adopt that typical air of self-sufficiency and arrogant condescension towards others, and that vanguardist style that can be found even amongst those who declare themselves opposed to all vanguards (but who nevertheless feel themselves to be “illuminated” by their own Truth). In this way, we end up in the paradox indicated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau more than two hundred years ago, in one of those ironic phrases laden with truth that he liked to shoot against his fellow philosophers. He questioned those who would say they loved Humankind, but only to avoid the obligation of loving any human being in particular. Rousseau’s critique remains useful today to illustrate the tragedy of a left without ethics.

Communism as an (immanent) ethics of the equals

If it is not from science, where should we find guidance for political practice? If not to Truth, to what or whom should our actions be accountable? Here let us return to the problem of the left and the ethical dimension that is indispensable if we are to protect it from ideological abuse, and to clearly separate it from right-wing practices. The beginning and end of any anticapitalist politics – and this is the central thesis of this essay – should be aradical ethics of equality.

A radical ethics of equality is, above all, an immanent ethics. Unlike other ethics – for example, that of Kant, that of the Socratic philosophers, or that included in religious principles – that claim to come from some eternal order (rational, natural or divine), ours should be firmly anchored in this world. As with all of social life, the universe of moral criteria should be put within the grasp of real men and women. To say it in another way, the content of this ethics should be the fruit of social agreements that recognise the needs of life in common, from the most universal (that is to say, those that relate to human beings as a species) to the most historical and situational. That an ethical code be something more or less permanent and widely shared does not mean that it should be considered eternal or universal, nor that its authority should be deposited in gods or transcendental Truths. An immanent ethic is an ethic that comes from us.

A radical ethic of equality is also an ethic of dialogue. It recognises that society is not made up of isolated individuals, but nor is it a collective that exists beyond the specific individuals who compose it (to postulate a collective over and above people, as certain leftists do, is to fall once again into the transcendental). Personal existence, as the young Bakhtin knew, is only possible in interaction with the other: it is by the means of the image, the body, the gaze, and the word of my fellows that I exist as a whole person. Social life is nothing more than this ongoing dialogue with our fellows, those who are alive, those who have died, and those who are yet to come. An ethical existence is, therefore, that of people who know themselves to be obliged to be able to answerto the other for what they are, for what they do, and for what they fail to do. An ethics of dialogue therefore requires commitment to our fellows, a personal existence that assumes its responsibility for the other, and which does not look for excuses or alibis nor does it retreat into the monologue or to devotion to a transcendent (be it God, Science, the Nation, the People, Class, the Party or the Individual). An ethical existence without alibis, is one of fidelity to the specific situation and of accountability to others for every act. And it can only be considered a radical ethics of equality if the commitment is to the other just as they are. (Accepting accountability for one’s actions only before those who think or act in the same way as I do – the Party or the “conscious” militants – is nothing more than another form of vanguardism that makes us immune to the imperative to be responsible to “ordinary” men and women.) This radical commitment to others just as they are does not mean ignoring class differences and the antagonism that shape our society. For we are talking about an ethics of equality, whoseraison d’être is precisely that of protecting life in common from those who, under any excuse, attempt to place themselves above others. That is why those who have refused to accept being equals, at all times and in all places have feared dialogic and immanent ethics. It is because the “unequals” cannot be accountable to others, that the justification of their privilege (“private law”) has always rested upon some authority or transcendent. Radical egalitarian ethics is, by definition, power’s fiercest enemy.

What would the specific content of an ethics of equals be? What virtues would it promote? What conducts would it condemn? It would be, firstly and fundamentally, and ethics of caring for the Other, expressed in a codification of virtues and defects that values all that which aims at cooperation, solidarity, empathy, humility, respect for diversity, the capacity for consensus, etc., and which “represses” impulses to competition, selfishness, ambition to power, intellectual arrogance, stubbornness, obsequiousness, or narcissism.

Having reached this point, it may sound perhaps disappointing to find out that a radical ethics of equality would not be very different, in its specific content, from the moral codes that human beings have produced since times immemorial. However, if one does not have a vanguardist disposition, there is nothing to be ashamed in  this absence of big novelties. Perhaps communism is, at the end of the day, nothing more nor less than the realisation of the dreams of a life together as equals that have always existed in all times and in all places.

——-

* This text is part of the book by Ezequiel Adamovsky Más allá de la vieja izquierda: seis ensayos para un nuevo anticapitalismo (forthcoming 2007).

 Here is a bio from 2006:

 Xabier Barandiaran is a PhD student and researcher on Cybernetics, Neurophilosophy and Artificial Life at the University of the Basque Country (Europe), member of the autonomous server SinDominio.Net, the hacktivist laboratory Metabolik BioHacklab (located at the social squat center Undondo Gaztetxea), the spanish and european HackLabs.Org network and the recent copyleft activist campaing “CompartirEsBueno.Net” (SharingIsGood: a spanish network of hacktivists and media-activists against intelectual property regimes and the media-culture industry). He has also been involved on other grassroots movement such as alternative education, social desobedience, anti-war movements and squatting. Xabier has also co-organized and activelly participated on a number of HackMeetings (self-managed technopolitical meetings that take place in squatted social centers in europe), Copyleft Conferences and other parallel events, workshops and seminars. His work has been devoted to development and promotion of free-software tools for social movements, direct action and coordination of autonomous technopolitical networks as research on free technologies & culture, community based digital self-management and hacktivism.

What is (it like) to be a Hard Problem?

“Some books are important not because they solve a

problem or even address it in a way that points to solution,

but because they are symptomatic of the confusions of the time.”

SEARLE1Searle, 1997, p.162. Searle’s review on David Chalmers The Conscious Mind; In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford University Press, 1996)

Structure of the essay:

1. Introduction.

2. The Hard Problem (HP)

3. What is (it like) to be a Hard Problem.

3.1. The dissolution of the HP and the HP of functionalism

3.2. What is (it like) to be a cognitive system

4. Recognising a conscious being.

5. Conclusion: conscious experience and scientific study

6. Discussion: pointing to a hard problem and a crucial gap

7. Acknowledgements

8. Bibliography and References.

Abstract: In this essay I argue that a systemic perspective of cognition may be sufficient to explain whatever it must be necessary to explain about consciousness. By analysing Chalmers’ diagnosis of the Hard Problem of consciousness we conclude that the only Hard Problem arises from the functionalist view of cognition. I argue that a functional explanation is not enough to explain consciousness (and that is why Chalmers’ Hard Problem arises) and that an operational explanation is required. It follows that once we have specified the structure that makes us conscious then ‘what phenomenal consciousness is’ becomes a matter of being that structure and not something to be explained. Finally I argue that considering a system conscious depends on the operational conditions under which it is legitimate to describe an entity as conscious i.e. the necessary and sufficient operational conditions for a system to be conscious.

Key words: Consciousness, Cognitive Sciences, Cartesian Dualism, Explanatory gap, Dynamical approach, Phenomenal experience, Operational explanation.

1. INTRODUCTION

Since Descartes the relation between the phenomenological world (res cogitans) and the physical world (res extensa) occupies a privileged position between the unresolved philosophical questions of the Western history. If not so much Descartes’ dualist ontology, its vocabulary and conceptual foundation remain alive in the contemporary debate (Searle, 1992) and, while consciousness is becoming an object of scientific study it’s ontological and epistemological status is still in question. And it’s not a trivial question since consciousness seems to us the highest human capacity, the more inaccessible domain, the most secret privacy, and the last hiding place of the individual against the objectivity. Can science grasp this mystery? Is there any mystery at all?

The current study of consciousness is characterised by a transdisciplinary, multidimensional and weakly co-ordinated approach. All sorts of theories and approaches inhabit the scene while they remain unconnected (at best) or incompatible. Moreover the claim of the impossibility of a scientific study of consciousness remains alive among some scientist and philosophers (Nagel and McGinn). In this context, as Searle’s Chinese Room Experiment (1980) for the problem of intentionality, Chalmers’ article Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness (1995) became a reference point and focused the debate. Even if Chalmers’ article has been considered a steep back in the debate (Dennett, 1996) I consider it symptomatic of a profound disagreement between different views in the field. I believe the really Hard Problem stands in the deep tension between confronted underlying assumptions in the current field (specially among Functionalists) and that we shall assume a biologically grounded operational perspective in order for the Hard Problem to vanish.

But what is the, so called, Hard Problem?

2. THE HARD PROBLEM

From Chalmers’ article we will rescue the analysis of the so called Hard Problem (HP); a) because part of the current debate is focused in Chalmers diagnosis of the Hard Problem, b) because I consider (and I will try to argue) that Chalmers’ mistake is already present in that diagnosis and that the latter development of his paper is a consequence of that mistake, and, c) because the claim of the HP, seems to me, is the point where consciousness, as a philosophical debate/problem, should arrive to an end, just because there is not such a problem (or at least the problem shows to be a philosophical problem in the more Wittgensteinian linguistic viewpoint).

At the beginning of the paper Chalmers divides the problems of the study of consciousness into the ‘easy’ problems and the ‘hard’ problem.

“The easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods” (§ 3).

The easy problems: the easy problems are those concerning functional mechanisms:

·Ability to discriminate stimuli

·Integration of information

·Reportability of mental states

·Focus of attention

·Control of behaviour

·Difference between wakefulness and sleep

All those phenomena are associated to consciousness but they have a functional role in the cognitive processes of the cognitive agent; thus they can be explained in functional terms. However difficult they may turn to be in the future, Chalmers takes for grounded the conceptual frame on which they will be explained so that a good explanation is a matter of techno-scientific achievement but not one of conceptual re-formulation.

The Hard Problem: But… (Chalmers follows) if those phenomena (easy problems) are exhausted in their functional role… how is it possible that they give rise to phenomenal experience? And this is what Chalmers considers The HP. The HP, thus, is the problem of experience that carries on in the Mind-Body debate under different forms:

•Consciousness* (Harvey)

•First person ontology (Searle)

·Qualia

·Phenomenal consciousness (Ned Block)

·“What is it like” (Nagel)

·Explanatory gap (Joseph Levine)

·Knowledge argument (Frank Jackson)

•Phenomenal experience (Chalmers)

·Etc…

What makes the HP hard, for Chalmers, is that it goes beyond any performance of functions because “to explain a cognitive function we need only specify a mechanism that can perform that function” (§12) and after explaining all those mechanisms we still have something else to explain: consciousness is more than a mechanism. That’s why, again on Chalmers’ view, any attempt to explain consciousness in the current literature, doesn’t work. We need an extra ingredient, a something else to fill the explanatory gap of why this functional or neural processes are accompanied by experience (the italic is mine to highlight Chalmers’ most common expressions when describing the problem).

After analysing some case studies that fail to explain consciousness, Chalmers concludes

At the end of the day, the same criticism applies to any purely physical account of consciousness. For any physical process we specify there will be an unanswered question: Why should this process give rise to experience? Given any such process, it is conceptually coherent that it could be instantiated in the absence of experience. It follows that no mere account of the physical process will tell us why experience arises. The emergence of experience goes beyond what can be derived from physical theory. (§ 43)

At this point, considering that any given cognitive process could exist without experience, Chalmers proposes to introduce experience as a fundamental feature of the world. Then he outlines a theory of consciousness whose central claim is ‘The double-aspect theory of information’ by which information is understood as being the basis of consciousness and the link with physics through the embeddedness of information in physical processes.

3. WHAT IS (IT LIKE) TO BE A HARD PROBLEM

3.1. The dissolution of the HP and the HP of traditional functionalism.

Explanatory gap, extra ingredient, accompanied by experience, something else, and so on seems to me dangerous expressions that cover a non-existing problem. If we add to a functional explanation a structural bottom-up, operational2Here operational vs. functional will be understood following (Di Paolo, 1999). By operational we mean an explanation which is “formulated in terms of a set of elements all pitched at a same descriptional level and also in terms of law-like realtionships between these elements so that an account can be given of how the phenomena are generated” (p.16) while by functional explanation we understand an explanation where “the terms of the reformulation are deemed to belong to a more encompassing context, in which te observer provides links and nexuses not supposed to operat in the domain in which the systems that generate the phenomena operate” (p.16). We intuitivelly understand operational explanations as specifying the structure of the system by establishing the elements and the law-like relations between the elements that constitute the system as such. While by funcional explanation we will understand particularly the kind of explanations of cognition held by Traditional AI where a cognitive agent can be defined solely in terms of the causal-computational relations between inputs and outputs requiring an external observer to specify them.

I don’t deny conscious experience, the vivid sensation of perceiving a red apple or having an orgasm. The Knowledge Argument (Jackson, Epiphenomenal Qualia 1982, from Torrance, 1998) illustrates this point: it is still different to have an orgasm than knowing all the processes and biological structures involving the phenomenon. But the Knowledge Argument is not an argument against the explanation (as it has been used), it is not an argument that shows that any explanation of consciousness is not enough; it just shows that it is different to explain how a cognitive systems works than being a cognitive system (how are they going to be equal? They are not even in the same level to be compared!). Probably the narrow vision of the classical functionalist viewpoint of what a cognitive agent is makes impossible to imagine that experience is to be a cognitive system. If we take cognition (as traditional functionalists do) to be the computation of an algorithm (independently of the system that performs it) then experience (the inner vivid sensation of experience) seems to be something else and the HP arrives when we realise that phenomenal consciousness cannot be added to the list of algorithms that constitute cognition. That’s why Chalmers considers that ‘the something else’ must be explained. But, from a systemic perspective, there is nothing to be explained about being a cognitive system because there is nothing on the being that can/should/must be explained. As well as there is nothing to be explained about “what it is like to be solid“; there is nothing to explain about being conscious. The only way of explaining solidity is specifying how the microstructure makes a solid macrostructure (what we have called structural3The term structural or structure won’t be used in this essay as oposed to operational (Varela) but rather as oposed to functional.

Lets go back to the beginning of this section; now we can see how terms like explanatory gap, extra ingredient, accompanied by experience, something else, and so on, are absolutely mistaken. There is no explanatory gap because there are not two objects to be linked. From our perspective accompanied by experience is completely nonsensical, the perceptive process of perceiving red IS the experience, thus, there is no extra ingredient to be added. But Chalmers mistake is still worst since the assumption of any extra ingredient falls under the Hard Problem again (the extended HP, Torrance, 1998), and no matter how many ingredients we add we will always need another one. At this point Zhalmers could argue against Chalmers with his own arguments: “why does any aspect of information give rise to experience? We need a third extra ingredient since it is, still, conceptually coherent to imagine any physical process + informational process without experience.” and so on, and so on ad infinitum.

Chalmers’ Hard Problem itself is a problem of functionalism (whose view of the mental and cognition is disembodied and functional and never operational), not a problem of Cognitive Sciences. As Jackendorff pointed out: if consciousness has no causal effect (functional role) then ‘it is useless’ (Jackendorff, 1987 p.26, from Varela et al. 1991. P. 82). But all there is in the domain of the mental is not functional. Chalmers functionalist view of the mind (only considering the causal connections between representations) is the real Hard Problem. As Searle points out (Searle, 1997) Chalmers mistake stands on trying to hold both functionalism and property dualism or irreducibility of consciousness; and it just doesn’t work. As Chalmers itself sees, functionalism is not enough to account for consciousness. And that is because functionalism has an horizontal concept of causation. Functionalism studies relations between representations (propositional attitudes) and this is not enough to account for cognition; on the lower boundary of cognition to account for the symbol grounding problem (Harnard, 1990), embodied situated cognition (Brooks, 1991) etc.; on the upper boundary for such non-functional ‘phenomena’4I quoted ‘phenomena’ because the self and consciousness cannot be properly called phenomena because they are prior to any phenomenon as such. In fact, this is the whole point of the essay.

3.2. What is (it like) to be a cognitive system

If we now consider a dynamical-embodied perspective of cognition, the functionalist HP comes to an end: our experience is embodied (Varela et al. 1991, Varela 1996) thus if we don’t want to fall into explanatory gap problems we have to consider cognition as embodied, as realised (and only realisable?) in a biological-dynamical structure. And then take (conscious) experience as being this embodied dynamical structure. Them, ones we assume this viewpoint, what makes us being as we are, which are the concrete dynamics that constitute a conscious being, will become a scientific task to be resolved, an operational description to be made.

At this point I would like to point to a dynamic-systemic Artificial Life (A-Life) approach to cognition from which I believe the problem could be addressed in a fruitful way (as this new approach to cognitive phenomena has showed with many other problems of Cognitive Science). Within this view cognition as a process can be understood as the structural coupling between an agent and its environment and a cognitive agent can be studied as a dynamical system. The dynamical approach (van Gelder, 1993, Van Gelder and Port 1995) does not entail, necessarily, the exclusion of symbolic/computational explanations of some cognitive processes because any computational process can (in principle) be explained by dynamical system theory (even if the concrete mechanisms require a research effort not yet resolved –Crutchfield, 1998). Thus any informational and functional account of consciousness (the easy problems) is not rejected but subsumed in an embodied dynamical bottom-up explanation of cognition (at the same time an embodied perspective can solve the symbol-grounding problem, the intentionality (Searle) of some cognitive processes5It is not a coincidence that what Chalmers calls the Hard Problem is strongly related to the problem of semantic content and intentionality, which is, at the same time, one of the major problems of functionalism (are consciousness and intentionality very far from being the same problem?).

Up to now we have been addressing the explanation of consciousness to a structural-operational study. But how does consciousness emerge from the dynamics of the brain? There is an increasing work on the foundations of biology, A-life and complex dynamical systems (Varela et al., 1991), where the concept of emergence plays a central role. Collier (Collier, 1998) argues that emergent properties entail cohesion, where “cohesion represents those factors that causally bind the components of something through space and time, so it acts coherently and resists which internal and external fluctuations”. But cohesion, as causal condition for the emergence of a property can be understood in terms of transfer of information (according to Collier). Thus, Chalmers was probably not completely wrong with his double aspect theory of information after all? Well it depends on what we understand by completely wrong, which is clear is that Collier’s argument does not support any interpretation of a phenomenal side of information. On the contrary I suggest that consciousness could be understood as an emergent property of informational processes happening in the brain6In this sense my position could be compared with Searle’s biological naturalism.

4. DISTINGUISHING A CONSCIOUS BEING

Up to now we have dealt with what it could be defined as an explanatory problem. But immersed in the literature around the topic of consciousness we find another sort of problem which is strongly linked to the above one not necessarily determining it (as it happens for some authors) , i.e. the problem of distinguishing a conscious being from a non-conscious one. I find the problem quite similar to the Turing test and all the ongoing functionalist problems of Strong and Weak AI (Searle, 1997). If we reduce consciousness (the cognitive and the phenomenal side) to a functional explanation, thus to an observable behaviour, then the Hard Problem arises and Zombies enter the scene (as well as if we reduce cognition to functional computation the ‘symbol grounding problem’ arises and ‘Chinese room’ kind of arguments enter the scene).

But nor functionalism is enough to explain cognition nor we do discriminate solely by behavioural observations. Until the sciences of the artificial, and robotics arose, for a certain behaviour there was usually the same kind of physical structures performing it (i.e. a human body for linguistic behaviour). That is why we, humans, take for grounded that for a certain behaviour there is a corresponding structure performing it, with its evolutionary history, structural causality and so on. But if, by chance, a plastic ball gets out of the window, nobody will attribute to that behaviour any intentionality of willing to suicide, nor any other intentional instance, because we know that the causal relations that make that ball going out of the window are structurally different from ours.

At this point the problem can be understood as an attitude problem:

So if one accepts that the creation of robots with consciousness1-3 offers merely ‘easy’ problems (…), the additional magic ingredient for consciousness* is merely a change of attitude in us, the observers. Such a change of attitude cannot be achieved arbitrarily; the right conditions of complexity of behaviour, of similarity to humans, are required first

(Harvey:10)

But an attitude problem is not merely an ‘attitude’ problem because my attitude with my teddy bear does not make the teddy bear conscious. The problem must be addressed as under what condition it is legitimate the attitude of considering or not a certain entity to be conscious. If phenomenal consciousness is referred to that being a cognitive system independently of the performing functional behaviour of the moment, the attribution of consciousness to a certain entity cannot be a matter of behaviour but a matter of the operational organisation of the entity that performs such behaviour. This way the matter of ‘attitude’ becomes an epistemological matter of establishing the operational conditions under which it is legitimate to describe an entity as conscious i.e. the necessary and sufficient operational conditions for a system to be conscious.

5. CONCLUSION: CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE AND SCIENTIFIC STUDY:

By the claim that being conscious is no more (nor less) than being a certain kind of cognitive system (with the appropriate structure and processes from where consciousness emerges) and thus that the HP does not entail any problem at all (but addresses a HP inside the functionalist assumptions), I don’t mean that we have no inner experience. What I suggest is that the existence of experience, of phenomenal consciousness, does not require any intrinsic explanation at all: because it is impossible a priori (by definition of the term explanation), and because the concept of intrinsic explanation entails the same problem ones again ad infinitum. Neither do I mean that there is no place in science for conscious experience. I suggest that the place of experience should be methodological rather than ontological. In this sense Varela’s proposal for a neurophenomenological framework (Varela, 1996) seems to me completely coherent with my argument. If there is anything to be explained this must be in functional and structural-operational terms, as proposed above.

But this claim does not narrow the methodological scope, it just opens it ones we realise that there is no extra ingredient nor explanatory gap. In this context, doubtless, phenomenology stands for one of the most powerful tools to take into account. Just because been cognitive systems put us in a privileged position to know how 3 trillion neurones work (and how the embodied study of those 3 trillion neurones work, as well). After all, the problem, seems to me, is more methodological than ontological. We know that something special (cognition, intentionality, consciousness) is going on in our brains, because we experience it7I want to point to the contradiction involved in this expresion, namely that we cannot experience consciousness because consciousness is not an object to be experienced or hadled by a subject but the very fact of been a subject. Language makes the whole subject/object dicotomy hard to solve since the very structure of language involves such dualism.

Probably explanable by the 40 Hz hypothesys (Crick and Koch).

6. DISCUSSION: POINTING TO A HARD PROBLEM AND A CRUCIAL GAP

I wish to finish this essay by pointing to a further discussion about some related issues that I find specially important but far from most of the efforts in the field. I will briefly note them.

In what accounts for consciousness we are dealing as well with the notion of the self (and still worst, with the experience of the self) considered as the unifying substrate of experience. I consider that the underlying problem of the self has great possibilities of becoming a real hard problem since it is one of the constitutive notions of western civilisation on which science is immersed.

On the other hand (but somehow linked with the former problem) I find the problem of the gap between dynamic experiences (understood as personal/individual experiences) and intellectual experiences (purely symbolic/abstract experiences). Following the work by Varela et al. (1991) I believe that working in this two issues is fundamental if we want knowledge to serve human purposes and not vice versa.

7. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To my father for his help on rigour, for his patience, for being always there. To Steve Torrance and Alvaro Moreno for guiding me first steeps into Cognitive Sciences. To Alfredo for technical support on What Macintosh still can’t do (on decompressing on-line articles).

8. BIBLIOGRAPHY and REFERENCES

BROOKS, R. (1991) Intelligence without representation. Artificial Intelligence 47 (1991), 139-159.

CHALMERS, D. (1995). Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies. 2:200-220.

[I used the HTML version on http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/archives/phil/papers/199806/199806022/…/cosnciousness.html]

COLLIER, J. D. (1998). The dynamical basis of emergence in natural hierarchies. From George Farre and Tarko Oksala (eds) Emergence, Complexity, Hierarchy and Organization, Selected and Edited Papers from the ECHO III Conference, Acta Polytechnica Scandinavica, MA19 (Finish Academy of Technology, Espoo, 1998.)

CRUTCHFIELD, J P. (1998) Dynamical Embodiment of Computation in Cognitive Processes. Submited as Open Peer Commentary on T. van Gelder (1998) The Dynamical Hypothesis in Cognitive Science, BBS to appear.

[Taken from the internet http://www.santafe.edu/jpc]

DENNETT, D. (1996). Facing Backwards on the Problem of Consciousness. Published in Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol.3, no.1, 1996, 4-6.

[I used the HTML version on http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/chalmers.htm]

DI PAOLO, E. (1999). On the Evolutionary and Behavioral Dynamics of Social Coordination: Models and Theoretical. DPhil Thesis, School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, University of Sussex.

[I used the internet version from www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/ezequiel/thesis.html]

DI PAOLO, E. (2000). Behavioral coordination, structural congruence and entrainment in a simulation of acoustically coupled agents. Adaptive Behavior 8:1. 25-46. Special issue on Simulation Models of Social Agents. K. Dautenhahn (guest ed.)

GUTTENPLAN, S. (editor). A companion to the philosophy of mind. Blackwell, 1998.

HARNAD, S. (1990) The Symbol Grounding Problem. Physica D42: 335-346

[I used the HTML version on http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/archives/psyc/papers/199803/199803014/doc.html/The_Symbol_Grounding_Problem.html]

HARVEY, I. Evolving Robot Consciousness: The Easy Problems and the Rest. To appear in Evolving Consciousness, G. Mulhauser (ed.), Advances in Consciousness Research Series, John Benjamins, Amsterdam. In preparation.

[I used the internte version at ftp://ftp.cogs.susx.ac.uk/pub/users/inmanh/consc.ps.gz]

MORENO, A., UMEREZ, J. & IBAÑEZ, J. (1997) Cognition and Life. The Autonomy of Cognition. Brain & Cognition 34 (1) Special Issue Academic Press pp. 107-129.

RORTY, R. (1994).Consciousness, Intentionality, and the Philosophy of Mind. From The Mind-Body Problem (A guide to the current debate). Edited by Richard Wagner and Tadesz Szubka. Blackwell, 1994. P. 121-127.

SEARLE, J. (1992) What’s Wrong With the Philosophy of Mind?. 1st chapter of ‘The rediscovery of the mind’ (MIT press, 1992). Taken from The Mind-Body Problem (A guide to the current debate). Edited by Richard Wagner and Tadesz Szubka. Blackwell, 1994. p. 277-298.

SEARLE, J. (1997). The Mystery of Consciousness. Granta Books 1998.

TORRANCE, S. (1996). Real world: embedding and traditional AI.

TORRANCE, S. (1998). The Taste of Lemons: A New Twist to the Cosnciousness Debate. (Talk delivered in Psychology Group, Middlesex University, November 1998)

Van GELDER, T. (1993) What can cognition be if not computation? From III International Workshop on Artificial Life and Arificial Intelligence, Workshop Notes, second edition, UPV. San Sebastian, 1995.

Van GELDER, T. (1995). Mind as Motion: Explorations in the Dynamics of cognition. MIT press.

VARELA, THOMPSON AND ROSCH, (1991). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, Cambridge MA:MIT Press. (I used the Spanish edition: Editorial Gedisa, 1997)

VARELA, F. (1996). Neurophenomenology: A Methodological Remedy for the Hard Problem. In Journal of Consciousness Studies, “Special Issues on the Hard Problems”, J.Shear (Ed.) June 1996.

[I used the HTML version on http://www.ccr.jussieu.fr/varela/ human_consciousness/article01.html]

Over the telephone Uri Gordon does not sound like he’s gloating, but for an anarchist such as himself, the earth-shaking economic developments of the past six weeks have to have provided some satisfaction. After all, today’s anarchists are certain of the wrong-headedness of the modern capitalist system, with its inevitable march toward a greater concentration of the world’s wealth in an increasingly smaller number of hands. Most also see the need for a radical change in humanity’s relationship with the environment, an understanding that seems to have been adopted by at least much of the West in recent months, as the effects of oil depletion and climate change become felt.  

Gordon, 32, is the author of “Anarchy Alive!: Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory” (Pluto Press, 183 pages, $26.95/16 pounds), a somewhat high-brow analysis of contemporary anarchism. Raised in Haifa, Gordon received his doctorate in political theory from Oxford University in 2005; his thesis served as the basis for the book. But as he describes in the book’s introduction, he arrived in the United Kingdom in the fall of 2000, after the anti-globalization movement had begun to draw tens of thousands to its demonstrations, and shortly before the huge protests in Europe against the imminent allied invasion of Iraq. He soon found himself spending as much time on the barricades as in the library. He resolved the apparent conflict, he writes, when he realized that “I could easily construe my activism as fieldwork, and actually gear my academic work to the needs of activists.” 

“Anarchy Alive!” deals with most of the big questions curious readers might have about the movement: its connection to the violently revolutionary anarchism of the early 20th century, and the views of today’s anarchists on violence; the attitude of anarchists to technology and to environmental issues, and why it is that so many of the protesters against Israel’s West Bank separation barrier seem to be anarchists – part of a general discussion of anarchism and the question of Israel/Palestine. 

Gordon describes the integral concept for anarchists of “prefigurative action,” which in the simplest terms means that they are not waiting for a revolution in order to begin living according to their beliefs. Since another major tenet of the movement is the need for decentralization of all aspects of life, it makes perfect sense that many anarchists live in small communities, and try to achieve a level of sustainability. Gordon, for example, is a resident of Kibbutz Lotan, up the road from Ketura, where he teaches politics and ethics at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies. (He has also contributed several opinion articles on environmental themes to Haaretz English Edition.) He spoke to us from there. 

***

How did you happen to become an anarchist? 

I grew up in a left-wing family, although my parents were not politically active. I did my army service in Army Radio, and reported from the West Bank during 1996-1997, covering the redeployment from the cities. I became interested in environmental issues after my release, when I picked up a book, “Our Angry Earth,” by Isaac Asimov and Frederick Pohl. It helped me realize that this would be the defining issue of the coming century. I started studying politics and economics at Tel-Aviv University, looking at environmental issues from a philosophical and economic perspective; I also became involved with groups like Green Action and in the struggle against the Trans-Israel Highway. It became clear to me that exploitation of nature by humans is intimately connected with the exploitation of humans by humans. 

How would you summarize the basic tenets of anarchist beliefs? 

We object to centralization of power, to hierarchical structures in society and to the institution of the state. We’re opposed to capitalism and social classes, to school systems designed to produce obedient workers and citizens, and to most forms of organized religion. We believe in horizontal forms of organization, in voluntary association and mutual aid, and believe that decisions should be made at the smallest or most local level possible. 

Does this mean that you won’t vote in the upcoming election in Israel, or wouldn’t serve in the army today? 

I probably won’t vote. In principle, I don’t want to signify my consent to be ruled, or my acquiescence to a system whereby we get to choose who pushes us around. Elections give people the illusion of democratic participation, but as the famous Jewish anarchist Emma Goldman said: If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal. And no, I wouldn’t serve in any army of any country. If everyone were an anarchist, there wouldn’t be armies and there wouldn’t be wars. 

You seem to be ignoring the basic characteristics of human nature. Given the choice, societies – even the kibbutz – seem to prefer capitalism, inegalitarian as it may be. And humans also seem to be naturally aggressive, no? 

I don’t agree. If you ask people, do you want to take orders or do your own thing, to compete or to cooperate – I think that if they had the choice to think about it, rather than being indoctrinated by a society based on competition and hierarchy, they would choose cooperation. Anarchists always say that their forms of organization are not novel. Most human relationships are naturally horizontal and cooperative. There’s a difference between order and hierarchy. Anarchy is also a form of order, but it’s based on agreement, rather than command. On agreed rules rather than enforced laws that protect the privileged from the many. 

But just look at the way people behave in Israel, driving – and parking – as if there were nobody else on the streets. 

People behave the way they do because of their culture and their mutual expectations. It’s not surprising that in a culture that educates us to compete with each other and either to command or to obey, you’d get people trying to elbow their way around and do as much as they can for their own benefit. Anarchism also calls for a revolution in consciousness and culture, one that will allow free rein to human sociable instincts, to mutual aid. 

It all sounds good, but what if everyone really were an anarchist? Would we have institutions like hospitals, universities, or even airlines? 

Centralized economies aren’t the only way to organize production and services. In an anarchist system, any form of productive activity would be owned and run directly by the workers, rather than by private bosses or the state. Production would be for need, not for profit. Various workers’ enterprises would coordinate between themselves to perform any larger scale tasks. The basic idea is that, if you leave people to their own devices, they will organize quite well, and that top-down, centralized forms of organization are in place to maintain existing systems of privilege and domination, rather than in order to get things done. 

Look at Catalonia, during the high stages of the Spanish Revolution, in 1936. There was a well-formed anarchist system. The peasants owned the land, tram workers ran the trams, and everything functioned – and this was in middle of a civil war. The original kibbutzim were also anarchistic, even if they didn’t call themselves that. In Degania, the founders said, we are trying to create a society without exploited and exploiters. We want direct democracy, from each according to their ability and to each according to their needs. 

You say you wouldn’t serve in the army today. But what if every Israeli said that – surely you don’t deny that Israel has genuine defense concerns? 

I think that occupation creates terrorism, and not vice versa. If all Israelis had the political consciousness to refuse to go to military service, we would have already arrived in a revolutionary situation. It would mean that they had all shed their artificial, drummed-up fears and risen up against their exploiters. In general, though, when people discuss politics, they put themselves in the place of the politician and imagine what they would do. But people like you and me aren’t being asked what we think the state should do. Whatever agreement the political elites end up signing is not going to be the end of the conflict. It’s only the beginning of the peace process. What matters at this stage is building ties of binational solidarity and cooperation, to have grassroots movements that seek to show and demonstrate with their own acts and lives that another Middle East is possible. You don’t have to be an anarchist to agree that it’s through everyday relationships that peace is accomplished. So when my friends and I go to villages of Palestinians whose lands are being confiscated for construction of the segregation barrier, we are showing with our own bodies that something is stronger than the perpetual threat being projected by parties on all sides of the political spectrum. We are showing that we have values that transcend all forms of separation. 

Do you see the economic meltdown as a vindication of your beliefs? 

I think the current global financial crisis is definitely a strong indication that capitalism is reaching its limits, and so I am convinced that various efforts to “buy time,” in this sense, are not going to cut it. On one hand, we are reaching the limits of the finite planet that we live on – of the resources we can extract, and the pollution we can emit − and on the other, a system of capitalism based on speculation on future debt is no longer managing to function. The way out is not for governments to bail out the banks, but for people to begin creating grassroots structures that are self-sufficient, and that will allow them to detach themselves from both capitalism and the state. 

We’re talking just before the election in the U.S., but it occurs to me that you probably don’t care who wins it. 

Actually, I want Obama to win, because I hope that when he breaks everybody’s hearts, people will then wake up to the fact that it doesn’t matter whether it’s a blue or red puppet in capitalism’s hand. At the same time, in the short term, we’ve had eight years of a very right-wing administration in Washington, which has dragged the whole world into a very bad position, and just the relief from that will make a difference in the lives of many Americans, and many Iraqis, hopefully, and Palestinians and Israelis

Hope in Common
David Graeber

We seem to have reached an impasse. Capitalism as we know it appears to be coming apart. But as financial institutions stagger and crumble, there is no obvious alternative. Organized resistance appears scattered and incoherent; the global justice movement a shadow of its former self. There is good reason to believe that, in a generation or so, capitalism will no longer exist: for the simple reason that it’s impossible to maintain an engine of perpetual growth forever on a finite planet. Faced with the prospect, the knee-jerk reaction—even of “progressives”—is, often, fear, to cling to capitalism because they simply can’t imagine an alternative that wouldn’t be even worse.

The first question we should be asking is: How did this happen? Is it normal for human beings to be unable to imagine what a better world would even be like?

Hopelessness isn’t natural. It needs to be produced. If we really want to understand this situation, we have to begin by understanding that the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a kind of giant machine that is designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures. At root is a veritable obsession on the part of the rulers of the world with ensuring that social movements cannot be seen to grow, to flourish, to propose alternatives; that those who challenge existing power arrangements can never, under any circumstances, be perceived to win. To do so requires creating a vast apparatus of armies, prisons, police, various forms of private security firms and police and military intelligence apparatus, propaganda engines of every conceivable variety, most of which do not attack alternatives directly so much as they create a pervasive climate of fear, jingoistic conformity, and simple despair that renders any thought of changing the world seem an idle fantasy. Maintaining this apparatus seems even more important, to exponents of the “free market,” even than maintaining any sort of viable market economy. How else can one explain, for instance, what happened in the former Soviet Union, where one would have imagined the end of the Cold War would have led to the dismantling of the army and KGB and rebuilding the factories, but in fact what happened was precisely the other way around? This is just one extreme example of what has been happening everywhere. Economically, this apparatus is pure dead weight; all the guns, surveillance cameras, and propaganda engines are extraordinarily expensive and really produce nothing, and as a result, it’s dragging the entire capitalist system down with it, and possibly, the earth itself.

The spirals of financialization and endless string of economic bubbles we’ve been experience are a direct result of this apparatus. It’s no coincidence that the United States has become both the world’s major military (”security”) power and the major promoter of bogus securities. This apparatus exists to shred and pulverize the human imagination, to destroy any possibility of envisioning alternative futures. As a result, the only thing left to imagine is more and more money, and debt spirals entirely out of control. What is debt, after all, but imaginary money whose value can only be realized in the future: future profits, the proceeds of the exploitation of workers not yet born. Finance capital in turn is the buying and selling of these imaginary future profits; and once one assumes that capitalism itself will be around for all eternity, the only kind of economic democracy left to imagine is one everyone is equally free to invest in the market—to grab their own piece in the game of buying and selling imaginary future profits, even if these profits are to be extracted from themselves. Freedom has become the right to share in the proceeds of one’s own permanent enslavement.

And since the bubble had built on the destruction of futures, once it collapsed there appeared to be—at least for the moment—simply nothing left.

The effect however is clearly temporary. If the story of the global justice movement tells us anything it’s that the moment there appears to be any sense of an opening, the imagination will immediately spring forth. This is what effectively happened in the late ‘90s when it looked, for a moment, like we might be moving toward a world at peace. In the US, for the last fifty years, whenever there seems to be any possibility of peace breaking out, the same thing happens: the emergence of a radical social movement dedicated to principles of direct action and participatory democracy, aiming to revolutionize the very meaning of political life. In the late ‘50s it was the civil rights movement; in the late ‘70s, the anti-nuclear movement. This time it happened on a planetary scale, and challenged capitalism head-on. These movements tend to be extraordinarily effective. Certainly the global justice movement was. Few realize that one of the main reasons it seemed to flicker in and out of existence so rapidly was that it achieved its principle goals so quickly. None of us dreamed, when we were organizing the protests in Seattle in 1999 or at the IMF meetings in DC in 2000, that within a mere three or four years, the WTO process would have collapsed, that “free trade” ideologies would be considered almost entirely discredited, that every new trade pact they threw at us—from the MIA to Free Trade Areas of the Americas act—would have been defeated, the World Bank hobbled, the power of the IMF over most of the world’s population, effectively destroyed. But this is precisely what happened. The fate of the IMF is particularly startling. Once the terror of the Global South, it is, by now, a shattered remnant of its former self, reviled and discredited, reduced to selling off its gold reserves and desperately searching for a new global mission.

Meanwhile, most of the “third world debt” has simply vanished. All of this was a direct result of a movement that managed to mobilize global resistance so effectively that the reigning institutions were first discredited, and ultimately, that those running governments in Asia and especially Latin America were forced by their own populations to call the bluff of the international financial system. Much of the reason the movement was thrown into confusion was because none of us had really considered we might win.

But of course there’s another reason. Nothing terrifies the rulers of the world, and particularly of the United States, as much as the danger of grassroots democracy. Whenever a genuinely democratic movement begins to emerge—particularly, one based on principles of civil disobedience and direct action—the reaction is the same; the government makes immediate concessions (fine, you can have voting rights; no nukes), then starts ratcheting up military tensions abroad. The movement is then forced to transform itself into an anti-war movement; which, pretty much invariably, is far less democratically organized. So the civil rights movement was followed by Vietnam, the anti-nuclear movement by proxy wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, the global justice movement, by the “War on Terror.”

But at this point, we can see that “war” for what it was: as the flailing and obviously doomed effort of a declining power to make its peculiar combination of bureaucratic war machines and speculative financial capitalism into a permanent global condition. If the rotten architecture collapsed abruptly at the end of 2008, it was at least in part because so much of the work had already been accomplished by a movement that had, in the face of the surge of repression after 911, combined with confusion over how to follow up its startling initial success, had seemed to have largely disappeared from the scene.

Of course it hasn’t really.

We are clearly at the verge of another mass resurgence of the popular imagination. It shouldn’t be that difficult. Most of the elements are already there. The problem is that, our perceptions having been twisted into knots by decades of relentless propaganda, we are no longer able to see them. Consider here the term “communism.” Rarely has a term come to be so utterly reviled. The standard line, which we accept more or less unthinkingly, is that communism means state control of the economy, and this is an impossible utopian dream because history has shown it simply “doesn’t work.” Capitalism, however unpleasant, is thus the only remaining option. But in fact communism really just means any situation where people act according to the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”—which is the way pretty much everyone always act if they are working together to get something done. If two people are fixing a pipe and one says “hand me the wrench,” the other doesn’t say, “and what do I get for it?”(That is, if they actually want it to be fixed.) This is true even if they happen to be employed by Bechtel or Citigroup. They apply principles of communism because it’s the only thing that really works. This is also the reason whole cities or countries revert to some form of rough-and-ready communism in the wake of natural disasters, or economic collapse (one might say, in those circumstances, markets and hierarchical chains of command are luxuries they can’t afford.) The more creativity is required, the more people have to improvise at a given task, the more egalitarian the resulting form of communism is likely to be: that’s why even Republican computer engineers, when trying to innovate new software ideas, tend to form small democratic collectives. It’s only when work becomes standardized and boring—as on production lines—that it becomes possible to impose more authoritarian, even fascistic forms of communism. But the fact is that even private companies are, internally, organized communistically.

Communism then is already here. The question is how to further democratize it. Capitalism, in turn, is just one possible way of managing communism—and, it has become increasingly clear, rather a disastrous one. Clearly we need to be thinking about a better one: preferably, one that does not quite so systematically set us all at each others’ throats.

All this makes it much easier to understand why capitalists are willing to pour such extraordinary resources into the machinery of hopelessness. Capitalism is not just a poor system for managing communism: it has a notorious tendency to periodically come spinning apart. Each time it does, those who profit from it have to convince everyone—and most of all the technical people, the doctors and teachers and surveyors and insurance claims adjustors—that there is really no choice but to dutifully paste it all back together again, in something like the original form. This despite the fact that most of those who will end up doing the work of rebuilding the system don’t even like it very much, and all have at least the vague suspicion, rooted in their own innumerable experiences of everyday communism, that it really ought to be possible to create a system at least a little less stupid and unfair.

This is why, as the Great Depression showed, the existence of any plausible-seeming alternative—even one so dubious as the Soviet Union in the 1930s—can turn a downswing into an apparently insoluble political crisis.

Those wishing to subvert the system have learned by now, from bitter experience, that we cannot place our faith in states. The last decade has instead seen the development of thousands of forms of mutual aid association, most of which have not even made it onto the radar of the global media. They range from tiny cooperatives and associations to vast anti-capitalist experiments, archipelagos of occupied factories in Paraguay or Argentina or of self-organized tea plantations and fisheries in India, autonomous institutes in Korea, whole insurgent communities in Chiapas or Bolivia, associations of landless peasants, urban squatters, neighborhood alliances, that spring up pretty much anywhere that where state power and global capital seem to temporarily looking the other way. They might have almost no ideological unity and many are not even aware of the other’s existence, but all are marked by a common desire to break with the logic of capital. And in many places, they are beginning to combine. “Economies of solidarity” exist on every continent, in at least eighty different countries. We are at the point where we can begin to perceive the outlines of how these can knit together on a global level, creating new forms of planetary commons to create a genuine insurgent civilization.

Visible alternatives shatter the sense of inevitability, that the system must, necessarily, be patched together in the same form—this is why it became such an imperative of global governance to stamp them out, or, when that’s not possible, to ensure that no one knows about them. To become aware of it allows us to see everything we are already doing in a new light. To realize we’re all already communists when working on a common projects, all already anarchists when we solve problems without recourse to lawyers or police, all revolutionaries when we make something genuinely new.

One might object: a revolution cannot confine itself to this. That’s true. In this respect, the great strategic debates are really just beginning. I’ll offer one suggestion though. For at least five thousand years, popular movements have tended to center on struggles over debt—this was true long before capitalism even existed. There is a reason for this. Debt is the most efficient means ever created to take relations that are fundamentally based on violence and violent inequality and to make them seem right and moral to everyone concerned. When the trick no longer works, everything explodes. As it is now. Clearly, debt has shown itself to be the point of greatest weakness of the system, the point where it spirals out of anyone’s control. It also allows endless opportunities for organizing. Some speak of a debtor’s strike, or debtor’s cartel.

Perhaps so—but at the very least we can start with a pledge against evictions: to pledge, neighborhood by neighborhood, to support each other if any of us are to be driven from our homes. The power is not just that to challenge regimes of debt is to challenge the very fiber of capitalism—its moral foundation—now revealed to be a collection of broken promises—but in doing so, to create a new one. A debt after all is only that: a promise, and the present world abounds with promises that have not been kept. One might speak here of the promise made us by the state; that if we abandon any right to collectively manage our own affairs, we would at least be provided with basic life security. Or of the promise offered by capitalism—that we could live like kings if we were willing to buy stock in our own collective subordination. All of this has come crashing down. What remains is what we are able to promise one another. Directly. Without the mediation of economic and political bureaucracies. The revolution begins by asking: what sort of promises do free men and women make to one another, and how, by making them, do we begin to make another world?

Raymond Williams

There are many close and evident connections between science fiction and utopian fiction, yet neither, in deeper examination, is a simple mode, and the relationships between them are exceptionally complex.** Thus if we analyse the fictions that have been grouped as utopian we can distinguish four types: (a) the paradise, in which a happier life is described as simply existing elsewhere; (b) the externally altered world, in which a new kind of life has been made possible by an unlooked-for natural event; (c) the willed transformation, in which a new kind of life has been achieved by human effort; (d) the technological transformation, in which a new kind of life has been made possible by a technical discovery.

It will of course be clear that these types often overlap. Indeed the overlap and often the confusion between (c) and (d) are exceptionally significant. One kind of clarification is possible by considering the negative of each type: the negative which is now commonly expressed as “dystopia.” We then get:

(a) the hell, in which a more wretched kind of life is described as existing elsewhere; (b) the externally altered world, in which a new but less happy kind of life has been brought about by an unlooked-for or uncontrollable natural event; (c) the willed transformation, in which a new but less happy kind of life has been brought about by social degeneration, by the emergence or re-emergence of harmful kinds of social order, or by the unforeseen yet disastrous consequences of an effort at social improvement; (d) the technological transformation, in which the conditions of life have been worsened by technical development.

Since there can be no a priori definition of the utopian mode, we cannot at first exclude any of these dystopian functions, though it is clear that they are strongest in (c) and (d), perceptible in (b), and barely evident in (a), where the negative response to utopia would normally have given way to a relatively autonomous fatalism or pessimism. These indications bear with some accuracy on the positive definitions, suggesting that the element of transformation, rather than the more general element of otherness, may be crucial. We find:

(a) The paradise or the hell can be discovered, reached, by new forms of travel dependent on scientific and technological (space-travel) or quasi-scientific (time-travel) development. But this is an instrumental function; the mode of travel does not commonly affect the place discovered. The type of fiction is little affected whether the discovery is made by a space voyage or a sea voyage. The place, rather than the journey, is dominant.

(b) The externally altered world can be related, construed, foretold in a context of increased scientific understanding of natural events. This also may be an instrumental function only; a new name for an old deluge. But the element of increased scientific understanding may become significant or even dominant in the fiction, for example in the emphasis of natural laws in human history, which can decisively (often catastrophically) alter normal human perspectives.

(c) The willed transformation can be conceived as inspired by the scientific spirit, either in its most general terms as secularity and rationality, or in a combination of these with applied science which makes possible and sustains the transformation. Alternatively the same impulses can be negatively valued: the “modern scientific” ant-heap or tyranny. Either mode leaves open the question of the social agency of the scientific spirit and the applied science, though it is the inclusion of some social agency, explicit or implicit (such as the overthrow of one class by another), that distinguishes this type from type (d). We must note also that there are important examples of type (c) in which the scientific spirit and applied science are subordinate to or simply associated with a dominant emphasis on social and political (including revolutionary) transformation; or in which they are neutral with respect to the social and political transformation, which proceeds in its own terms, or, which is of crucial diagnostic significance, where the applied science, though less often the scientific spirit, is positively controlled, modified, or in effect suppressed, in a willing return to a “simpler,” “more natural” way of life. In this last mode there are some pretty combinations of very advanced “non-material” science and a “primitive” economy.

(d) The technological transformation has a direct relation to applied science. It is the new technology which, for good or ill, has made the new life. As more generally in technological determinism, this has little or no social agency, though it is commonly described as having certain “inevitable” social consequences.

We can now clearly describe some significant relations between utopian fiction and SF, as a preliminary to a discussion of some modern utopian and dystopian writing. It is tempting to extend both categories until they are loosely identical, and it is true that the presentation of otherness appears to link them, as modes of desire or of warning in which a crucial emphasis is obtained by the element of discontinuity from ordinary “realism.” But this element of discontinuity is itself fundamentally variable. Indeed, what most has to be looked at, in properly utopian or dystopian fiction, is the continuity, the implied connection, which the form is intended to embody. Thus, looking again at the four types, we can make some crucial distinctions which appear to define utopian and dystopian writing (some of these bear also on the separate question of the distinction of SF from older and now residual modes which are simply organizationally grouped with it):

(a) The paradise and the hell are only rarely utopian or dystopian. They are ordinarily the projections of a magical or a religious consciousness, inherently universal and timeless, thus commonly beyond the conditions of any imaginable ordinary human or worldly life. Thus the Earthly Paradise and the Blessed Islands are neither utopian nor science-fictional. The pre-lapsarian Garden of Eden is latently utopian, in some Christian tendencies; it can be attained by redemption. The medieval Land of Cokaygne is latently utopian; it can be, and was, imagined as a possible human and worldly condition. The paradisal and hellish planets and cultures of science fiction are at times simple magic and fantasy: deliberate, often sensational presentations of alien forms. In other cases they are latently utopian or dystopian, in the measure of degrees of connection with, extrapolation from, known or imaginable human and social elements.

(b) The externally altered world is typically a form which either falls short of or goes beyond the utopian or dystopian mode. Whether the event is magically or scientifically interpreted does not normally affect this. The common emphasis is on human limitation or indeed human powerlessness: the event saves or destroys us, and we are its objects. In Wells’s In the Days of the Comet the result resembles a utopian transformation, but the displacement of agency is significant. Most other examples, of an SF kind, are explicitly or latently dystopian: the natural world deploys forces beyond human control, thus setting limits to or annulling all human achievement.

(c) The willed transformation is the characteristic utopian or dystopian mode, in the strict sense.

(d) The technological transformation is the utopian or dystopian mode narrowed from agency to instrumentality; indeed it only becomes utopian or dystopian, in strict senses, when it is used as an image of consequence to function, socially, as conscious desire or conscious warning.

1. No contrast has been more influential, in modern political thought, than Engels’ distinction between “utopian” and “scientific” socialism. If it is now more critically regarded, this is not only because the scientific character of the “laws of historical development” is cautiously questioned or sceptically rejected; to the point, indeed, where the notion of such a science can be regarded as utopian. It is also because the importance of utopian thought is itself being revalued, so that some now see it as the crucial vector of desire, without which even the laws are, in one version, imperfect, and, in another version, mechanical, needing desire to give them direction and substance. This reaction is understandable but it makes the utopian impulse more simple, more singular, than in the history of utopias, it is. Indeed the variability of the utopian situation, the utopian impulse, and the utopian result is crucial to the understanding of utopian fiction.

This can be seen from one of the classical contrasts, between More’s Utopia and Bacon’s New Atlantis. It is usual to say that these show, respectively, a humanist and a scientific utopia:

that excellent perfection of all good fashions, humanitye and civile gentilnesse [More — first English translation, 1551];

the end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes and secret motions of things and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible [Bacon, 1627].

It can be agreed that the two fictions exemplify the difference between a willed general transformation and a technological transformation; that More projects a commonwealth, in which men live and feel differently, while Bacon projects a highly specialised, unequal but affluent and efficient social order. But a full contrast has other levels. Thus they stand near the opposite poles of the utopia of free consumption and the utopia of free production. More’s island is a cooperative subsistence economy; Bacon’s a specialised industrial economy. These can be seen as permanent alternative images, and the swing towards one or another, in socialist ideology as in progressive utopianism, is historically very significant. One might indeed write a history of modern socialist thought in terms of the swing between a Morean cooperative simplicity and a Baconian mastery of nature, except that the most revealing trend has been their unconscious fusion. Yet what we can now perceive as permanent alternative images was rooted, in each case, in a precise social and class situation. More’s humanism is deeply qualified: his indignation is directed as much against importunate and prodigal craftsmen and labourers as against the exploiting and engrossing landlords — his social identification is with the small owners, his laws regulate and protect but also compel labour. It is qualified also because it is static: a wise and entrenched regulation by the elders. It is then socially the projection of a declining class, generalized to a relatively humane but permanent balance. Bacon’s scientism is similarly qualified: the scientific revolution of experiment and discovery becomes research and development in an instrumental social perspective. Enlarging the bounds of human empire is not only the mastery of nature; it is also, as a social projection, an aggressive, autocratic, imperialist enterprise; the projection of a rising class.

We cannot abstract desire. It is always desire for something specific, in specifically impelling circumstances. Consider three utopian fictions of the late nineteenth century: Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871); Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888); William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890).

The Coming Race is at one level an obvious example of the mode of technological transformation. What makes the Vril-ya, who live under our Earth, civilized is their possession of Vril, that all-purpose energy source which lies beyond electricity and magnetism. Outlying underground peoples who do not possess Vril are barbarians; indeed the technology is the civilisation, and the improvement of manners and of social relations is firmly based on it alone. The changes thus brought about are the transformation of work into play, the dissolution of the State and in effect the outlawing of competitive and aggressive social relations. Yet it is not, for all the obvious traces of influence, either a socialist or an anarchist utopia. It is a projection of the idealised social attitudes of an aristocracy, now generalised and distanced from the realities of rent and production by the technological determinism of Vril. In its complementary liberation of sexual and family relations (in fact qualified, though apparently emphasized, by the simple reversal of the relative size and roles of women and men) it can be sharply contrasted with the rigidities of these relations within More’s humanism. But this is of a piece with the aristocratic projection. It is (as in some later fantasies, with similarly privileged assumptions) a separation of personal and sexual relations from those problems of care, protection, maintenance, and security which Vril has superseded. Affluence delivers liberation. By contrast the greed, the aggression, the dominativeness, the coarseness, the vulgarity of the surface world — the world, significantly, both of capitalism and of democracy — are easily placed. They are what are to be expected in a world without Vril and therefore Vril-ya. Indeed there are moments when Vril can almost be compared with Culture, in Matthew Arnold’s virtually contemporary Culture and Anarchy. Arnold’s spiritual aristocracy, his spiritual force beyond all actual classes, has, though, been magically achieved, without the prolonged effort that Arnold described, by the properties of Vril. It is in each case desire, but desire for what? A civilising transformation, beyond the terms of a restless, struggling society of classes.

What has also to be said, though, about The Coming Race is that desire is tinged with awe and indeed with fear. The title introduces that evolutionary dimension which form this period on is newly available in utopian fiction. When the Vril-ya come to the surface they will simply replace men, as in effect a higher and more powerful species. And it is not only in his unVril humanity that the hero fears this. Towards the end he sounds the note that we shall hear so clearly later in Huxley’s Brave New World: that something valuable and even decisive — initiative and creativity are the hovering words — has been lost in the displacement of human industry to Vril. This was a question that was to haunt the technological utopia. (Meanwhile, back in 19th century society, an entrepreneur took his own short-cut. Inspired by Lytton he made a fortune from a beef extract called Bovril.)

Bellamy’s Looking Backward is unquestionably a utopia, in the central sense of a transformed social life of the future, but it is in a significant way a work without desire; its impulse is different, an overriding rationalism, a determining total organisation, which finds its proper institutional counterparts in the State-monopoly capitalism which is seen as the inevitable “next stage in the industrial and social development of humanity” (the order of adjectives there is decisive.) That this forecast, rather than vision, was widely taken as socialism is indicative of a major tendency in Bellamy’s period, which can be related to Fabianism but has also now to be related to a major current in orthodox Marxism: socialism as the next higher stage of economic organisation, a proposition which is taken as overriding, except in the most general terms, questions of substantially different social relations and human motives. Morris’s critique of Bellamy repeated almost exactly what is called the Romantic but is more properly the radical critique of utilitarian social models — that “the underlying vice … is that the author cannot conceive … anything else than themachinery of society”: the central point made in this tradition, from Carlyle’s Signs of the Times onward. Morris’s fuller response was his News from Nowhere, but before we look at this we should include a crucial point about the history of utopian writing, recently put forward by M. H. Abensour in his Paris dissertation “Formes de l’utopie Socialiste-Communiste.”

Abensour establishes a crucial periodisation in the utopian mode, according to which there is, after 1850, a change from the systematic building of alternative organisational models to a more open and heuristicdiscourse of alternative values. E.P. Thompson, discussing Abensour in New Left Review No. 99 (1976), has interpreted this latter mode as the “education of desire.” It is an important emphasis, since it allows us to see more clearly by contrast, how examples of the mode of “willed social transformation” can be shifted, in their essence, to the mode of “technological transformation,” where the technology need not be only a marvellous new energy source, or some industrial resource of that kind, but can be also a new set of laws, new abstract property relations, indeed precisely new social machinery. But then, when we have said this, and recognized the contrasting value of the more heuristic mode in which the substance of new values and relations is projected, with comparatively little attention to institutions, we have to relate the change to the historical situation within which it occurred. For the shift from one mode to another can be negative as well as positive. To imagine a whole alternative society is not mere model-building, any more than the projection of new feelings and relationships is necessarily a transforming response. The whole alternative society rests, paradoxically, on two quite different social situations: either that of social confidence, the mood of a rising class, which knows, down to detail, that it can replace the existing order; or that of social despair, the mood of a declining class or fraction of a class, which has to create a new heaven because its Earth is a hell. The basis of the more open but also the vaguer mode is different from either. It is a society in which change is happening, but primarily under the direction and in the terms of the dominant social order itself. This is always a fertile moment for what is, in effect, an anarchism: positive in its fierce rejection, of domination, repression, and manipulation; negative in its willed neglect of structures, of continuity and of material constraints. The systematic mode is a response to tyranny or disintegration; the heuristic mode, by contrast, seems to be primarily a response to a constrained reformism.

It is then not a question of asking which is better or stronger. The heuristic utopia offers a strength of vision against the grain; the systematic utopia a strength of conviction that the world really can be different. The heuristic utopia, at the same time, has the weakness that it can settle into isolated and in the end sentimental “desire,” a mode of living with alienation, while the systematic utopia has the weakness that, in its insistent organisation, it seems to offer little room for any recognisable life. These strengths and weaknesses vary, of course, in individual examples of each mode, but they vary most decisively, not only in the periods in which they are written but in the periods in which they are read. The mixed character of each mode then has much to do with the character of the 20th-century dystopias which have succeeded them. For the central contemporary question about the utopian modes is why there is a progression, within their structures, to the specific reversals of a Zamyatin, a Huxley, an Orwell — of a generation of SF writers.

It is in this perspective that we have now to read News from Nowhere. It is commonly diagnosed and criticised as a generous but sentimental heuristic transformation. And this is substantially right, of the parts that are made ordinarily to stick in the mind: the medievalism of visual detail and the beautiful people in the summer along the river are inextricable from the convincing openness and friendliness and relaxed cooperation. But these are residual elements in the form: the Utopians, the Houyhnhnms, the Vril-ya would have found Morris’s people cousins at least, though the dimensions of universal mutuality have made an identifying difference. But what is emergent in Morris’s work, and what seems to me increasingly the strongest part of News from Nowhere, is the crucial insertion of the transition to utopia, which is not discovered, come across, or projected — not even, except at the simplest conventional level, dreamed — but fought for. Between writer or reader and this new condition is chaos, civil war, painful and slow reconstruction. The sweet little world at the end of all this is at once a result and a promise; an offered assurance of “days of peace and rest,” after the battle has been won.

Morris was strong enough, even his world is at times strong enough, to face this process, this necessary order of events. But when utopia is not merely the alternative world, throwing its light on the darkness of the intolerable present, but lies at the far end of generations of struggle and of fierce and destructive conflict , its perspective, necessarily, is altered. The post-religious imagining of a harmonious community, the enlightened rational projection of an order of peace and plenty, have been replaced, or at least qualified, by the light at the end of the tunnel, the sweet promise which sustains effort and principle and hope through the long years of revolutionary preparation and organisation. This is a genuine turning-point. Where the path to utopia was moral redemption or rational declaration — that light on a higher order which illuminates an always present possibility — the mode itself was radically different from the modern mode of conflict and resolution.

Morris’s chapters “How the Change Came” and “The Beginning of the New Life” are strong and convincing. “Thus at last and by slow degrees we get pleasure into our work”: this is not the perspective of reformism, which in spirit, in its evasion of fundamental conflicts and sticking points, is much nearer to the older utopian mode; it is the perspective of revolution — not only the armed struggle but the long and uneven development of new social relations and human feelings. That they have been developed, that the long and difficult enterprise has succeeded, is crucial; it is the transition from dream to vision. But it is then reasonable to ask whether the achieved new condition is not at least as much rest after struggle — the relaxed and quiet evening after a long, hard day — as any kind of released new energy and life. The air of late Victorian holiday is made to override the complexities, the divergences, the everyday materialities of any working society. When the time-dreamer finds himself fading, as he looks in on the feast at the old church, the emotions are very complex: the comforting recall of a medieval precedent — “the churchales of the Middle Ages”; the wrench of regret that he cannot belong to this new life; and then also, perhaps, for all the convinced assent to the sight of the burdens having been lifted, the impulse — and is it only unregenerate? — of an active, engaged, deeply vigorous mind to register the impression, though it is put into a voice from the future, “that our happiness even would weary you.” It is the fused and confused moment of the longing for communism, the longing for rest and the commitment to urgent, complex, vigorous activity.

2. When utopia is no longer an island or a newly discovered place, but our familiar country transformed by specific historical change, the mode of imagined transformation has fundamentally changed. But the historical agency was not only, as in Morris, revolution. It was also, as in Wells, some kind of modernising, rationalising force: the vanguard of Samurai, of scientists, of engineers, of technical innovators. Early rationalist utopias had only, in the manner of Owen, to be declared to be adopted; reason had that inevitability. Wells, refusing popular revolution, belonged to his time in seeing agency as necessary, and there is a convincing match between the kind of agency he selected — a type of social engineering plus a rapidly developing technology — and the point of arrival: a clean, orderly, efficient and planned (controlled) society. It is easy to see this now as an affluent state capitalism or monopoly socialism; indeed many of the images have been literally built. But we can also, holding Morris and Wells together in our minds, see a fundamental tension within the socialist movement itself — indeed in practice within revolutionary socialism. For there are other vanguards than those of Wells, and the Stalinist version of the bureaucratic Party, engineering a future which is primarily defined as technology and production, not only has its connections to Wells but has to be radically distinguished from the revolutionary socialism of Morris and of Marx, in which new social and human relations, transcending the deep divisions of industrial capitalist specialisation, of town and country, of rulers and ruled, administrators and administered, are from the beginning the central and primary objective. It is within this complex of tendencies — of efficient and affluent capitalism set against an earlier capitalist poverty and disorder; of socialism against capitalism in either phase; and of the deep divisions, within socialism itself, between the reformist free-riders with capitalism, the centralising social engineers, and the revolutionary democrats — that we have to consider the mode of dystopia, which is both written and read within this extreme theoretical and practical complexity.

Thus Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) projects a black amalgam of Wellsian rationality and the names and phrases of revolutionary socialism in a specific context of mobile and affluent corporate capitalism. This sounds and is confused, but the confusion is significant; it is the authentic confusion of two generations of SF itself, in its powerful dystopian mode. “Community, Identity, Stability”: this is the motto of the Brave New World State. It is interesting to track these ideals back into the utopian mode. Stability, undoubtedly, has a strong bearing; most of the types of utopia have strongly emphasised it, as an achieved perfection or a self-adjusting harmony. Huxley adds the specific agencies of repression, manipulation, pre-natal conditioning, and drugged distraction. Western SF has been prolific in its elaboration of all these agencies: the models, after all, have been close to hand. Stability blurs to Identity: the manufacture of human types to fit the stabilised model; but this, crucially, was never an explicit utopian mode, though in some examples it is assumed or implied. Variability and autonomy, within the generally harmonious condition, are indeed among its primary features. But now, under the pressures of consumer capitalism and of monopoly socialism, the mode has broken. As in the later stages of realist fiction, self-realisation and self-fulfillment are not to be found in relationship or in society, but in breakaway, in escape: the path the Savage takes, like a thousand heroes of late-realist fiction, getting out from under the old place, the old people, the old family, or like a thousand SF heroes, running to the wastes to escape the machine, the city, the system. But then the last and most questionable irony: the first word of the motto of this repressive, dominating, controlling system is Community: the keyword, centrally, of the entire utopian mode. It is at this point that the damage is done or, to put it another way, is admitted. It is in the name of Community, the utopian impulse, and in the names of communism (Bernard Marx and Lenina) that the system is seen as realised, though the actual tendencies — from the degradation of labor through an ultimate division and specialisation to the organised mobility and muzac of planned consumption — rely for their recognition on a contemporary capitalist world. In this 1946 foreword Huxley continued his running together of historically contrary impulses but then, interestingly, returned to utopia, offering a third way beyond the incubator society and the primitive reservation: a self-governing and balanced community, little different in spirit from Morris’ future society except that it is limited to “exiles and refugees,” people escaping from a dominant system which they have no chance or hope of changing collectively. Utopia then lies at the far end of dystopia, but only a few will enter it; the few who get out from under. It is the path travelled, in the same period, by bourgeois cultural theory: from the universal liberation, in bourgeois terms, through the phase in which the minority first educates and then regenerates the majority, to the last sour period in which what is now called “minority culture” has to find its reservation, its hiding-place, beyond both the system and the fight against the system. But then what is so strange is that this last phase, in some writing, returns to the utopian mode, throwing strange questions back to the whole prior tradition: questions which disturb the apparently simple grammar of desire — that desire for another place and another time which, instead of being idealised, can be seen as always and everywhere a displacement, but which can itself be transformed when a history is moving.

Not in Utopia — subterranean fields

Or in some secret island, Heaven knows where!

But in the very world, which is the world

Of all of us — the place where in the end

We find our happiness, or not at all!

Wordsworth’s emphasis, it is true, can go either way: into revolutionary effort, when history is moving; into a resigned settlement when it goes wrong or gets stuck. The utopian mode has to be read, always, within that changing context, which itself determines whether its defining subjunctive tense is part of a grammar which includes a true indicative and a true future, or whether it has seized every paradigm and become exclusive, in assent and dissent alike.

For the same consideration puts hard questions to the now dominant mode of dystopia. Orwell’s 1984 is no more plausible than Morris’s 2003, but its naturalised subjunctive is more profoundly exclusive, more dogmatically repressive of struggle and possibility, than anything within the utopian tradition. It is also, more sourly and more fiercely than in Huxley, a collusion, in that the state warned against and satirised — the repression of autonomy, the cancellation of variations and alternatives — is built into the fictional form which is nominally its opponent, converting all opposition into agencies of the repression, imposing, within its excluding totality, the inevitability and the hopelessness which it assumes as a result. No more but perhaps no less plausible than Morris’s 2003; but then, in the more open form, there is also Morris’s 1952 (the date of the revolution), and the years following it: years in which the subjunctive is a true subjunctive, rather than a displaced indicative, because its energy flows both ways, forward and back, and because in its issue, in the struggle, it can go either way.

3. The projection of new heavens and new hells has been a commonplace in SF. Yet perhaps a majority of them, just because they are so often literally out of this world, are functions of fundamental alteration: not merely the intervention of altered circumstance, which in the type of the externally altered world is a minor mode of the utopian, but a basic recasting of the physical conditions of life and thence of its life forms. And then in most stories this is a simple exoticism, generically tied to the supernatural or magical romance. There is a range from casual to calculated fantasy, which is at the opposite pole from the hypothesised “science” of SF. Yet, perhaps inextricable from this genre, though bearing different emphases, there is a mode which is truly the result of a dimension of modern science: in natural history, with its radical linkages between life-forms and life-space; in scientific anthropology, with its methodological assumption of distinct and alternative cultures. The interrelation between these is often significant. The materialist tendency of the former is often annulled by an idealist projection at the last, mental phase of the speculation; the beast or the vegetable, at the top of its mind, is a human variation. The differential tendency of the latter, by contrast, is often an overriding of material form and condition: an overriding related to idealist anthropology, in which alternatives are in effect wholly voluntary. Yet it is part of the power of SF that it is always potentially a mode of authentic shift: a crisis of exposure which produces a crisis of possibility; a reworking, in imagination, of all forms and conditions.

In this at once liberating and promiscuous mode, SF as a whole has moved beyond the utopian; in a majority of cases, it is true, because it has also fallen short of it. Most direct extrapolation of our own conditions and forms — social and political but also immanently material — has been in effect or in intention dystopian: atomic war, famine, overpopulation, electronic surveillance have written 1984 into millennia of possible dates. To live otherwise, commonly, is to be other and elsewhere: a desire displaced by alienation and in this sense cousin to phases of the utopian, but without the specific of a connected or potentially connecting transformation and then again without the ties of a known condition and form. So that while the utopian transformation is social and moral, the SF transformation, in its dominant Western modes, is at once beyond and beneath: not social and moral but natural; in effect, as so widely in Western thought since the late 19th century, a mutation at the point of otherwise intolerable exposure and crisis: not so much, in the old sense, a new life as a new species, a new nature.

It is then interesting within this largely alternative mode to find a clear example of an evidently deliberate return to the utopian tradition, in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974). It is a return within some of the specific conditions of SF. The alternative society is on the moon of a far planet, and space-travel and electronic communication — to say nothing of the possibilities of the “ansible,” that device for instantaneous space-wide communication developed from the theory of simultaneity — permit interaction between the alternative and the original society, within a wider interaction of other galactic civilisations. At one level the spaceship and the ansible can do no more, technically, than the sea voyage, the cleft in the underground cavern and, crucially, the dream. But they permit, instrumentally, what is also necessary for another and more serious reason: the sustained comparison of the utopian and the non-utopian options. The form of the novel, with its alternating chapters on Anarres and Urras, is designed for this exploratory comparison. And the reason is the historical moment of this looking again at utopia: the moment of renewed direct social and political hope, a renewed alternative social and political morality, in a context with one variable from the ordinary origins of the utopian mode, i.e. that within the world in which the hope is being interestedly if warily examined, there is not, or apparently not, the overwhelming incentive of war, poverty, and disease. When Morris’s dreamer goes back from 21st to 19th century London the questions are not only moral; they are directly physical, in the evidently avoidable burdens of poverty and squalor. But when Le Guin’s Shevek goes from Anarres to Urras he finds, within the place provided for him, an abundance, an affluence, a vitality, which are sensually overwhelming in comparison with his own moral but arid world. It is true that when he steps out of his place and discovers the class underside of this dominant prosperity the comparison is qualified, but that need only mean that the exuberant affluence depends on that class relationship and that the alternative is still a shared and equal relative poverty. It is true also that the comparison is qualified, in the text as a whole, by what is in effect a note that our own civilisation — that of Earth, which in its North American sector Urras so closely and deliberately resembles — has been long destroyed: “appetite” and “violence” destroyed it; we did not “adapt” in time; some survivors live under the ultimate controls of “life in the ruins.” But this, strictly, is by the way. Urras, it appears, is not in such danger; Anarres remains the social and moral option, the human alternative to a society that is, in its extended dominant forms, successful. It is among its repressed and rejected that the impulse stirs, renewing itself, after a long interval, to follow the breakaway revolution, anarchist and socialist, which took the Odonians from Urras to a new life on Anarres. Shevek’s journey is the way back and the way forward: a dissatisfaction with what has happened in the alternative society but then a strengthened renewal of the original impulse to build it. In two evident ways, then, The Dispossessed has the marks of its period: the wary questioning of the utopian impulse itself, even within its basic acceptance; the uneasy consciousness that the superficies of utopia — affluence and abundance — can be achieved, at least for many, by non-utopian and even anti-utopian means.

The shift is significant, after so long a dystopian interval. It belongs to a general renewal of a form of utopian thinking — not the education but the learning of desire — which has been significant among Western radicals since the crises and also since the defeats of the 1960s. Its structures are highly specific. It is a mode within which a privileged affluence is at once assumed and rejected: assumed and in its own ways enjoyed, yet known, from inside, as lying and corrupt; rejected, from in close, because of its successful corruption; rejected, further out, by learning and imagining the condition of the excluded others. There is then the move to drop out and join the excluded; the move to get away, to get out from under, to take the poorer material option for a clear moral advantage. For nothing is more significant, in Le Guin’s contrasted worlds, than that Anarres, the utopia, is bleak and arid; the prosperous vitality of the classical utopia is in the existing society that is being rejected. This is a split of a major kind. It is not that Anarres is primitivist: “they knew that their anarchism was the product of a very high civilization, of a complex diversified culture, of a stable economy and a highly industrialized technology” (§4). In this sense, the modification of Morris is important; it is clearly a future and not a past, a socially higher rather than a socially simplified form. But it is significantly only available in what is in effect a waste land; the good land is in the grip of the Urrasti dominance. It is then the movement Huxley imagined, in his 1946 foreword. It is not the transformation, it is the getaway.

It is a generous and open getaway, within the limited conditions of its wasteland destination. The people of Anarres live as well, in all human terms, as Morris’s cooperators; mutuality is shown to be viable, in a way all the more so because there is no abundance to make it easy. The social and ethical norms are at the highest point of the utopian imagination. But then there is a wary questioning beyond them: not the corrosive cynicism of the dystopian mode, but a reaching beyond basic mutuality to new kinds of individual responsibility and, with them, choice, dissent, and conflict. For this, again of its period, is an open utopia: forced open, after the congealing of ideals, the degeneration of mutuality into conservatism; shifted, deliberately, from its achieved harmonious condition, the stasis in which the classical utopian mode culminates, to restless, open, risk-taking experiment. It is a significant and welcome adaptation, depriving utopia of its classical end of struggle, its image of perpetual harmony and rest. This deprivation, like the waste land, may be seen as daunting, as the cutting-in of elements of a dominant dystopia. But whereas the waste land is voluntary deprivation, by the author — product of a defeatist assessment of the possibilities of transformation in good and fertile country — the openness is in fact a strengthening; indeed it is probably only to such a utopia that those who have known affluence and known with it social injustice and moral corruption can be summoned. It is not the last journey. In particular it is not the journey which all those still subject to direct exploitation, to avoidable poverty and disease, will imagine themselves making: a transformed this-world, of course with all the imagined and undertaken and fought-for modes of transformation. But it is where, within a capitalist dominance, and within the crisis of power and affluence which is also the crisis of war and waste, the utopian impulse now warily, self-questioningly, and setting its own limits, renews itself.

*ACKNOWLEDGEMENT. This essay will appear in Science Fiction: A Critical Guide, ed. Patrick Parrinder, forthcoming from Longmans (London, 1979).

**SELECT SECONDARY LITERATURE: M.H. Abensour, Utopies et dialectique du socialisme(forthcoming); John Fekete, The Critical Twilight (UK 1977); John Goode, “William Morris and the Dream of Revolution,” in John Lucas, ed., Literature and Politics in the Nineteenth Century (UK 1971); A.L. Morton, The English Utopia (UK 1969); Patrick Parrinder, H.G. Wells (US 1977); Darko Suvin, “The Alternate Islands,” Science-Fiction Studies, 3 (Nov. 1976); E.P. Thompson, William Morris, Romantic to Revolutionary (new edn. US 1977); Raymond Williams, Orwell (UK 1971).

ABSTRACT

There are many connections between science fiction and utopian fiction, yet neither is a simple mode, and the relationships between them are complex. If we analyze the fictions that have been grouped as utopian we can distinguish four types: a) the paradise, in which a happier life is described as simply existing elsewhere; b) the externally altered world, in which a new kind of life has been made possible by an unlooked for natural event; c) the willed transformation, in which a new kind of life has been achieved by human effort; and finally d) the technological transformation, in which a new kind of life has been made possible by a technical discovery. (Dystopian narratives may be discussed by inverting these terms, the utopian paradise becoming dystopian hell, for instance.) Among the texts discussed in the light of Engels’s distinction between “utopian” and “scientific” socialism are Bacon’s New Atlantis, More’s Utopia, Bellamy’s Looking Backward, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.

Alan Moore on ‘Watchmen’ movie: ‘I will be spitting venom all over it’

“Resisting, Subverting and Destroying the Apparatus of Surveillance and Control”: An Interview with Mike Davis

Mike Davis is professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of, amongst others, “City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles” (1990), “Dead Cities, And Other Tales” (2003) and most recently, “Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb” (2007). Following is a short excerpt from the interview he kindly gave to Voices on the 23d of February in London.

You often draw lines of comparison between different tendencies of urban control across the globe. Could you compare the situation in Los Angeles, the repression and surveillance happening there when you were writing City of Quartz with the situation in London today?

There is nothing comparable at all in the U.S. to the apparatus of surveillance that exists in London. Even CCTV cameras are only recently becoming an issue in the U.S. Total surveillance of down town areas of American cities is something I wrote about in the early nineties but only applied to tiny areas, a few acres in down town Los Angeles for example. If Giuliani does become president we will get closer to the idea of having total surveillance and control in the city centre but London is at least one if not two generations ahead of the United States. Having said that, the foundations in the U.S. exist: the freeways now have surveillance systems that monitor gridlock. But I find London really shocking in many ways. I had no idea for instance until I came here about the fact that subway passes are used to monitor and accumulate data. In the United States things have gone in a different direction. Obviously, in every economic transaction you have and particularly on the internet, data is being transferred or sold for marketing purposes. I think the American political system might be the most advanced in the world in this sense – using marketing data to target people and pass political messages across to them. Also, there is a much larger budget and much bigger research effort going on in the U.S. To give you an example of how this works: The Bush Administration wants guest programmes to satisfy the labour needs of crucial industries like agribusiness. Alas it has been blindsided by a revolt in the republican grassroots against democrats. One of the things they are calling for is building a wall the entire length of the Mexican border and the Congress has actually authorised part of that, although people who actually work on border control and surveillance laugh at it since these walls would be totally ineffective: 12-foot high sheets of metal that anyone could climb. They are working on something completely different: a virtual border, more like the virtual control that now exists around the city of London. They had to feed red meat to the conservatives in the suburbs who wanted a Berlin-like physical wall since only that gives them the reassurance of border control. Real control over people’s movement however does not so much require these walls as it requires the technology. This is the one sphere where I think the U.S. is more advanced in creating a society of total surveillance. Perry, the Governor of Texas, has authorised putting cameras up on areas of the border that people commonly cross and plugged them in to the internet. So it has created virtual vigilantes. Anybody who wants can waste their time looking at a desert, and if you see a Mexican coming across it you can call a number to some department of the Texas state which will alert the border control.

So the internet gets to threaten freedom because of the way in which we can all surveil, oppress and jail each other: we are all prison guards now, watching each others’ movements. This is a frightening idea and the right-wing loves it, having some role to play in the policing of immigration and society. Everyone wants to wear a badge in some sense.

In LA they recently put on digital screens on the freeways to give warnings about traffic, although we are still far behind Europe in that. They now use them for alerts on kidnaps etc. The problem with implementing a lot of this in the U.S. and in inner cities in particular is that it wouldn’t survive for a day! They would have to in some way to arm, fortify and protect surveillance cameras. The degree of vandalism in American inner cities is so advanced and extensive… I once calculated the square footage of graffiti in LA and interviewed people cleaning up graffiti. One morning I got up and the inside of my mailbox had been tagged. When you have that many kids engaging with vandalism, graffiti etc. they will start putting up cameras but they are going to be broken and torn down. It might work well with the middle class – it will work well at leafy suburbs of Santon or white parts of Johannesburg but when you start putting the surveillance cameras in the townships or the American ghettos, you will have to have a policeman standing in front of them each. This is one of the contradictions of surveillance society. CCTV is not nearly as advanced in the US as in Europe. People are more reassured by private police in the U.S.

Why aren’t cameras being vandalised in London?

That would be one of my questions too. I think that we need to propagandise and fight for the idea of a universal insurrection against surveillance state, against the erosion of civil liberties. We need to encourage people and find every way possible in which to resist, subvert and destroy the apparatus of surveillance and control. Of course, millions of teenagers do that anyway. Kevin Lynch wrote a book on vandalism; he was very interested in vandalism as an urban process, in spontaneous vandalism of all sorts. He studied it in the seventies, partially to understand how architects could combat it and partially because he was interested in its logic. He thought that anything that involved people and the built environment, including destroying it, was a good thing. If you wanted to generate a theory of participatory architecture or urbanism, vandalism seemed to be the most common and popular form of participating in the built environment by revolting against its dehumanisation, in working class council estates in American inner cities and so on.

I think we need a strategy to support each other; we should vandalise and subvert the surveillance state and the middle class that supports it. Tearing down the armed response signs from peoples’ lawns freaks them out… Not that the armed response is real or reliable, but people get immense reassurance from having the sign there. If you remove it they think that all forces might mobilise against them and that they might get killed the next day. I started off vandalising lawn jockeys – these are a phenomenon of American segregation and racism. They are black jockey figures put in the lawn like the pink flamingos they put there. They are popular amongst people who are nostalgic of the old racial order, when all blacks were servants or slaves. When I went back to L.A. in the late eighties I discovered that there were quite a few of these around houses in Beverly Hills. It is something to which all the creative energy of youth needs to be applied: to find ways in which to fight back and subvert the surveillance society.

To your central question I have no answer to at all. I lived in London in the eighties, very unhappy and poor, but had some great inspiring moments. I was down in Fleet Street at the battle of Fortress Murdoch, with the print workers battling the cops every night… Wonderful things. A lot of tremendous energy in the city. So I am appalled to come back here and see peoples’ complaisance and complacency.

London is a place where so many people come through…. Migrants coming to work, students coming to study, a constant flux of people coming in and out. We were wondering if that has something to do with this complacency – or does it, on the other hand, provide in itself possibilities for resistance?

It does, though today immigrants are as radically vulnerable in London as they are in the U.S. I gave a talk the other night and tried to explain that it is hard to think of a time in the American history that immigrants (including legal ones) have been so vulnerable. The Bush Administration’s position is that even legal immigrants have no real standing under the American Bill of Rights or Constitution. You do not have the protection of habeas corpus, Anglo-saxon liberty etc. Gigantic immigrant rights protests took place last year in the United States expressing people’s existential anxiety, the recognition that they have got a right to stand. On the other hand, the logic of this in London is clear: More than New York, London is the ultimate playground of rich people. Russian billionaires come here, not to NYC. Everything is being done to reassure that this is the ultimate secure place to park your money. London has always played this role to some degree though it used to be considered that NYC was the ultimate place to go. London has been challenging this very aggressively, the irony being that this aggression is partially driven by Ken Livingstone’s policies.

In your RIBA lecture you spoke of cities as the only viable solution for the future, when talking about the environment. Could you elaborate?

Inevitably, this will become a world in which at least two thirds of the population will live in cities. I wish I could believe in traditional Kropotkinite ideas of returning to mutual aid in the countryside… that’s why I think we have to dust off this great conversation about alternative cities between socialists and anarchists roughly around the 1880s and the 1930s. Cities are the only way to square the circle between humanity’s demand for equality and a decent standard of living in a sustainable planet. The substitute for ever going intensified private or individual consumption is the public luxury of the city. I am very much influenced by the constructivist ideas deriving from Russia in the early twenties. They were confronted with the fact that Russia had no capacity to build very lavish housing for the working class, but they would compensate by creating the most wonderful, utopian public spaces. Every factory would have a great sports centre, a cinema or a library. Public space not only satisfies the same needs, it also produces and satisfies other ones. It is one thing to be alone at home with an infinity of pornography on the internet and quite a different thing to be young, in the plaza or the public space surrounded by people your own age and all the possibilities that brings along….

In essence, the city is the economy of scale: it produces the most sufficient relationship between humans and nature. It produces a public or social wealth comprising not only a substitute for private consumption or private wealth, but is also the basis for needs that cannot exist or be fulfilled under capitalism. If people had a choice between all the pornography you can ingest in your lifetime and flirting with people in an enormous bathhouse, what would you choose? That is the genius of the city. Patrick Geddes, the great urban thinker from Edinburgh and friend of Kropotkin’s, was the first one to see that the dependency of the city and its vulnerable condition on its hinterland is watershed that urban density supported the preservation of open space and services the nature. He was the first one to think deeply about the politics of infrastructure and recycling, not exporting waste downstream, sustainability… To see that in some relationship to social justice. He is the one who went to India with the British Army asking about sanitation systems in the country. The Indians had solved their problems – they know what to do with their shit. You are the ones who’ve got the problem, as you want to dump it in the water! There is a direct connection between Geddes and Kropotkin and a whole, partially lost anarchist tradition thinking about self-organised urban space, self-governed cities and how cities work environmentally. There is no other possible solution: Trading carbon credits in markets will not save the earth. Building cities that are truly cities in the most profound sense will do so. Creating an equality of pleasure and public luxury will do so. And recognising that consumption has turned into a rampant disease that poisons us and our children.

In 1934 came an end to the discussion and free thinking about alternative urbanism ranging across the span from abandoning the cities and going back to mutual aid and the countryside to, at some cases, in the Soviet Union, visions of super-cities, hyper-cities. There is a hugely rich vain of creative utopian thought about urbanism that needs to recur. It is not just the product of thinkers and planners, projects and case studies by governments, but it is also about capturing the individual activity of urban dwellers and poor people, everyone.

Talking about the provos in Amsterdam, the situationists etc… The problem is often creating use of urban space by avant-garde groups, people trying to reclaim and maintain traditional bohemias: refugees, squatters, artists… Inadvertently doing the work of redevelopers and real estate. In Los Angeles, despite tons of money thrown at the downtown (Los Angeles has one of the most inhuman downtowns in the world), the city never managed to gentrify it. The turning point was when my architecture students and starving artists willing to live side-by-side with homeless people started moving in the studio spaces there. They finally got to the point where they created cool places: restaurants and bars started to open, just like with the Lower East Side in NYC or Soho in London. Prices skyrocketed, these people were pushed out and the yuppies came in, and they were in turn replaced by even richer people. This is a real problem because when you get some creative network or community of young people trying to live in the city in a different manner they can unwillingly become foot soldiers.

Reformist politics has zero to say about this. There is absolutely no reformist government anywhere in the world that can deal with the serious and major issues of urban inequality, because it will not take on property values, land inflation etc. Until you start talking about confiscating the incriminating land value or socialising land or systems of limited equity in land, you cannot control the city, you cannot achieve any real equality in it.

First printed in the HUMANE REVIEW, January, 1901.

Reprinted as pamphlet several times, most recently by CGH Services, c.1992 and Jura Media, 1996

MEN of such high standing in hygiene and biology having made a profound study of questions relating to normal food, I shall take good care not to display my incompetence by expressing an opinion as to animal and vegetable nourishment. Let the cobbler stick to his last. As I am neither chemist nor doctor, I shall not mention either azote or albumen, nor reproduce the formulas of analysts, but shall content myself simply with giving my own personal impressions, which, at all events, coincide with those of many vegetarians. I shall move within the circle of my own experiences, stopping here and there to set down some observation suggested by the petty incidents of life.

First of all I should say that the search for truth had nothing to do with the early impressions which made me a potential vegetarian while still a small boy wearing baby-frocks. I have a distinct remembrance of horror at the sight of blood. One of the family had sent me, plate in hand, to the village butcher, with the injunction to bring back some gory fragment or other. In all innocence I set out cheerfully to do as I was bid, and entered the yard where the slaughtermen were. I still remember this gloomy yard where terrifying men went to and fro with great knives, which they wiped on blood-besprinkled smocks. Hanging from a porch an enormous carcase seemed to me to occupy an extraordinary amount of space; from its white flesh a reddish liquid was trickling into the gutters. Trembling and silent I stood in this blood-stained yard incapable of going forward and too much terrified to run away. I do not know what happened to me ; it has passed from my memory. I seem to have heard that I fainted, and that the kind-hearted butcher carried roe into his own house ; I did not weigh more than one of those lambs he slaughtered every morning.

Other pictures cast their shadows over my childish years, and, like that glimpse of the slaughter-house, mark so many epochs in my life. I can see the sow belonging to some peasants, amateur butchers, and therefore all the more cruel. I remember one of them bleeding the animal slowly, so that the blood fell drop by drop; for, in order to make really good black puddings, it appears essential that the victim should have suffered proportionately. She cried without ceasing, now and then uttering groans and sounds of despair almost human; it seemed like listening to a child.

And in fact the domesticated pig is for a year or so a child of the house ; pampered that he may grow fat, and returning a sincere affection for all the care lavished on him, which has but one aim – so many inches of bacon. But when the affection is reciprocated by the good woman who takes care of the pig, fondling him and speaking in terms of endearment to him, is she not considered ridiculous – as if it were absurd, even degrading, to love an animal that loves us?

One of the strongest impressions of my childhood is that of having witnessed one of those rural dramas, the forcible killing of a pig by a party of villagers in revolt against a dear old woman who would not consent to the murder of her fat friend. The village crowd burst into the pigstye and dragged the beast to the slaughter place where all the apparatus for the deed stood waiting, whilst the unhappy dame sank down upon a stool weeping quiet tears. I stood beside her and saw those tears without knowing whether I should sympathise with her grief, or think with the crowd that the killing of the pig was just, legitimate, decreed by common sense as well as by destiny.

Each of us, especially those who have lived in a provincial spot, far away from vulgar ordinary towns, where everything is methodically classed and disguised – each of us has seen something of these barbarous acts committed by flesh-eaters against the beasts they eat. There is no need to go into some Porcopolis of North America, or into a saladero of La Plata, to contemplate the horrors of the massacres which constitute the primary condition of our daily food. But these impressions wear off in time; they yield before the baneful influence of daily education, which tends to drive the individual towards mediocrity, and takes out of him anything that goes to the making of an original personality. Parents, teachers, official or friendly, doctors, not to speak of the powerful individual whom we call “everybody,” all work together to harden the character of the child with respect to this “four-footed food,” which, nevertheless, loves as we do, feels as we do, and, under our influence, progresses or retrogresses as we do.

It is just one of the sorriest results of our flesh-eating habits that the animals sacrificed to man’s appetite have been systematically and methodically made hideous, shapeless, and debased in intelligence and moral worth. The name even of the animal into which the boar has been transformed is used as the grossest of insults ; the mass of flesh we see wallowing in noisome pools is so loathsome to look at that we agree to avoid all similarity of name between the beast and the dishes we make out of it. What a difference there is between the moufflon’s appearance and habits as he skips about upon the mountain rocks, and that of the sheep which has lost all individual initiative and becomes mere debased flesh-so timid that it dares not leave the flock, running headlong into the jaws of the dog that pursues it. A similar degradation has befallen the ox, whom now-a-days we see moving with difficulty in the pastures, transformed by stock-breeders into an enormous ambulating mass of geometrical forms, as if designed beforehand for the knife of the butcher. And it is to the production of such monstrosities we apply the term “breeding”! This is how man fulfils his mission as educator with respect to his brethren, the animals.

For the matter of that, do we not act in like manner towards all Nature? Turn loose a pack of engineers into a charming valley, in the midst of fields and trees, or on the banks of some beautiful river, and you will soon see w hat they would do. They would do everything in their power to put their own work in evidence, and to mask Nature under their heaps of broken stones and coal. All of them would be proud, at least, to see their locomotives streaking the sky with a network of dirty yellow or black smoke. Sometimes these engineers even take it upon themselves to improve Nature. Thus, when the Belgian artists protested recently to the Minister of Railroads against his desecration of the most beautiful parts of the Meuse by blowing up the picturesque rocks along its banks, the Minister hastened to assure them that henceforth they should have nothing to complain about, as he would pledge himself to build all the new workshops with Gothic turrets!

In a similar spirit the butchers display before the eyes of the public, even in the most frequented streets, disjointed carcasses, gory lumps of meat, and think to conciliate our æstheticism by boldly decorating the flesh they hang out with garlands of roses!

When reading the papers, one wonders if all the atrocities of the war in China are not a bad dream instead of a lamentable reality. How can it be that men having had the happiness of being caressed by their mother, and taught in school the words “justice” and “kindness,” how can it be that these wild beasts with human faces take pleasure in tying Chinese together by their garments and their pigtails before throwing them into a river? How is it that they kill off the wounded, and make the prisoners dig their own graves before shooting them? And who are these frightful assassins? They are men like ourselves, who study and read as we do, w ha have brothers, friends, a wife or a sweetheart ; sooner or later we run the chance of meeting them, of taking them by the hand without seeing any traces of blood there.

But is there not some direct relation of cause and effect between the food of these executioners, who call themselves “agents of civilisation,” and their ferocious deeds? They, too, are in the habit of praising the bleeding flesh as a generator of health, strength, and intelligence. They, too, enter without repugnance the slaughter house, where the pavement is red and slippery, and where one breathes the sickly sweet odour of blood. Is there then so much difference between the dead body of a bullock and that of a man? The dissevered limbs, the entrails mingling one with the other, are very much alike : the slaughter of the first makes easy the murder of the second, especially when a leader’s order rings out, or from afar comes the word of the crowned master, “Be pitiless.”

A French proverb says that “every bad case can be defended.” This saying had a certain amount of truth in it so long as the soldiers of each nation committed their barbarities separately, for the atrocities attributed to them could afterwards be put down to jealousy and national hatred. But in China, now, the Russians, French, English, and Germans have not the modesty to attempt to screen each other. Eyewitnesses, and even the authors themselves, have sent us information in every language, some cynically, and others with reserve. The truth is no longer denied, but a new morality has been created to explain it. This morality says there are two laws for mankind, one applies to the yellow races and the other is the privilege of the white. To assassinate or torture the first named is, it seems, henceforth permissible, whilst it is wrong to do so to the second.

Is not our morality, as applied to animals, equally elastic? Harking on dogs to tear a fox to pieces teaches a gentleman how to make his men pursue the fugitive Chinese. The two kinds of hunt belong to one and the same “sport” ; only, when the victim is a man, the excitement and pleasure are probably all the keener. Need we ask the opinion of him who recently invoked the name of Attila, quoting this monster as a model for his soldiers?

It is not a digression to mention the horrors of war in connection with the massacre of cattle and carnivorous banquets. The diet of individuals corresponds closely to their manners. Blood demands blood. On this point any one who searches among his recollections of the people whom he has known will find there can be no possible doubt as to the contrast which exists between vegetarians and coarse eaters of flesh, greedy drinkers of blood, in amenity of manner, gentleness of disposition and regularity of life.

It is true these are qualities not highly esteemed by those “superior persons,” who, without being in any way better than other mortals, are always more arrogant, and imagine they add to their own importance by depreciating the humble and exalting the strong. According to them, mildness signifies feebleness : the sick are only in the way, and it would be a charity to get rid of them. If they are not killed, they should at least be allowed to die. But it is just these delicate people who resist disease better than the robust. Full-blooded and high-coloured men are not always those who live longest : the really strong are not necessarily those who carry their strength on the surface, in a ruddy complexion, distended muscle, or a sleek and oily stoutness. Statistics could give us positive information on this point, and would have done so already, but for the numerous interested persons who devote so much time to grouping, in battle array, figures, whether true or false, to defend their respective theories.

But, however this may be, we say simply that, for the great majority of vegetarians, the question is not whether their biceps and triceps are more solid than those of the flesh-eaters, nor whether their organism is better able to resist the risks of life and the chances of death, which is even more important : for them the important point is the recognition of the bond of affection and goodwill that links man to the so-called lower animals, and the extension to these our brothers of the sentiment which has already put a stop to cannibalism among men. The reasons which might be pleaded by anthropophagists against the disuse of human flesh in their customary diet would be as well-founded as those urged by ordinary flesh-eaters today. The arguments that were opposed to that monstrous habit are precisely those we vegetarians employ now. The horse and the cow, the rabbit and the cat, the deer and the hare, the pheasant and the lark, please us better as friends than as meat. We wish to preserve them either as respected fellow-workers, or simply as companions in the joy of life and friendship.

“But,” you will say, “if you abstain from the flesh of animals, other flesh-eaters, men or beasts, will eat them instead of you, or else hunger and the elements will combine to destroy them.” Without doubt the balance of the species will be maintained, as formerly, in conformity with the chances of life and the inter-struggle of appetites ; but at least in the conflict of the races the profession of destroyer shall not be ours. We will so deal with the part of the earth which belongs to us as to make it as pleasant as possible, not only for ourselves, but also for the beasts of our household. We shall take up seriously the educational rôle which has been claimed by man since prehistoric times. Our share of responsibility in the transformation of the existing order of things does not extend beyond ourselves and our immediate neighbourhood. If we do but little, this little will at least be our work.

One thing is certain, that if we held the chimerical idea of pushing the practice of our theory to its ultimate and logical consequences, without caring for considerations of another kind, we should fall into simple absurdity. In this respect the principle of vegetarianism does not differ from any other principle; it must be suited to the ordinary conditions of life. It is clear that we have no intention of subordinating all our practices and actions, of every hour and every minute, to a respect for the life of the infinitely little; we shall not let ourselves die of hunger and thirst, like some Buddhist, when the microscope has shown us a drop of water swarming with animalculæ. We shall not hesitate now and then to cut ourselves a stick in the forest, or to pick a flower in a garden; we shall even go so far as to take a lettuce, or cut cabbages and asparagus for our food, although we fully recognise the life in the plant as well as in animals. But it is not for us to found a new religion, and to hamper ourselves with a sectarian dogma ; it is a question of making our existence as beautiful as possible, and in harmony, so far as in us lies, with the æsthetic conditions of our surroundings.

Just as our ancestors, becoming disgusted with eating their fellow-creatures, one fine day left off serving them up to their tables; just as now, among flesh-eaters, there are many who refuse to eat the flesh of man’s noble companion, the horse, or of our fireside pets, the dog and cat-so is it distasteful to us to drink the blood and chew the muscle of the ox, whose labour helps to grow our corn. We no longer want to hear the bleating of sheep, the bellowing of bullocks, the groans and piercing shrieks of the pigs, as they are led to the slaughter. We aspire to the time when we shall not have to walk swiftly to shorten that hideous minute of passing the haunts of butchery with their rivulets of blood and rows of sharp hooks, whereon carcasses are hung up by blood-stained men, armed with horrible knives. We want some day to live in a city where we shall no longer see butchers’ shops full of dead bodies side by side with drapers’ or jewellers’, and facing a druggist’s, or hard by a window filled with choice fruits, or with beautiful books, engravings or statuettes, and works of art. We want an environment pleasant to the eye and in harmony with beauty.

And since physiologists, or better still, since our own experience tells us that these ugly joints of meat are not a form of nutrition necessary for our existence, we put aside all these hideous foods which our ancestors found agreeable, and the majority of our contemporaries still enjoy. We hope before long that flesh-eaters will at least have the politeness to hide their food. Slaughter houses are relegated to distant suburbs ; let the butchers’ shops be placed there too, where, like stables, they shall be concealed in obscure corners.

It is on account of the ugliness of it that we also abhor vivisection and all dangerous experiments, except when they are practised by the man of science on his own person. It is the ugliness of the deed which fills us with disgust when we see a naturalist pinning live butterflies into his box, or destroying an ant-hill in order to count the ants. We turn with dislike from the engineer who robs Nature of her beauty by imprisoning a cascade in conduit-pipes, and from the Californian woodsman who cuts down a tree, four thousand years old and three hundred feet high, to show its rings at fairs and exhibitions. Ugliness in persons, in deeds, in life, in surrounding Nature-this is our worst foe. Let us become beautiful ourselves, and let our life be beautiful!

What then are the foods which seem to correspond better with our ideal of beauty both in their nature and in their needful methods of preparation? They are precisely those which from all time have been appreciated by men of simple life; the foods which can do best without the lying artifices of the kitchen. They are eggs, grains, fruits; that is to say, the products of animal and vegetable life which represent in their organisms both the temporary arrest of vitality and the concentration of the elements necessary to the formation of new lives. The egg of the animal, the seed of the plant, the fruits of the tree, are the end of an organism which is no more, and the beginning of an organism which does not yet exist. Man gets them for his food without killing the being that provides them, since they are formed at the point of contact between two generations. Do not our men of science who study organic chemistry tell us, too, that the egg of the animal or plant is the best storehouse of every vital element? Omne vivum ex ovo.