Having attended the St. Anne’s Warehouse production of The Tempest this afternoon [the first theater afforded my wife and I after 11 months with our Welsh, Communist daughter — inside joke] I was reminded of Gonzalo’s utopia. I found it a wonderful tonic to this thread from a diary yesterday.
I' the commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things; for no kind of traffic
Would I admit; no name of magistrate;
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none; contract, succession, 860
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;
No occupation; all men idle, all;
And women too, but innocent and pure;
No sovereignty;—
...
All things in common nature should produce
Without sweat or endeavour: treason, felony, 870
Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine,
Would I not have; but nature should bring forth,
Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance,
To feed my innocent people.
It is an interesting speech for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it is cribbed almost directly from Montaigne’s Of Cannibals :
[Brazilian Indians have] no kind of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate or politic superiority, no use of service, of riches or of poverty, no contracts, no successions... no occupation but idle, no respect of kindred but common, no apparel but natural, no manuring of lands, no use of wine, corn, or metal. (from John Florio's 1603 English translation)
This essay was one of the earliest known references to the idea of the ‘noble savage’ which was eventually developed against Hobbes’ notion of nature as ‘a war of all against all’ during the 17th century [and the authoritarian state proposed to corral that ‘state of nature’]. This idea even filtered into fairly frequent reflection by Benjamin Franklin:
The Care and Labour of providing for Artificial and Fashionable Wants, the sight of so many rich wallowing in Superfluous plenty, whereby so many are kept poor and distressed for Want, the Insolence of Office . . . and restraints of Custom, all contrive to disgust [the Indians] with what we call civil Society.
—
Benjamin Franklin, marginalia in a pamphlet entitled [Matthew Wheelock],
Reflections, Moral and Political on Great Britain and Her Colonies, 1770
[26]
I expound upon this here because there exists a technocratic delusion among the ‘ruling’ left that tinkering at the margins of capitalism will somehow effect a social, political and economic order that can engender equality and justice [and yes, I mean effect with an ‘e’, as the dkos grammar algorithm has flagged that word — quite in keeping with my point]. It might affect the existing order, but it certainly won’t result in a world of justice and equality.
Going back to the thread linked earlier, the problems are systemic, multiple and almost untranslatable to technocrats. For one, anarchists aren’t disgusted with civil society because it is civil society. Anarchists are disgusted by how we currently construe civil society — namely it is hierarchical, dependent on property regimes, non-representative in its governance, promotes sanctioned violence and reiterates socio-economic inequality. Alternatively, rightists and fascists are disgusted by civil society because it is. Rightists and fascists believe in authoritarianism, hierarchy, inequality, property, violence and ‘a war of all against all’. There can be no peace. There can be no commons. Violence by rightists is reality, while violence employed by [some] anarchists is a tactic. And what is that ‘anarchist’ violence? It is always ‘property’ violence. What the technocrats cannot stomach, much like the rightists they unwittingly support, is an attack on property.
And use of service, none; contract, succession, 860
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none
For an anarchist, the regime of ‘property’ is the violence. Police forces are raised to protect it; wars are fought to acquire it; people are impoverished to maintain it. But for those entrenched in a property system, the idea that what they do every day is violence cannot stand. They cannot comprehend the violence of their existence. They cannot fathom a commons.
Mojique sees his village from a nearby hill
Mojique thinks of days before Americans came
He sees the foreigners in growing numbers
He sees the foreigners in fancy houses
He thinks of days that he can still remember...now.
Mojique holds a package in his quivering hands
Mojique sends the package to the American man
Softly he glides along the streets and alleys
Up comes the wind that makes them run for cover
He feels the time is surely now or never...more.
Read more: Talking Heads - Listening Wind Lyrics | MetroLyrics
If you have to wonder how some Americans might bristle at the property regime, why not make it easier and see how most of the world experiences it. The Battle for Seattle [which people seem to have forgot] was more about property than it was trade — specifically intellectual property regimes and their effects on access to science and technology by developing nations and the selling of the commons [natural resources] to multinational corporations — along with all of the environmental casualties of such idiocy.
If you really want to understand an anarchist, try to understand the idea of equality. Try to envision it in every aspect of your life. Try to envision it in your personal relationships. Try to envision it where you ‘make a living’. Try to envision it in your government. Try to envision it in the world — in the way in which your individual life affects the lives of unknown people thousands of miles away. Try to envision a world where we are all equal, because if anyone is Caliban, none of us are free.