The Land and Ecology

Scientific fact proclaims the existence of an ecology of which we are a part.  No system of ethics or morality, except the diseased mythologies of fascism, can justify human existence in the present if humanity fails to exist in the future.  Capitalism will either destroy humanity by destroying its ecological niche or it will destroy humanity by changing it. From these three statements comes an inescapable conclusion: that the class war is also a war of ecological survival.

Are We The Problem?

Of course working class cultures created or maintained by capitalism are part of the problem.  As previous articles in Organise! have shown, some members of the working class enjoy wantonly destroying the environment, whether shooters and hunters, trail-bikers or off-road drivers.  We consume our environment in the same way and for the same reasons we consume capitalism’s goods.  We appear happy to see mountains quarried for stone and the holes turned into landfill, forests planted and felled to feed our craving for newsprint, furniture and packaging.  We sometimes side with the rural owning class against our best interests. Two-thirds of Scottish rural households have income below the poverty line yet continue to defer to the local ruling class.  We grub up hedges, spray pesticides or let useful land lie fallow because someone pays us to do it.  That who we are is a social construct created by capitalism to suit its needs, not ours, is the cause of this false consciousness and revolutionary consciousness the solution.  No people at any time, in any place have truly “walked light on the land”.  We have all inflicted ourselves upon the land and the ecology it is part of as much as our greed, our desires and our technological capacity have allowed.  If these impacts were historically relatively small, so what you could ask?  It is today and tomorrow that matters.  We have used as much of the world’s resources since 1950 as the whole of the human race did in its entire existence up to that point.  Capitalism’s point of no return has already been reached; it will die or be radically changed.  How many of us will die in the process is the question.

A New Holocaust of the Ecologies

Capitalism has created the Spectacle to seduce us, it has appropriated all the planet’s resources and the built of a vast machinery of control, including states, governments, armies, death-squads, laws, judges, policemen, prisons, gulags, advertising, schools, socialization, madhouses and the whole process of production and consumption, in order to protect and extend that grand larceny.  And to be precise, by capitalism we mean capitalists, real people running real governments and corporations, in huge mansions, wielding vast and shadowy powers.  People with great wealth and no ethics, people for whom personal aggrandizement expressed in profit, status or authority is a too powerful opium.  The effect of this is the wholesale destruction of the planet’s biological and social ecologies, the mass holocaust of the poor, in which disasters are only the most visible events in an unrelenting carnage of wars, starvation, pandemics, crippling disease, ignorance, riot and pogrom.  A jungle cleared, a shanty bulldozed, a golf course built on sacred land, farms drowned beneath a reservoir, chemical spills into water systems, toxins into the air from urban incinerators.  These are not environmental events alone, they are social and economic events, they are battles lost in a class war, if the working class is those who must endlessly produce and yet have no say over what is produced and how.  900m die of hunger every year on a world even the despised UN says could support 14bn people.  Is this just drought and famine, environmental events?  or is it because people have been cleared from the land, forced to work for pennies, droughts caused by massive dams or to fill the swimming pools and water the gardens of the rich ?

The environment was and is an area of  working class struggle because it is we who suffer most from environmental degradation and expropriation of land, water and clean air.  Boycotts of dam projects, nuclear power stations, forest clearances, heavy industry (for instance in Thailand where a riot by 100,000 people halted a steel-making project), dumping of toxins and waste have been social as well as environmental victories for the working class.   Early socialists argued strenuously that political and economic struggle was the means to achieve environmental reform.  Revolutionaries like William Morris and Kropotkin proposed sustainable economies that were also socially just.  The land would be a vast granary, water would run clean and food would be pure, free from chemicals and adulteration.  Environmentally-caused diseases like cholera, diphtheria and typhus would be eliminated.  These programs of reform grew out of the unrelenting struggle of working class people against bosses and owners, struggles to defend their place within ecologies (such as resistance to clearances or enclosures) or to improve environments that capitalism had ruined (for instance campaigns for clean water, decent housing and sanitation).  Their struggle brought reforms, such as nationalized water companies, but because they did not change the nature of either ownership or control, they were only temporary.  The same struggles are being waged by the working class in its millions today but most are equally led by reformist leaders.  The anti-capitalist movement must re-learn, as the global poor already know, that the revolution must be made by us, here, on the land and in the towns, and not by campaigns against far-off institutions like the WTO or UN or without an end to private property or (so-called) democratic control. 

The Iron Laws of Capitalism

The engine of environmental destruction is capitalism, with its iron laws of expropriation, exploitation and despoliation.  The petrol is private property, by which we include private ownership and state ownership which are, in essence, the same since the state exists to protect private property and periodically redistribute it between owning classes.  The state exists to preserve the vast inequalities in how global resources are shared out.   And with what result?  125 wars in the developing world since the 1950s, killing over 20m people.  Fierce wars for land in Palestine, Zimbabwe and Brazil.  Between 1975 and 1985, the number of urban Third World poor without access to safe water increased by 100m.  Water wars rage in South Asia, the Middle East and Central America.  Water speculators in the city of Guayaquil sell water to the poor for 400 times the price paid by volume consumers like factories.  While the rich use 300 liters a day, the poor get less than 25.   This is not a modern phenomenon.  The imposition of free market economics on colonial territories in the 19^th Century massively increased death tolls from drought and monsoon: as many as 18m died in India and China alone in two years in the 1870s.  Famine in China sparked the Boxer Uprising.  ‘Modernization’ caused village stocks of grain to be centralized in the Indian Empire and then exported to England whenever there were bad harvests.  When famine struck, the colonial administration raised prices beyond the reach of the peasants who starved, fled the land or turned to banditry and even cannibalism.  Money sent by European governments for relief often ended up funding increases in local military establishments and ‘bush wars’ against colonial rivals or were pocketed by the colonial merchant and ruling classes – the very crimes that the Iraqi state is accused of today.   Despite a decades-long effort to ‘civilise’ and ‘develop’ India, there was no increase in the per capita income of people between 1757 and 1947.  Wealth flowed in both directions but did not pass out of the hands of the ruling classes into that of the peasantry.  And the same is happening today.  The Advance Brazil plan will spend £27bn to develop Amazonia, destroying 95% of the rainforest by 2020; how much of this will create sustainable economies and ecologies which truly benefit ordinary people ?  And if they protest, the iron laws of capitalism – ownership, property rights, laws – will be used against them.  The ‘right’ to use and exploit is created by ownership and defended by privilege, law, custom and power.  Whether Scottish croft, Colombian forest or Turkish homeland, power confers ownership which in turn creates wealth; wealth produces a corrupted system of judges, lawyers and bailiffs to protect and extend ownership which over time creates a privileged class – privileged to use the power of the state to protect its interests.  

The recent foot and mouth ‘epidemic’ was a massive abuse of animals and the land caused by the pursuit of profit.  Infected swill from schools, probably arising from the cheap imported meat schools use (cost-cutting before children’s health), was fed to pigs because it was cheap.  Infected and disease-free animals were taken to large agri-business holding stations – the weak or unwanted were sold in local markets, spreading infection.  They were then transported hundreds of miles to fattening stations and mixed with other animals even though it is well known that livestock transported long distances are very susceptible to disease.  Some were exported to Europe (after being infected), others sold after fattening to the abattoirs and then into the food chain.  This industrial agriculture is forced upon farmers by a capitalism that must offer ever cheaper goods to survive and the greed of the supermarkets for profit and market share.  What is truly amazing is that foot and mouth disease cannot infect humans and does no more harm to animals than minor sores and milk that can’t be used and wears off after a few weeks.  In the 19^th Century and abroad farmers simply let the disease burn itself out after killing very few animals.  Why is it different in these islands?  Because the supermarkets will not buy infected meat and farmers will not pay to feed a cow that even temporarily produces no milk.  Foot and mouth was not a natural disaster, it was an economic disease, killing profits but of no harm to animals or humans.  One million healthy, disease-free sheep were killed to protect the profits of the supermarkets and large agri-businesses, the ultimate indictment of capitalist profit motive and methods of organization.  Strangely the animal rights and environmental campaigners stood silent, arms folded while supposedly right-wing farmers threatened outright defiance of the law; an encouraging development.  Are ten thousand foxes or lab rats worth more than 1m sheep, animals that could feed and provide wool to millions ?  Or is the liberal reformist critique of capitalism still incomplete, ignoring the exploitation and captivity of the working class as either producer or consumer, in favour of opposing one kind of cruelty (in field and laboratory) but not other kinds (in abattoir and rendering plant)?

Globalisation and free trade are forcing intense farming methods on farmers with disastrous consequences.  In 1999 200,000 farmers in Europe gave up the unequal struggle and big business moved in.  10 companies worldwide control 60% of the international food chain.  Four of them control the world supply of corn, wheat, tea, rice and timber.  Massive subsidies, paid for by taxes on wages and non-agricultural businesses, swell the profits of the biggest farms and agricultural businesses, usually owned by large multi-national corporations – in the US, a total of $22bn.  While western capitalism demands subsidy worth $362bn per year, the farmers of the rest of the world share just $18bn – if they can’t compete, they are accused of inefficiency by western ‘experts’ and legislated out of existence or driven to the wall by ‘free and fair’ competition.

Fighting The Environmental Class War

We must first target the means by which environmental degradation occurs.  Whatever the label, whether irrationalism, neo-Luddism or propaganda by the deed, direct action against the means of environmental destruction and degradation is an act of resistance and ultimately is one of the means by which revolution is realised.  Resistance takes familiar forms.  The first industrial working class wrecked mines and broke weaving frames in the 1740s, spinning machines in the 1770s, agricultural machinery in the 1810s, forms of resistance that continued all through the 19^th and 20^th Centuries and which the working class of the developing world are using every day.  It is a form of resistance embraced by the direct action movement.  But we need to go further, much further.  Isolated actions are no good, we need a program and the means to achieve it.  Since ownership always creates owners, masters, we must socialize the land.  Use of land and resources cannot be based on singular or personal ‘rights’ but on the utility and social benefits such use creates.  We have to stimulate and support movements for radical land reform (i.e. changes to both ownership and use) which have expropriation and socialisation as both their end and their tactic: squatting must become a rural as well as an urban phenomenon.  Our aim should be to drive farmers who are abusing the land off the land, leaving it for us to reclaim.  We must tie popular boycotts of retailers who sell non-organic/GM food to occupations, squats and mass trespasses, to drive those who refuse to change off the land.  The HLS campaign is a model we need to spread.  If we wish to change land use, as a challenge to capitalism now, then making it economically difficult to continue with environmental destruction, driving agri-business off the land and occupying and squatting empty buildings, rural and urban, together with a revival and radicalization of the commune movement needs to be undertaken far more often.  A movement to occupy empty rural and small village buildings, especially second and holiday homes, coupled with squats of urban housing (both new and old) and occupations of planning and developer offices would link rural and urban homeless and be a powerful challenge to the state’s defense of property.  There are hundreds of thousands of acres of unused or misused land and tens of thousands of unused buildings across the country.  We should make room within this movement for those who want to build within capitalism as well as destroy it.  We must learn how to make society work, practically; ‘green gatherings’ with a revolutionary intent and without the pacifism and mysticism; radical communes that teach as well as shelter.  We shouldn’t regard it as reformism so long as we do not get trapped within capitalism’s property relations and all understand that the places we create now will be socialized in the future.

The Land And Us

We cannot change the laws of nature but we can change conditions of existence.  We have been predators but in the main do not kill as often as we did.  We defend the means of our existence (the land, the crops, waterways) but can limit the impact of our actions radically.  While we (collectively and individually) will continue to defend our existence (for instance by limiting the impact of insects on crops), we will do it from necessity, humanely and rationally, and in ways which do not adversely effect the environment; the definition of which must surely be, unnecessary or beyond what can be easily renewed or which disadvantages non-proximate life.  Think organic, low-impact farming won’t work?  A recent study of sustainable agriculture using low-tech methods introduced on farms supporting 4m people in majority world countries revealed that food production increased 73%, crops like cassava and potato showed a 150% increase and even large ‘modern’ farms could increase production 46%.  In Brazil farmland the size of  India is left untilled while 20m rural poor have no land at all.  The future occupation and use of land will depend on the extent to which all who wish to do so have discussed and consented to such use, that those occupying or using the land continue to work in solidarity with the whole of society within broad principles of co-operation, sharing freely both the means of production and what is produced.  No individual or group of individuals will have any ‘right’ to say “the land must be used in the way we decide” nor can what is on or under the land or produced upon it be their property, whether plant or animal.  The number of people involved in agriculture (in its widest sense) will probably expand greatly, with vast estates and agri-corp holdings broken up and shared out but also urban farms created in and near towns.  The aim of agriculture (and associated activities like food processing) will be self-sufficiency for the localities and specialization or growing for ‘export’ only where there is surplus land or productive forces.  It is likely that neighbours, co-workers, communities and communes will collectively agree that land will be used in particular ways according to a plan or program of beneficial change.  This will not always be in the direction of development or ‘efficiency’ (which will have different definitions and parameters anyway); if people need more gardens or wilderness, small-holdings instead of sheep stations, they will create them.

Interview with McDonald’s Workers’ Resistance

McDonald’s Workers’ Resistance (MWR) is a group of politically aware workers who have taken the bold decision to organise a workplace group in their store in Glasgow. The first issue of their piss-take newsletter McSues appeared recently, and while aimed at McDonald’s employees, is accessible to anyone with experience of the service sector. Looking to spread their message and link up with other groups, they participated in this interview for Organise! There is much that other workers can learn from their example.

Organise!: Initially, how did the MWR group come together? Was it politically motivated or ‘economically’, i.e. through the need to organise for improved working conditions?

MWR: There were specific issues at our store that were pissing people off, for example we were due hundreds of pounds in unpaid bonuses. At the same time a group of us, who over the years had become close friends, got talking and decided to try and take the informal resistance that we’d practised for years a stage further. A number of us were already influenced by radical politics so you could say it was politically motivated. At present our ability to influence our economic circumstances is limited, so that was possibly less of a motivation.

Organise!: How successful had your tactics been in improving your working conditions?

MWR: Objectively, not very. We haven’t won higher wages or anything like that, although we did have some initial success with the bonuses. It’s been obvious for some time that to have any real impact we need to reach out to McDonald’s workers in other areas and it was with this in mind that we produced McSues. However, we have to be realistic: McDonald’s opens a new restaurant every three minutes, so even if another McDonald’s employee got organised every 10 minutes, the ratio of unorganised, to organised employees, would be increasing.

The main way our experience of work has changed has been through changes we’ve enacted ourselves. We challenged the company’s obsession with hierarchies by downing tools to vote on every petty decision; we’ve skived more; stolen more; supported each other better and we’ve found a voice with which to hit back against their idiotic propaganda. Finally, several of the group who produced McSues have subsequently got themselves new jobs, and found their working conditions have improved quite a bit!

Organise!: How to you see your role in the wider context of the struggle against capitalism?

MWR: A response that frequently follows a denunciation of McDonald’s is an anecdote about an even worse or equally bad job. This is not surprising because, contrary to what you’d think from the attention it receives, there is nothing special about McDonald’s - it’s just especially good at doing what all businesses attempt, that is maximising the profit they can make out of their employees labour. MWR is not a cohesive group with a membership or constitution or anything like that, and not everyone involved or in contact would necessarily identify themselves with these aims, but we have never wanted to hide the fact that many of us would like to see the complete overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a system where workers have direct control over production. Already our struggle is clearly linked to others, and not just other workplace struggles. For example, McDonald’s can sack workers at will and the (D)SS will be happy to force others into McDonald’s service. So we are aware that we are in the same struggle as claimants groups and many others.

Organise!: What are the MWR’s opinion on trade unions? Are you seeking TU representation rights?

MWR: While we would wish to offer solidarity to McDonalds employees seeking trade union representation (presently in Canada and Russia, for example) and recognise this as positive, it is not an objective for ourselves. We’ve been greatly inspired by postal workers in Scotland who in recent times have had much success with the sort of industrial action we’d like to see at McDonald’s. However, most of this seems to have been done in spite of  their union. And this appears to be typical. Additionally, where the staff turnover is as rapid as it is at McDonald’s, the traditional trade union model is not really applicable. This combined with the impotence of contemporary trade unions, has the positive effect of creating space for more effective and more radical alternatives. MWR is an exploration of this space.

Organise!: What has the reaction of the company been to your activities?

MWR: Increasingly, we are concentrating on more anonymous activities away from the shop floor, for example, distributing propaganda, communicating with other McDonald’s employees etc. We have been acting anonymously since obviously, McDonald’s will sack us as soon as they find us.

They seek us here, they seek us there,

They see us every fucking where,

But they’ll not find us whoever they ask,

‘Cos decent folk just don’t grass.

Organise!: Have you managed to link up with any other like-minded groups in the UK or overseas?

MWR: At the time of writing we are attempting to develop contacts with McDonald’s workers in struggle around the world. Some of these struggles are quite advanced; in France, where the CNT have been organising, a store was recently occupied, there have been strikes in Florence, Italy, and union drives in Russia and Canada. We are hoping to propose the formation of an international network of McDonald’s workers. Global business, global resistance.

Organise!: What has the reaction of other McDonald’s employees been to the appearance of McSues and are future issues planned?

MWR: At present only a small amount of the print run has been distributed, but we’ve already had enthusiastic responses. Even workers who don’t agree with our aims usually find McSues a good laugh and subsequently struggle to take the company seriously. That in itself is positive. Further issues are very definitely planned, but as several of the group who produced the first issue have escaped the job, we are very keen to get contributions in from other McDonald’s workers.

Organise!: What is your view of the current wave of ‘anti-capitalist’ protests? Would you encourage demonstrators to hurl bricks through the window of your store while you were working?

MWR: Definitely not. We’d encourage them to do it on our day off so we could join in. When there was all the press coverage of the McDonald’s that got smashed up on Mayday 2000, so many workers were saying things like: “wow, I’d love to do that, that would feel so fucking good.” McNews, McDonald’s official staff newsletter, actually printed an article about the Whitehall store re-opening after it got smashed up (issue 25, p.5), where they admitted that: “Before trouble flared, staff shut the restaurant on police advice”. So all the shite about low paid workers and families fleeing for their lives was just media lies.

Not all those who identify as anti-capitalist revolutionaries agree with what we’re trying to do. Some have declined to work with us, because “people shouldn’t work for McDonald’s”. If people can’t tell the difference between the company and its workers then that’s a bit scary. But generally we support the anti-capitalist protests.

Organise!: How did the company react to the introduction of the minimum wage? There were stories of those over 21 being sacked in favour of those in the bottom end wage bracket.

MWR: We haven’t heard that, which doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. In general, however, the minimum wage didn’t have a great effect on McDonald’s. No politician would want to damage the interests of big business, so the minimum wage was set around the level that companies like McDonald’s were paying already. To us this provides further evidence of the need for self-activity.

Organise!: What are the future plans for MWR?

MWR: In the short term we hope to consolidate and develop contacts at stores in Britain to form a network of McDonald’s workers. This would help us to share ideas and propaganda and possibly we could start thinking about what sort of actions could be co-ordinated nation-wide. We’ll also be working to develop our international links and to try and learn from the experiences of workers in France, Italy and Canada. Hopefully we can work together to develop effective strategies for global resistance.

And in the long term? Well we worry that something designed so brilliantly upon the principle of maximising our exploitation could never fit into an emancipated society. However, we have observed that when you empty a McDonald’s restaurant, you are left with a not bad five-aside football pitch. So post-revolution MWR is committed to providing quality all-weather sports facilities!

You can contact MWR at the following address:   MWR

                                                                                                PO BOX 3828

                                                                                                GLASGOW

                                                                                                G41 1YU

Or email them at: mwrposse@yahoo.co.uk

This article is an attempt to create a description of mental illness, from a first person perspective, after having been through the mental health system and wishing to save the experience of madness as a valuable one, with links to the general social critique of anarchism.

The most marked experience of serious mental illness, or of those labelled schizophrenic by an essentially oppressive psychiatric profession, is the assumption of a new identity. This entirely takes the place of the sufferer’s old identity and, in essence, the “lunatic” becomes an entirely different person. Now, this is not to deny that there are not large difficulties faced by anyone who has suffered a total mental breakdown. The most marked aspect of this is paranoia/confusion, where language itself becomes oppressive and the person begins to hallucinate. But I would argue that the reasons for this experience are entirely rational, and based on the problems of living in an entirely antagonistic society.

Identity

I would like to begin my analysis with a general outline of identity. For me, identity is entirely social. A person learns to co-exist and interact with other people, and develops in themselves as a result of this interaction. They are given an identity by their parents, and this develops through interaction with them, other children and adults in their environment. In modem bourgeois democracy for the early part of their lives, most people are allowed a certain leeway, in that their identity is a result of their association with other people, and not imposed by the antagonistic state/capital machine. This may, however, only apply to the children of middle class families. I would argue that it is this leeway of identity that would survive in an antagonistic society, where who you are is not important, you will be valued as a member of the human race regardless. I would argue that for most of the sane majority, their identities have not been challenged in their indeterminateness. They are more than just a name. In mental illness, however, it becomes impossible to exist with your previous identity and an escape route is sought, albeit unconsciously. The reason for this desperation is that their social identity is removed, i.e., their social situation has become antagonistic, or they find no more avenues for development, they have been cast out of a previously supportive social situation, or they have been punished as a result of their official identity. As a result of this, an intense feeling of worthlessness sets in and you find nothing left to fall back on. Your social identity, built on the people around you, has been negated. This may take the form of physical or sexual abuse, betrayal of trust or, under capitalism, the adaption of your social situation to antagonistic society by it itself becoming antagonistic. This is witnessed in basic atomisation, where people become mendacious, self-serving, manipulative and generally cold.

A prime reason, therefore, for the delusions of mental health sufferers, is their total alienation. Alienation from language, from other people, and therefore from their social identity. The action of capitalism expropriates a man’s soul by turning the basis of that soul, his society, against him.

A New Identity

I would now like to turn to the process of mental illness itself, or the ways in which a new identity is found. Most mental patients assume an identity taken from history, be it Jesus Christ, Genghis Khan or in my case a descendant of the leaders of the last Jacobite Rebellion. The reasons for this are manifold.

Firstly, there is a lack of conscious historical purpose or identity for most people under capitalism. A lack of the ability to play a part in improving society as a fully functioning member of the human race. Most people are consigned to the herd of wage slavery, and as a result, are subject to expropriation of their very souls.  Secondly, assuming the identity of a great person from history allows you the symbolic power that goes with it, people are more likely to value Finn McCool than nonentity no. 5 from the South Side of Glasgow. The term historical can also be used to cover heroes from mythology, who represent powerful entities and are part of the cultural history of mankind. Thirdly, the person feels an unconscious affinity with this new character, which they may have developed earlier in life. The new personality allows the development of dreams from childhood, when development was on a more unconscious level. This basically ties in with the Freudian return of the repressed. Fourthly, there is an element of redemption, the sufferer believes that they can become this person and therefore return something to the glory of their name because, the sufferer, themself, is such a good person. While of course, becoming a better person themselves, being absolved of all their sins. Fifthly, they may feel that elements of their experience mirror these historical characters. And lastly, the sufferer needs a powerful identity to rationalise all the pain being felt. Manic Depressives and Schizophrenics share in common a feeling of great unhappiness or actual physical pain caused by their relations with other people and rationalise in moments of breakdown that the reason for their persecution is their powerful, previously hidden identity. They also feel that they have power because of the abnormal amount of pain they are suffering. A first step to reaching the mentally unwell would be to help them understand that suffering is universal in present society.

Official Identity

I would now like to turn to the response of the system and society to mental illness and the potential for liberation that mental illness reveals. Basically, the system works by re-imposing the person’s former or official identity. This is a continuous process starting in the family and the world of work and only intensified in mental hospitals. A person’s official identity is a stick to beat them with. As a child, consumer (of anything, as long as you pay for it) or labourer you are placed on an unequal footing. Anyone who thinks they control your identity can use this fact to completely disregard your humanity, if you know personally the people who oppress you, it becomes worse because the oppression takes on a physical and manifest form. A person only develops when he/she can approach other people without fear. Living with or working for a person who thinks they control your identity automatically puts them in a position to create fear in you. This is the psychological consequence of capitalism, where people turn other people into property. A main tactic can be, in fact, labelling or calling someone mad in the first place, when they are not. This implies that the person is not human, is already an outcast, has created their own suffering, or, has brought about their own punishment by acting in the way they do. An argument analogous to the one where Jews deserve to be exterminated because they are weak. Of course, this is the main problem with mental hospitals where people are treated as self-made outcasts from an otherwise benevolent society. The existence of the state ties in with this as everyone becomes a piece of property or a subject and thus expendable. Those who value themselves and their independence are deemed insane.

Hospitalisation

I would now like to turn to more concrete matters by focussing on the effect of psychiatric hospitals on patients. Firstly, the patient is ignored. Nurses, doctors, do not talk to patients. This is because the suffering person is deemed irrational and therefore basically impossible to talk to, no longer a social being. That this ignorance may be the reason for the patient’s problems in the first place, and he/she may be dying to talk to people about his/her new identity and how the world can finally be a better place, is concealed or ignored. Perhaps consciously, to further weaken the person’s psyche. People are denied basic human rights on the most innocuous of pretences. Wanting to leave the hospital, or basically confronting the psychiatric profession with the truth, that you are being oppressed unjustly, you are not irrational, and being somebody new doesn’t mean that you are, can lead to you’re being sectioned. This means that for 28 days, soon to be 6 months, you cannot go outside the ward, have to take medication and have a nurse follow you everywhere. Everyday situations in mental hospitals go beyond the Kafkaesque. Medication itself is designed to suppress your mental activity, your delusions, which are basically an essential part of yourself at that time, and as such to cut you off from your physical existence, suppressing your very will to live. Witnessed by the high number of suicides among mental patients after leaving mental hospital and after returning to the person you most hate, yourself, and the same environment which caused your emotional destruction, most likely friends and family. The system does not even treat you as mentally ill.  If you were, you could be talked to and reasoned with, but this is not the way of modern psychiatry. Besides, some people get banged up just for being activists, as in the case of Greg Minns in Burnley.

Liberation

Lastly, I would like to emphasise the liberation found in mental illness. Firstly, a mental patient is entirely sociable. They depend on other people for warmth, kindness and solidarity. The usual picture of mental hospitals is completely false, they are usually very quiet and subdued places. The change in the sufferer’s identity is also accompanied with a change in the identities of those round about them. The happiness found in escaping from your life needs to be shared, in a way. Also they are left no doubt about their own goodness, although you are totally alienated the mere fact of you having a body with which to associate with other people means you can intuitively follow your own will and power to do good rather than evil, evil no longer has any hold over or attraction for the totally insane. Basically, your experience becomes proof of the power of the individual. But as a social being your wants are basically the same as those around you, love, comfort, peace and happiness. But, to say that these can be achieved in anything other than a stateless communist society would be a blatant lie.

In conclusion, the experience of mental health sufferers is one of unending pain, but that all that is needed to end their suffering is compassion and understanding. With the ending of Capitalism and the state, not only would suffering not arise, but also people would be free to be forbearing with the mentally dispossessed

In the Tradition - Part 3

Organise! Editors note: This article is an edited version of a chapter from a book by Brian Morris.  A member of the AF, with Brian’s permission, did the editing.  If you want to find out more about the book, then contact the AF’s London Group.

Kropotkin is one of the first thinkers to attack the ideas of philosophers whose work helped to justify capitalism and the state. He was, in particular, strongly opposed to the views of such philosophers as Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, all "contract theorists" who tended to view humans in as essentially asocial, atomistic beings.  Hobbes especially considered the human person as a self-directing machine, a possessive individual who was aggressive, competitive, acquisitive, anti-social and power seeking, ever engaged in a restless desire for power.  Life in the "state of nature", that is, tribal society, was thus uncivilised - lacking culture, art, sociality and morality.  It exhibited a "war of every one against every one".  As Hobbes graphically expressed it is in the oft-quoted phrase, in the state of nature there is continual fear and conflict, and the "life of man" is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short". Therefore, the only way society could exist was to have a state.

Although acknowledging the social nature of the individual, Locke and the political economists tended to re-affirm this liberal conception of the individual as a "possessive" individual, the competitive owner of private property, both in terms of real property and in terms of owning "property in the person".

Kropotkin rejected entirely the Hobbesian view of social life along with the possessive individualism of liberal social theory.  For Kropotkin, humans were intrinsically social animals: indeed, as we have seen, sociality and mutual aid was held by Kropotkin to be intrinsic to animal life itself and therefore to human life as well. Humans without society had simply never existed; neither had absolute freedom - in the sense of licence to do anything. Therefore, according to Kropotkin, these philosophies are myths used to justify the nation state.

As the views of Hobbes seemed so widely accepted, Kropotkin in his writings felt it important to defend the integrity of tribal society.  He thus attempted to indicate that clan-based societies do not live in a perpetual state of fear, natural lust and hostility but are characterised by social institutions based on mutual aid and reciprocity and by explicit moral principles.

In "Mutual Aid" Kropotkin devoted separate chapters to outlining the social life of what he described - following the terminology of Lewis Morgan and other early anthropologists - as "savages" (hunter-gatherers) and "barbarians" (agricultural peoples living in settled villages).  Believing firmly in the "idea of unity in nature" and that there was no "gulf" or "abyss" between humans and animals, Kropotkin stressed that humans were no exception to the general principles of sociability and mutual aid that he felt played a crucial role on the evolution of animal life. All humans, throughout history and without exception, thus live in societies, and Kropotkin felt that the "social instinct" was deeply rooted in human psychology.  He even suggested that "social life - that is, we, not I - is the normal form of life. Such sociability and mutual aid was expressed in many different ways - for mutual defence, in collective hunting and the sharing of food, in the rearing of children or simply for enjoying life in common.

Kropotkin felt that there were common patterns of social organisation evident among early human societies - which were independent of both climate and race - and that the same process of evolution had been going on among humankind with "a wonderful similarity".  It was represented by two distinct phases: an earlier phase of hunter-gathering when "clan organisation" and "tribal solidarity" were the primary forms of organisation; and a later phase which emerged with the development of agricultural and pastoralism.  In this later stage or era, the patriarchal "family" emerged as a distant social unit, and the "village community" became the chief means of "barbarian" people in their struggle against a hostile environment.

Drawing on his own experiences among the Tungus and other native peoples of Siberia, and on the few anthropological studies that were then available at the end of the nineteenth century, Kropotkin sought to emphasise that the Hobbesian view of "primitive man", bare very little relation to the realities of tribal life.  For studies of the "Bushmen" and Hottentot (the Khoisan people) of Southern Africa, the Dayaks of Borneo, the aboriginal people of Australia, the natives of Papua New Guinea, and the Aleuts of North Alaska, all indicated the importance of mutual aid and social solidarity among tribal communities. Kropotkin indicated, with ethnographic data drawn from numerous sources, the complexity in the organisation of their marriage rules, the fact that the band or clan and not the family, was of crucial importance in their social life, and that "unbridled individualism" was a characteristic of modern societies rather than tribal life.  The emphasis among these tribal communities, as recorded by sympathetic observers, was on the sharing of food and goods, on the importance of generosity, on equality among clan members, and on sociability.  Kropotkin notes the high standard of morality among such people as the Aleuts and Eskimo (Inuit), and describes their social life as one based on "communism" and tribal solidarity. 

Kropotkin writes particularly perceptively of the unwritten encyclopaedic knowledge of the natural world possessed by tribal peoples and of the close relationship that pertained between humans and animals among such peoples, as well as among the early ancestors of Europeans. Among tribal peoples then, Kropotkin suggested, a close intimacy pertained between humans and animals.  They had a deep knowledge of the habits and ecology of animals, which was expressed in proverbs and sayings, they considered animals, as social beings, to be considerably wiser than themselves, for they had observed that all animals were in continual communication.

 When he journeyed in Siberia, Kropotkin wrote, "I often noticed the care with which my Tungus or Mongol guide would take not to kill any animal uselessly.  The fact is that every life is respected by a savage, or rather was, before he came into contact with Europeans".  Kropotkin notes that tribal people, far from expressing contempt for human life, hated murder and bloodshed, and to spill blood, whether of a human or an animal, was a "grave matter".   

Kropotkin has often been accused of looking with "undue nostalgia" towards the past, and as portraying tribal life as more idyllic than it actually was.  But it has to be remembered that Kropotkin was attempting to counter the Hobbesian portrayal of tribal life by his contemporaries, and he did not in fact ignore the violence and murder that was evident in tribal society, nor the power that was often possessed by the shamans.  He noted, for example, that solidarity often did not extend beyond the clan or tribe, and that "quarrels arose between people of different clans and tribes which could end in violence or even murder". Kropotkin in "Mutual Aid" was seeking a better understanding of the social life of tribal people, not advocating a return to a hunter-gathering existence.  He was not an anarcho-primitivist.

Contrary to the Hobbesian image, Kropotkin recognised that "savages" (hunter-gatherers) had complex social organisations and cultural forms, and that their life was governed and sustained, not by a "war of all against all" but by an intricate web of customary norms and inter-personal relationships.  Mutual aid and reciprocity were the guiding principles of such tribal or clan-based societies; the same could be said for the agricultural peoples whom the Romans called "barbarians".  For Kropotkin this was a phase or era of human social evolution that came before serfdom (feudalism) and to the rise of the state, as exemplified by the Roman Empire.  "Barbarian" society thus constituted a phase between clan-based tribal communities and the emergence of the state as an institutional form.  It was represented in Europe in such peoples as the Celts, Teutons and Slavs, who when they first came into contact with the Roman Empire, were undergoing, Kropotkin felt, a transitional phase of organisation.  For with the development and increasing concentration of wealth and power in tribal society, and a more settled existence, the patriarchal family steadily emerged as a separate unit, independent of the clans, and the village community became the central focus of social life.  Although Kropotkin recognised that the village community was a form of social organisation found throughout the world, he discussed in some detail three specific societies, the Buryats of Eastern Siberia, the Kabyles of Algeria and the Mountain people of the Caucasia, relying specifically on the pioneer writings of Henry Maine and Maxim Kovalevsky.  Kropotkin emphasised four aspects of their social life; that each of these people had their own complex and unique form of morality; that there was a strong emphasis among these people on reciprocity and sharing; that although they lacked state instructions, these people, though communal rituals and confederal relationships, had a sense of tribal solidarity or nationhood; and finally, that there were no institutions of "private property", land being held in common by the clans or village communities.  Communism was thus a ruling principle among the "barbarian" people, as it was for clan-based societies.  As Kropotkin wrote:

"Land was thus under common control, hunting and cultivation were often communal activities, and the resolution of social conflict was achieved through clan institutions or village assemblies."

With regards to the Kabyle, Kropotkin wrote that they:

"Know of no authority whatever besides that of the djemmaa, or folkmoot of the village community.  All men of age take part in it, in the open air...and the decisions of the djemmaa are evidently taken at unanimity: that is, the discussions continue until all present agree to accept, or to submit to, some decision.  There being no authority in a village community to impose a decision, this system has been practised by mankind wherever there have been village communities".

Although Kropotkin was an inveterate optimist when it came to the question of a social revolution, he was neither naive nor ill-informed when it came to understanding the realities of social life.  He thus did not romanticise tribal society, and the suggestion that Kropotkin was an advocate of "post-industrial tribalism” represents a total misunderstanding of Kropotkin's conception of a future anarchist communist society.

In stressing that humans did not live in a "state of perpetual warfare" and that mutual aid and reciprocity were the norm in tribal society - thus countering the "caricature" of tribal life put out by the followers of Hobbes - Kropotkin never sought to hide the limitations of the early forms of social life.  He notes that among tribal people infanticide and the abandonment of old people was often practised, that raiding and fiends are common, with a blind commitment to the "rules of blood revenge", that one finds secret societies and initiations that give power to shamans and priests; that witchcraft beliefs are common, and that different ethical principles are often applied to those outside a particular tribal community - and that during conflict "revolting cruelties" may thus be inflicted upon enemies. So Kropotkin was not an advocate of anarcho-primitivism, nor did he suggest that the "tradition of authority" was to be replaced by the "authority of tradition".  He recognised only too well the hierarchical aspects of tribal life, and the sometimes oppressive nature of public opinion.  As he wrote:

"There is no doubt that primitive society had temporary leaders.  The sorcerer, the rainmaker - the learned man of that age - sought to profit from what they knew about nature in order to dominate their fellow beings.  Similarly, he who could more easily memorise the proverbs and songs in which all traditions was embodied became influential". 

Another key point of Kropotkin’s critique of bourgeois social theory was his view that sociality and culture are not the enemy of individual autonomy and expression, but must be seen as "the structure without which no individuals can even begin to exercise their potentialities". Individuals in tribal society were not unreflective or lacking any individuality, their lives completely determined by social norms and public opinion.  Kropotkin always stressed the need to develop a society that not only respected but also enhanced individual freedom and initiative. Individual autonomy is of paramount importance to Kropotkin and he neither romanticised tribal life, nor considered public opinion on tradition as some hallowed social form, but rather sought to develop a new form of society "in which the welfare of all would become the groundwork for the fullest development of the personality".  Kropotkin was thus concerned to cherish and uphold the "development of individuality" and the creative power of the individual.

Throughout his writings Kropotkin made a clear distinction between two forms of individualism, the kind of bourgeois individualism associated with Hobbes and Nietzsche, and the "true individualism" of the anarchist communist tradition. The egoism - the "narrow and selfish" individualism - espoused by liberal theorists and by the anarchist followers of Nietzsche, Kropotkin considered "spurious" for it was essentially asocial and implied the oppression of ones neighbours, at the elitist affirmation of a "superior type" of humanity.  The egomaniac, or the narcissistic individual who was content to treat other people as objects, or as a means of their own empowerment, was not Kropotkin's idea of an anarchist.            

In a recent study on the politics of individualism L Susan Brown essentially follows Kropotkin in making a distinction between two forms of individualism, the instrumental individualism of liberal political theory, and the existentialist individualism, which she argues, is shared by both anarchist political philosophy and liberalism.  Instrumental individualism implies an "abstract" (asocial) individual, as a possessive individual, an individual who uses others to further their own ends and self-interest.  Instrumental individualism is thus based on the belief in freedom as a means to achieve individual interests, and conceives the human person as a possessive, competitive individual, the owner of property, not only in terms of "self-ownership" - having property in oneself - but also as holding real, private property.

Existential individualism, on the other hand - Kropotkin's "true" individualism - is "founded on the idea that freedom is an inherently valuable end in itself; self determination and individual autonomy are desirable for themselves, and need no other justification". Thus freedom can have two very different meanings - that of instrumental freedom manifested through the market, and that of existential freedom, expressed in the individual’s capacity to be autonomous and self-determining.

In an important critique of liberal feminism - as expressed in the writings of John Stuart Mill, Betty Friedan and Janet Radcliffe Richards - Brown clearly demonstrated that liberal political theory contains an inherent contradiction, in embracing both forms of individualism.  For all three scholars, in their liberal commitment to an inherently unequal class system (capitalism) and in advocating state power, completely undermine the existential individualism that they also profess to espouse.  Individualist anarchism, Brown suggests, is essentially a radical version of liberalism and not an alternative to it, and that only social anarchism has political coherence in combining existential individualism with free communism

In contrast liberalism and individualist anarchism (or anarcho-capitalism) to the degree that they advocate private property and the free market economy always compromise individual freedom and undermine existential individualism.

Brown also emphasises the fact that social anarchism is not only opposed to governmental power (the state) but seeks to dissolve all forms of authority and power.  She quotes from Rudolf Rocker:

"Common to all anarchists is the desire to free society of all political and social coercive institutions which stand in the way of the development of free humanity"

She thus concludes that anarchists oppose any form of social organisation that take away or inhibits the self-determination of the individual.

 However, in contrast to Kropotkin, her emphasis in the study is on individual autonomy rather than on social freedom.  Kropotkin was not only critical of the state, and all its manifestations and techniques of power (prisons, schools) but also of private property, the wage system, capitalism and all forms of religious authority - not just the state.

Kropotkin, never fantasised about a pre-social state of nature, for he recognised that humans were intrinsically social beings - as well as being autonomous individuals.  He thus repudiated entirely the philosophy of the individual as asocial, possessive, narcissistic and competitive.  He considered this narrow and selfish individualism to be both "misanthropic" and oppressive.  But in stressing that humans were inherently social beings, this did not imply that human nature was "fixed" or "static", or that they had ontological "freedom".  Kropotkin stressed social freedom and a communal individuality, and advocated anarchist communism in that he felt that this formed the best basis for individual development and freedom, and allowed for the full expression of a person's faculties, capacities and individuality.

It has been fashionable, usually by writers of Ph.D. theses, to criticise Kropotkin for having a romantic view of human nature and therefore making ethics unnecessary. This presents a complete travesty of anarchist thought.  It has often been said that Kropotkin, and anarchists move generally, are too innocent, too naive, and have too rosy a picture of human nature.  It is said that, like Rousseau, they have a romantic view of human nature, which they see as essentially good, co-operative and peace loving.  But of course, real humans are not like this: they are cruel and aggressive and selfish, a