You May Be an Anarchist -And Not Even Know It

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point that it no longer even sees the bars of its cage. In this interview, the 57-year-old radical explores the roots of domination, the subtle coercion of the clock, and his hope for a future without progress.

Now that the mainstream media have discovered anarchism, there seems to be more and more confusion about what it means. How do you define it?

I would say anarchism is the attempt to eradicate all forms of domination. This includes not only such obvious forms as the nation-state, with its routine use of violence and the force of law, and the corporation, with its institutionalized irresponsibility, but also such internalized forms as patriarchy, racism, homophobia. Beyond that, anarchism is the attempt to look even into those parts of our everyday lives we accept as givens, as parts of the universe, to see how they, too, dominate us or facilitate our domination of others.

But has a condition ever existed in which relations have not been based on domination?

That was the human condition for at least 99 percent of our existence as a species, from before the emergence of Homo sapiens, at least a couple of million years ago, until perhaps only 10,000 years ago, with the emergence of first agriculture and then civilization.

Since that time we have worked very hard to convince ourselves that no such condition ever existed, because if no such condition ever existed, it’s futile to work toward it now. We may as well then accept the repression and subjugation that define our way of living as necessary antidotes to "evil human nature." After all, according to this line of thought, our pre-civilized existence of deprivation, brutality, and ignorance made authority a benevolent gift that rescued us from savagery.

Think about the images that come to mind when you mention the labels "cave man" or "Neanderthal." Those images are implanted and then invoked to remind us where we would be without religion, government, and toil, and are probably the biggest ideological justifications for the whole van of civilization––armies, religion, law, the state.

The problem with those images, of course, is that they are entirely wrong. There has been a potent revolution in the fields of anthropology and archaeology over the past 20 years, and increasingly people are coming to understand that life before agriculture and domestication––in which by domesticating others we domesticated ourselves––was in fact largely one of leisure, intimacy with nature, sensual wisdom, sexual equality, and health.

How do we know this?
In part through observing modern foraging peoples––what few we’ve not yet eliminated––and watching their egalitarian ways disappear under the pressures of habitat destruction and oftentimes direct coercion or murder. Also, at the other end of the time scale, through interpreting archaeological digs. An example of this has to do with the sharing that is now understood to be a keynote trait of non-domesticated people. If you were to study hearth sites of ancient peoples, and to find that one fire site has the remains of all the goodies, while other sites have very few, then that site would probably be the chief’s. But if time after time you see that all the sites have about the same amount of stuff, what begins to emerge is a picture of a people whose way of life is based on sharing. And that’s what is consistently found in preneolithic sites. A third way of knowing is based on the accounts of early European explorers, who again and again spoke of the generosity and gentleness of the peoples they encountered. This is true all across the globe.

How do you respond to people who say this is all just nutty Rousseauvian noble savage nonsense?
I respectfully suggest they read more within the field. This isn’t anarchist theory. It’s mainstream anthropology and archaeology. There are disagreements about some of the details, but not about the general structure.

If things were so great before, why did agriculture begin?
That’s a very difficult question, because for so many hundreds of thousands of years there was very little change. That’s long been a source of frustration to scholars in anthropology and archaeology: How could there have been almost zero change for hundreds of thousands of years––the whole lower and middle Paleolithic Era––and then suddenly at a certain point in the upper Paleolithic there’s this explosion, seemingly out of nowhere? You suddenly have art, and on the heels of that, agriculture.

I think it was stable because it worked, and I think it changed finally because for many millennia there was a kind of slow slippage into division of labor. This happened so slowly––almost imperceptibly––that people didn’t see what was happening, or what they were in danger of losing. The alienation brought about by division of labor––alienation from each other, from the natural world, from their bodies––then reached some sort of critical mass, giving rise to its apotheosis in what we’ve come to know as civilization. As to how civilization itself took hold, I think Freud nailed that one when he said that "civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means of power and coercion." That’s what we see happening today, and there’s no reason to believe it was any different in the first place.

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