You May Be an Anarchist -And Not Even Know It

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What’s wrong with division of labor?
If your primary goal is mass production, nothing at all. It’s central to our way of life. Each person performs as a tiny cog in this big machine. If, on the other hand, your primary goal is relative wholeness, egalitarianism, autonomy, or an intact world, there’s quite a lot wrong with it.

I think that at base a person is not complete or free insofar as that person’s life and the whole surrounding setup depend on his or her being just some aspect of a process, some fraction of it. A divided life mirrors the basic divisions in society and it all starts there. Hierarchy and alienation start there, for example. I don’t think anyone would deny the effective control that specialists and experts have in the contemporary world. And I don’t think anyone would argue that control isn’t increasing with ever-greater acceleration.

But humans are social animals. Isn’t it necessary for us to rely on each other?
It’s important to understand the difference between the interdependence of a functioning community and a form of dependence that comes from relying on others who have specialized skills you don’t have. They now have power over you. Whether they are "benevolent" in using it is really beside the point.

In addition to direct control by those who have specialized skills, there is a lot of mystification of those skills. Part of the ideology of modern society is that without it, you’d be completely lost, you wouldn’t know how to do the simplest thing. Well, humans have been feeding themselves for the past couple of million years, and doing it a lot more successfully and efficiently than we do now. The global food system is insane. It’s amazingly inhumane and inefficient. We waste the world with pesticides, herbicides, the effects of fossil fuels to transport and store foods, and so on, and literally millions of people go their entire lives without ever having enough to eat. But few things are simpler than growing or gathering your own food.

You’ve said that we’ve also come to be dominated by time itself.
Time is an invention, a cultural artifact, a formation of culture. It has no existence outside culture. And it’s a pretty exact measure of alienation.

How so?
Everything in our lives is measured and ruled by time—even dreams, as we force them to conform to a workaday world of alarm clocks and schedules. It’s really amazing when you think that it wasn’t that long ago that time wasn’t so disembodied, so abstract.

But wait a second. Isn’t the tick, tick, tick of a clock about as tangible as you can get?
I really like what anthropologist Lucien Levy-Bruhl wrote about this: "Our idea of time seems to be a natural attribute of the human mind. But that is a delusion. Such an idea scarcely exists where primitive mentality is concerned."

Which means?
Most simply, that they live in the present, as we all do when we’re having fun. It has been said that the Mbuti of southern Africa believe that "by a correct fulfillment of the present, the past and the future will take care of themselves."

What a concept!
Primitive peoples generally have no interest in birthdays or measuring their ages. As for the future, they have little desire to control what does not yet exist, just as they have little desire to control nature. That moment-by-moment joining with the flux and flow of the natural world, of course, doesn’t preclude an awareness of the seasons, but this in no way constitutes an alienated time consciousness that robs them of the present. What I’m talking about is hard for us to wrap our minds around because the notion of time has been so deeply inculcated that it’s sometimes hard to imagine it not existing.

You’re not talking about just not measuring seconds . . .
I’m talking about time not existing. Time, as an abstract continuing "thread" that unravels in an endless progression that links all events together while remaining independent of them. That doesn’t exist. Sequence exists. Rhythm exists. But not time. Part of this has to do with the notion of mass production and division of labor. Tick, tick, tick, as you said. Identical seconds. Identical people. Identical chores repeated endlessly. Well, no two occurrences are identical, and if you are living in a stream of inner and outer experience that constantly brings clusters of new events, each moment is quantitatively and qualitatively different from the moment before. The notion of time simply disappears.

I’m still confused.
You might try this: If events are always novel, then not only would routine be impossible, but the notion of time would be meaningless.

And the opposite would be true as well.
Exactly. Only with the imposition of time can we begin to impose routine. The 14th century saw the first public clocks, and also the division of hours into minutes and minutes into seconds. The increments of time were now as fully interchangeable as the standardized parts and work processes necessary for capitalism.

At every step of the way this subservience to time has been met with resistance. For example, in early fighting in France’s July Revolution of 1830, all across Paris people began to spontaneously shoot at public clocks. In the 1960s, many people, including me, quit wearing watches.

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