Submitted by An_Old_Big_Tree in readingclub (edited )

(length: approx. 18 A4 pages, can be found in the anarchist library)

Hey all!

So a small few of you said you'd be interested to read along with me on this. I ended up enjoying it and am hoping to find the time to read more. I think what I'll do is post individual thoughts (and sometimes just interesting quotes) as comments so that they can be replied to directly in each comment thread if anybody wants to do that. Obviously you can start up your own comment threads too :)

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An_Old_Big_Tree OP wrote

Quote:

"The Marxists see only the mote in the enemy’s eye. They supplant their villain with a hero, the Anti-capitalist mode of production, the Revolutionary Establishment. They fail to see that their hero is the very same “shape with lion body and the head of a man, a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun.” They fail to see that the Anti-capitalist mode of production wants only to outrun its brother in wrecking the Biosphere.
Anarchists are as varied as Mankind. There are governmental and commercial Anarchists as well as a few for hire. Some Anarchists differ from Marxists only in being less informed. They would supplant the state with a network computer centers, factories and mines coordinated “by the workers themselves” or by an Anarchist union. They would not call this arrangement a State. The name-change would exorcize the beast.”

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existential1 wrote

I had this bit bookmarked as well. It really hits the point that "a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet", or "the state by any other name would oppress just as harshly". I feel like this argument that he uses and then keeps up is a very strong critique of many forms socialism and some of anarchism.

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An_Old_Big_Tree OP wrote

The whole anti-work section was quite cool and it fed in well with the section that expressed how authority might emerge in times of scarcity (with the building of the water systems and certain elements of religion). Reading that I found myself really thinking that anarchists must have a critique of civilisation, and that it is so very clearly not just capitalism and the state and identity-based hierarchical systems that need dismantling. The whole idea of the “foreigner” as the person who is excluded from political life rings true for me in relation to all forms of oppression.

They way he complicated the progress narrative as racist and included Marxists in that narrative was cool and I thought very accessible.

Finally also the idea that the Leviathan makes no contracts and that there was never a stage where people originally went into it willingly was just nice to read and something that feels intuitive for me, but perhaps that’s because I’m anarchist.

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existential1 wrote

I particularly enjoyed the last two paragraphs of the first chapter and the first through third of the second. Too long to quote here without being burdensome, but it really brought up two things for me.

  1. The notion of how language displays just how disconnected we are from that original sense of being and interconnected-ness. It really connects with me in terms of the current fossil-fuel crises throughout north America and how indigenous communities have phrases that perfectly describe how important water and the land is that are things you literally never hear in English outside of these moments when they're translated from people who aren't as far removed from the land as a community.

  2. The attack on the logic that Civilization itself is unarguably "progress" in terms of a better state of being that is inevitable because of its inherent betterment of all.

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An_Old_Big_Tree OP wrote

What are people’s thoughts on Perlman’s relation to Positive Evidence? It comes up quite a bit, and I understand how he’s doing a critique of our projection of our world of what is going on when trying to understand other culture’s worlds, but I’m not sure if there’s more to that. I thought it was good though and I liked how it was tied to racism, because it often feels like the greens are terrible at that. That said, I suspect a lot of the people Perlman engages are people who also fail to evade racism and shitty assumptions about the societies they consider.

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An_Old_Big_Tree OP wrote

His section on Matri-archy and complicating it was interesting; if I understand correctly he seems to imply that our interpretation of matri-archy as an hierarchical system is a flawed projection of our present understanding, and that archies refer “to government, to artificial as opposed to natural order, to an order where the Archon is invariably a man”.

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An_Old_Big_Tree OP wrote

Quote:
“Our professors talk of fruits and nuts, animal skins and meat. They point to our supermarkets, full of fruits and nuts. We have an abundance our ancestors didn’t dream of, Q.E.D. These are, after all, the real things, the things that matter. And if we want more than fruits and nuts, we can go to the theater and see plays; we can even sprawl in front of the TV and consume the entire world-wide spectacle. Hallelujah! What more could we want?”

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An_Old_Big_Tree OP wrote

Readability:

I found it quite hard to get into because of Perlman’s style; especially the first few pages with all the quotes of poems. Fortunately it gets easier quite quickly.

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An_Old_Big_Tree OP wrote

Reference points for Perlman:

I haven’t heard of about half of these he reference people (Turner, Toynbee, Drinnon, Jennings, Camatte, Debord, Zerzan, Melville, Thoreau, Blake, Rousseau, Montaigne, Las Casas, Lao Tze) , and I’ve only really looked into and read a little of Lao Tze, Debord, Camatte, and Zerzan.
Camatte seems to come up repeatedly as a kind of ex-marxist person engaged in these questions and he’s very interesting for me. It’s interesting to see Debord on this list, I only really know him wrt The Society of The Spectacle, and I don’t think of that as a book critiquing civilisation.

There’s also Pierre Clastres, who I feel like would be a great person to read, starting with Society Against The State.

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[deleted] wrote (edited )

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