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anarchism: a beginner’s guide
creatively, he argued that he had been right to conceive the struggle
against authority as an existential revolt. Read thus endorsed Albert
Camus’ characterization of the modern struggle as a ‘metaphysical
revolt, the revolt of man against the conditions of life, against
creation itself’. 29
Anarchists drawing inspiration from the SI include insurrectionists
like Alfredo Bonanno, postmoderns and primitivists. Taking up
some of the ideas of the SI anarchists have attempted to show how
the structures of the state hinder expression, or what surrealists term
the realization of ‘the Marvelous’. As Zerzan explains, the contribution
of the SI lies particularly in the notion of the spectacle and in
the analysis of the commodity-developed world. Individuals, in
what Zerzan pejoratively calls ‘civilization’ or ‘symbolic culture’,
understand the world indirectly, ‘by blocking and otherwise suppressing
channels of sensory awareness’. Technology compels them
‘to tune out’ most of what they could otherwise experience. Life is
drained of real meaning and ‘[m]assive, unfulfilling consumption
… reigns as the chief everyday consolation’. In the ‘horror-show of
domination’ people relate to each other through ‘entertaining, easily
digestible images and phrases’. They become illiterate and fatalistic,
‘indifferent to questions of origins, agency, history or causation’. 30
Too many estimate their own worth by the standards of the perfect
consumer goods that surround them. Some, as Nicki Clarke suggests,
become self-haters: ‘I’m starving myself, watching my breasts
and hips disappear – you know I understand the hatred of this body,
this sexualised body, this packaged consumerproductbody that
exists for someone else’s enjoyment, someone else’s eye. Not mine.’ 31
Others are driven to insanity. Alfredo Bonanno picks up the story.
Individuals who manage to escape ‘the commodity code’ and fall
‘“outside” the areas of the spectacle … are pointed at. They are
surrounded by barbed wire … they are criminalized. They are
clearly mad!’ He continues: ‘It is forbidden to refuse the illusory in a
world that has based reality on illusion, concreteness on the unreal’. 32
The final critique, that authority is corrupting, focuses on the
relational qualities of state rule. This critique is a complaint about
the state’s falsity and the way in which it stirs antagonism in society.
Tolstoy’s version of this thesis was based on a moral view, linked to
his Christianity. He defined authority as ‘the means of forcing a man
to act contrary to his desires’ and contrasted it to ‘spiritual influence’.
Authority, he argued, encouraged hypocrisy. In this context,
hypocrisy is not merely about being forced to act against conscience