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62
anarchism: a beginner’s guide
‘like Mussolini … and Hitler, people who, like Lenin himself, cursed
their weak and inept bourgeoisies for having failed to establish their
nation’s greatness’. Yet in contrast to Rocker, Perlman argued that
nationalism predated the idea of the nation. On his account nationalism
was never about patriotic self-determination or emancipation,
but always about domination and control. To those who defined the
nation as ‘an organized territory consisting of people who share a
common language, religion and customs’, Perlman argued:
This is not a description of the phenomenon but an apology for it, a
justification … The common language, religion and customs … were
mere pretexts, instruments for mobilizing armies. The culmination of
the process was not an enshrinement of the commonalities, but a
depletion, a total loss of language, religion and customs; the inhabitants
of a nation … worshipped on the altar of the state and
confined their customs to those permitted by the national police. 41
Perlman’s conclusion, like Rocker’s, was that nationalism served
only to draw the people closer to Leviathan and that its success could
be measured by their willingness to regard others with hostility as
outsiders.
Rather than concentrating on nationalism, other primitivists have
identified the power of the state with what appear to be the blander –
but also more insidious – aspects of ideology. For example, one of
Zerzan’s concerns is the notion of time. In 1944 George Woodcock
wrote an essay denouncing as a tyrannous abstraction the domination
of mechanized time. Zerzan develops a similar view, comparing linear
to cyclical time. Linear time orders and constrains us by structuring
our activities – in the workplace, forcing the pace of production and
organizing the routine of daily life – and our consciousness. It has no
connection with the rhythms of the natural world. In linear time life is
understood as a simple progression in which each individual waits for
its end. It is the measure of ‘history, then progress, then an idolatry of
the future that sacrifices species, languages, cultures, and … the entire
natural world on the altar of some future’. 42
The anti-anarchist Bob Black attacks the idea of work which,
drawing on the thought of the French philosopher Michel Foucault,
he equates with discipline. Work, he argues, is a site for ‘totalitarian’
control: ‘surveillance, rotework, imposed work tempos, production
quotas, punching-in and -out’. 43 In Black’s view, workplaces –
factories, offices and shops – are no different in kind from prisons,