Fredy Perlman (1934–1985)

"And so the problem remained; lots of people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans."
--Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

Round about the three quarters mark, Fredy Perlman states that he's sick of writing this book and would rather be doing something else. I had a similar sensation reading it.

It's not that his ideas are bad or even wrong; instead it’s the contempt with which he seems to treat everything along the way. Those within states are slaves or “zeks”, those without are noble savages and helpless victims. Historians are liars and anthropologists are racists. Citations and facts are tools of the oppressors.

In rejecting historians he falls into their worst traps: the books is pretty standard european history, even devolving to tedious lists of kings. Although he stops to tell us --not show, not demonstrate, tell-- that so and so and their state is bad, it’s still great man history.

His rejection of archaeology and anthropology is both unfair and damaging. By the 80s anthropology had been rejecting the very concept of civilization and barbarism for a couple decades. Certainly anthropology gives us a window into the “free people” whom Perlman so esteems that he almost completely ignores.

In the 2000s another anarchist, David Graeber, took the same topics but treated them with respect. He went into the weeds, talked to the people instead of projecting on them and came out with Debt: The First 5000 Years. It is so jam packed with novel ideas and fascinating observations that is a joy to read at twice the length of Leviathan.

Go read that instead.… (mere)

Letters of Insurgents is one of the more savage books I’ve read about anarchism. Told through a sprawling series of letters between two characters, one behind the Iron Curtain and one in the US, the exchange subjects the radical milieu of anarchists, various shades of red bureaucrats, professionals, liberals, hippies, etc. and most of all the characters’ own life goals and projects to unrelenting criticism. As the characters question each other and themselves, it in turn invites the reader to ask the same of themselves while offering no easy answers.

Part of its savagery is the uncomfortable mirror it holds up to the readers - in watching Sophia and Yarostan try and make their way in the world I was able to see some of my own story as well. Projects that begin with hope and often end in failure, the friends who ‘make it’ into the professional class, people who you underestimate who surprise you, the way we can mythologize our own past - all of these things and more spoke to me in ways that radical texts don’t often do. The larger themes in this work - trying to find one’s way in a world that challenges you at every turn and where you can easily find yourself as one of the biggest impediments to realizing some sort of radical existence; engaging in projects that fail and disappoint and may get you hurt and still doing stuff; conceiving of doing something at all and with people you love in a world dominated by capitalism, the state, and where so many of today’s radicals wish to be tomorrow’s bosses - are painted with the eye of an artist whose experience with all of these seeps through the pages and into his characters.

Though I enjoyed this book a lot, it can feel somewhat unwieldy at a length approaching 800 pages. The letter format is well-executed but one should expect a lot of ‘tell’ rather than ‘show’ when it comes to events in the characters lives as all of them are described by characters reporting to each other rather than in real-time. And while I appreciated the skewering of socialists, there were times when a character would start holding forth and it was ‘here we go again, another pages-long paragraph about dialectics and working class consciousness that’s going to end with them being told to go to hell for the same reason as the last one’. The dryness and repetitiveness of their arguments was I’m sure intentional, but perhaps there were a few too many stock ‘politicians’ in this work for my taste. That said, the arguments the characters have with them are incredibly quotable, and for all of the caricatures that surface there are many characters who are less straightforward.

The standout element of this work to me was its introspectiveness. Its guiding concept of liberation - the realization of one’s desires without law - is subject to constant criticism as Perlman asks ‘What do we mean by this? What would it mean in practice?’. That some of how this plays out is held as controversial or taboo by some readers is good, I think, because it shows some of the laws that readers may be operating within under in the guise of anarchism. If it doesn't encourage self-reflection, at the very least I think this book can be the start of a good (or at least interesting) conversation.… (mere)

Eight years ago I listened to this book during Insurgent Summer, an effort to get a anarchists in the US to engage with the ideas in this book. The idea was that I would get together with comrades in my area and discuss the content. Instead, I listened to it alone, and cheered. I hungered at the time for this ultra-left politics. So much so that I shrugged off the really warped shit that in memory took up a small portion near the end of the book.

Eight years later, I listened to a podcast where one of the readers of the audiobook breathlessly recounted its importance. I have a job with a 45 minute commute, so I downloaded the audio files again and jumped back in.

The book is a series of straw-man arguments between a pretty impressive catalog of ideologies you might come across in your local anarchist infoshop: tankie leftist, classical anarchist, syndicalist, lumpenprole, primmie, pacifist, new-age hippie, medicine (the stupid straw-man argument from the book on this one would have drawn the most ire from me if it wasn’t for, uh... the other thing we’ll get to), transhumanist, academic, post-68 ultra-left. Each of these are ridiculed in turn, held up as a standard to which we are to compare with the book's golden ideology of insurrectionary incestuous pedophilia.

I wish I was kidding. The first go around, the incest and pedophilia was a quirk that I chose to ignore. The second round I knew what to expect, and I found the book to be so infatuated and saturated with incest and pedophilia that I found it entirely unignoreable. To the point where it crowds out other incredibly important things about the book. The book doesn’t just contain incest between brother and sister and father and daughter. It insists upon them. One of the protagonists initially resists fucking his own daughter. But through consistent browbeating by the other characters, in the climax of a global revolutionary moment, where people are throwing off their shackles and pursuing their desires, he gives in and fucks his own daughter. No, really. He is ridiculed for having social mores like not wanting to fuck his own daughter, they are compared to mores like wage slavery and capitalism, and he is accused of counterrevolutionary behavior for resisting fucking his daughter. “If you can’t see past what’s weird about fucking your own daughter” his brotherfucking wife tells him “then you’re the same person who would construct a global economic system that brutally oppresses billions of people and you would run tank treads across anyone’s face who dared question whether there should be police and prisons.”

What the actual fuck? How do you recommend this book to someone? It’s not subtle, it’s not some part at the very end thrown in. It’s alluded to throughout the book, and the incest writ large is pervasive.

Letters of Insurgents:incestuous pedophilia :: Atlas Shrugged:rape

This metaphor stacks up pretty well. Disturbing fucked up sex shit that is beaten into the reader in the middle of a book whose everyone-is-wrong-except-me worldview would most closely appeal to 19 year-olds. The fact that the politics are worlds better in the former doesn’t do it any favors, because, really, if a politic excuses (no! INSISTS on) incestuous father-daughter pedophilia, it’s also really shitty politics.

In seeking some reason for the inclusion (the saturation!) of incestuous pedophilia, I have read and heard others talk about how that is the risque conclusion that one should pursue all of their desires: that one inevitably comes up against a taboo like this one. I'm not so sure. First of all, that taboo is not nearly dealt with in the text. The character in question never deliberates on why one might not have this desire to fuck his daughter, other than that he is an uptight counterrevolutionary. Secondly, surely there are thousands of other taboos to breach. Why was this one chosen? I can't answer that honestly.… (mere)

This is likely the only historical survey of western civilization that I'll ever read with genuine excitement and interest, and my most naive wish after reading it was that it could become a standard introductory text for students of world history.

It goes without saying that Perlman's essay is not "objective". In other words, it is no candidate for perpetuating the business of progress, which is the unspoken agenda of "objectivity". This account of His-Story is openly disparaging of the He's which constitute and write it as well as the Leviathans which they run. It is an account that is zealously life-affirmative. And it is written in conscious contrast to the libraries of historical literature that demean life and freedom by glorifying the abstract, artificial constructs of Progress, Civilization, and production.

Some readers might find the author's linguistic liberties and central analogy peculiar, but they are critical devices for shifting the reader's perspective outside the historical narratives we're accustomed to learning. He uses "Levaithan" prominently as a synonym for the state and civilization and "zek" (actual slang from [b:The Gulag Archipelago|70561|The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956|Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170735849s/70561.jpg|2944012] for inmates in Soviet labor camps) for worker, slave, or proletarian. The Leviathan is depicted visually as a monstrous mechanical worm and conceptually as Thomas Hobbes's [b: formulation|91953|Leviathan (Penguin Classics)|Thomas Hobbes|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171239204s/91953.jpg|680963] of the state as a head (the king) and a body (the citizens), all zeks--human beings incorporated into the beast.

Compared to the somber prose of [a:Frederick W. Turner|181381|Frederick W. Turner|http://www.goodreads.com/images/nophoto/nophoto-U-50x66.jpg]'s equally critical [b:Beyond Geography|1133668|Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness|Frederick W. Turner|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1181257100s/1133668.jpg|1120884], Perlman's is straightforward yet full of passion. Turner's style suits his tragic work, while Perlman wrote what feels like an unfinished hero story, the hero, Ahura Mazda, the light, life, community, and freedom struggling against Ahriman, darkness, death, hatred, and enslavement. This history is no uninformed polemic; it is a thorough, exhaustive, informative polemic that spans from the origin of the species to the present, looking forward to the end of Leviathan and the return of the light.

Despite my wish, although it is as valid as any standard account, I know that this book or one like it could never be accepted as a valid account of history anywhere Leviathan functions, which, at present, is the whole planet. If this account of history became widely accepted, Leviathan would face its end.

Check out the first chapter here… (mere)